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train	52995	[ "Why is Si retirement so significant to the Space Exploration Team? ", "What makes Gubelin an outlier in the present day?", "What is the main reason that Gubelin is so resentful of Si’s decision?", "What is the main reason behind the Welfare State operating as it does?", "What happens to drafted workers?", "Why is Si so astonished when there is a real bartender working the bar?", "Why does Si deliberate on how to spend his night?", "What is the “space cafard” that Si describes? " ]	[ [ "There aren’t enough working people in the world. They won’t be able to find a replacement.", "As one of two remaining spacemen, it would likely mean the defunding and shut down of the Space Exploration Team.", "Training new spacemen is costly and time consuming. They won’t have anyone else ready after him.", "His retirement may inspire others to stop working as well, which would be hugely detrimental as most people don't feel the drive to work as is. " ], [ "He is much older than the rest of the population.", "He refuses new operations that could improve his health.", "His mind is still active, and he values hard work.", "He still wears glasses and value objects like the gold watch given to Si." ], [ "He doesn’t want to have to go through the effort of training a new spaceman, as it’s very costly and time consuming.", "He regrets not having the opportunity of space exploration himself.", "He fears the end of the Space Exploration program, and for mankind’s research of space to come to an end.", "He hates the Welfare State and how it’s taken away people’s drive to learn and explore." ], [ "Automation with computers has made the need to work largely obsolete. ", "The current populace is not skilled enough to work, and thus most people are a part of the Welfare State", "The government does not want new workers, and is content supplying people with the funds they need to get through life. ", "Overtime, the public has lost its drive to work. Thus, no one enforces a workforce." ], [ "They train and work for a time, then retire with extra funds.", "They receive no pay, and have to undergo training and work for some time", "They are called upon throughout their life for periods of work.", "They work a short period of time, then return to normal life." ], [ "He hasn’t been talking to people, and Si is caught off guard seeing someone face to face again after so long.", "He’s never seen a bartender before, nor been in an establishment that has one.", "He was in his thoughts considering his money, and was caught off guard.", "He didn’t expect it. It’s a job that is normally automated, and it’s shocking to see a human working it." ], [ "He finally has the opportunity to let loose, and wants to revel in it.", "He’s spent his money on “cheap” entertainment in the past, and wants to do better now. ", "He’s not used to this freedom and is unsure what to do.", "He’s not used to living this way and is uncomfortable." ], [ "It’s the isolation that spacemen feel working alone in space, with only computers as company", "It’s the public’s adverse opinion of space exploration that Gubelin tries to hide.", "It’s the desire to return home from a long voyage.", "It is the current system of operations for spacecraft, where people man ships with only one person." ] ]	[ 3, 4, 3, 1, 1, 4, 2, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis." ], [ "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "Gubelin grunted bitterly. \"Unfortunately, our present-day sailor\n can't be separated from his money quite so easily. If he could, I'd\n personally be willing to lure him down some dark alley, knock him over\n the head and roll him myself. Just to bring him back to his job again.\"\n\n\n He brought his wallet from his pocket, and flicked it open to his\n universal credit card. \"The ultimate means of exchange,\" he grunted.\n \"Nobody can spend your money, but you, yourself. Nobody can steal it,\n nobody can, ah,\ncon\nyou out of it. Just how do you expect to sever\n our present-day sailor and his accumulated nest egg?\"\n\n\n The other chuckled again. \"It is simply a matter of finding more modern\n methods, my dear chap.\"\nII", "\"So some way we've got to bring Seymour Pond out of his retirement!\"\n\n\n \"Now we are getting to matters.\" Girard-Perregaux nodded his agreement.\n Looking over the rim of his glass, his eyes narrowed in thought as his\n face took on an expression of Machiavellianism. \"And do not the ends\n justify the means?\"\n\n\n Gubelin blinked at him.\n\n\n The other chuckled. \"The trouble with you, Lofting, is that you have\n failed to bring history to bear on our problem. Haven't you ever read\n of the sailor and his way of life?\"\n\n\n \"Sailor? What in the name of the living Zoroaster has the sailor got to\n do with it?\"", "Gubelin, half angry at his friend's argument, leaned forward to snap\n rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. \"Face\n reality, Lofting. Don't require or expect from Seymour Pond more\n than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our\n Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundamental womb-to-tomb\n security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our\n society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food,\n clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level\n of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted\n into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the\n population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "\"But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....\"\nGirard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that,\n seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off\n the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken\n man.\n\n\n He said, \"No, he hasn't. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has\n always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in\n actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to\n the least dangerous path. Today we've reached the point where no one\n need face danger—ever. There are few who don't take advantage of the\n fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.\"", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Girard-Perregaux grunted his sarcasm and dialed a glass of iced tea\n and tequila. He said, \"Nevertheless, both you and I conform with the\n present generation in finding it far more pleasant to follow one's\n way of life in the comfort of one's home than to be confronted with\n the unpleasantness of facing nature's dangers in more adventurous\n pastimes.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city." ], [ "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Gubelin, half angry at his friend's argument, leaned forward to snap\n rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. \"Face\n reality, Lofting. Don't require or expect from Seymour Pond more\n than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our\n Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundamental womb-to-tomb\n security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our\n society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food,\n clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level\n of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted\n into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the\n population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "\"So some way we've got to bring Seymour Pond out of his retirement!\"\n\n\n \"Now we are getting to matters.\" Girard-Perregaux nodded his agreement.\n Looking over the rim of his glass, his eyes narrowed in thought as his\n face took on an expression of Machiavellianism. \"And do not the ends\n justify the means?\"\n\n\n Gubelin blinked at him.\n\n\n The other chuckled. \"The trouble with you, Lofting, is that you have\n failed to bring history to bear on our problem. Haven't you ever read\n of the sailor and his way of life?\"\n\n\n \"Sailor? What in the name of the living Zoroaster has the sailor got to\n do with it?\"", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "\"But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....\"\nGirard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that,\n seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off\n the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken\n man.\n\n\n He said, \"No, he hasn't. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has\n always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in\n actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to\n the least dangerous path. Today we've reached the point where no one\n need face danger—ever. There are few who don't take advantage of the\n fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.\"", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"" ], [ "In the early days of the Ultrawelfare State, they had made a mistake\n in adapting to the automation of the second industrial revolution.\n They had attempted to give everyone work by reducing the number of\n working hours in the day, and the number of working days in the week.\n It finally became ludicrous when employees of industry were working\n but two days a week, two hours a day. In fact, it got chaotic. It\n became obvious that it was more practical to have one worker putting in\n thirty-five hours a week and getting to know his job well, than it was\n to have a score of employees, each working a few hours a week and none\n of them ever really becoming efficient.\n\n\n The only fair thing was to let the technologically unemployed remain\n unemployed, with their Inalienable Basic stock as the equivalent of\n unemployment insurance, while the few workers still needed put in a\n reasonable number of hours a day, a reasonable number of weeks a year\n and a reasonable number of years in a life time. When new employees\n were needed, a draft lottery was held.", "Gubelin, half angry at his friend's argument, leaned forward to snap\n rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. \"Face\n reality, Lofting. Don't require or expect from Seymour Pond more\n than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our\n Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundamental womb-to-tomb\n security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our\n society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food,\n clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level\n of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted\n into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the\n population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "\"But has he no spirit of adventure? Has he no feeling for....\"\nGirard-Perregaux was wagging his finger again, a gesture that,\n seemingly mild though it was, had an astonishing ability to break off\n the conversation of one who debated with the easy-seeming, quiet spoken\n man.\n\n\n He said, \"No, he hasn't. Few there are who have, nowadays. Man has\n always paid lip service to adventure, hardships and excitement, but in\n actuality his instincts, like those of any other animal, lead him to\n the least dangerous path. Today we've reached the point where no one\n need face danger—ever. There are few who don't take advantage of the\n fact. Including you and me, Lofting, and including Seymour Pond.\"", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Gubelin grunted bitterly. \"Unfortunately, our present-day sailor\n can't be separated from his money quite so easily. If he could, I'd\n personally be willing to lure him down some dark alley, knock him over\n the head and roll him myself. Just to bring him back to his job again.\"\n\n\n He brought his wallet from his pocket, and flicked it open to his\n universal credit card. \"The ultimate means of exchange,\" he grunted.\n \"Nobody can spend your money, but you, yourself. Nobody can steal it,\n nobody can, ah,\ncon\nyou out of it. Just how do you expect to sever\n our present-day sailor and his accumulated nest egg?\"\n\n\n The other chuckled again. \"It is simply a matter of finding more modern\n methods, my dear chap.\"\nII", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "\"So some way we've got to bring Seymour Pond out of his retirement!\"\n\n\n \"Now we are getting to matters.\" Girard-Perregaux nodded his agreement.\n Looking over the rim of his glass, his eyes narrowed in thought as his\n face took on an expression of Machiavellianism. \"And do not the ends\n justify the means?\"\n\n\n Gubelin blinked at him.\n\n\n The other chuckled. \"The trouble with you, Lofting, is that you have\n failed to bring history to bear on our problem. Haven't you ever read\n of the sailor and his way of life?\"\n\n\n \"Sailor? What in the name of the living Zoroaster has the sailor got to\n do with it?\"", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city." ], [ "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "In the early days of the Ultrawelfare State, they had made a mistake\n in adapting to the automation of the second industrial revolution.\n They had attempted to give everyone work by reducing the number of\n working hours in the day, and the number of working days in the week.\n It finally became ludicrous when employees of industry were working\n but two days a week, two hours a day. In fact, it got chaotic. It\n became obvious that it was more practical to have one worker putting in\n thirty-five hours a week and getting to know his job well, than it was\n to have a score of employees, each working a few hours a week and none\n of them ever really becoming efficient.\n\n\n The only fair thing was to let the technologically unemployed remain\n unemployed, with their Inalienable Basic stock as the equivalent of\n unemployment insurance, while the few workers still needed put in a\n reasonable number of hours a day, a reasonable number of weeks a year\n and a reasonable number of years in a life time. When new employees\n were needed, a draft lottery was held.", "All persons registered in the labor force participated. If you\n were drawn, you must need serve. The dissatisfaction those chosen\n might feel at their poor luck was offset by the fact that they were\n granted additional Variable Basic shares, according to the tasks\n they fulfilled. Such shares could be added to their portfolios, the\n dividends becoming part of their current credit balance, or could be\n sold for a lump sum on the market.\n\n\n Yes, but now it was all over. He had his own little place, his own\n vacuum-tube vehicle and twice the amount of shares of Basic that most\n of his fellow citizens could boast. Si Pond had it made. A spree was\n obviously called for.", "Gubelin, half angry at his friend's argument, leaned forward to snap\n rebuttal, but the other was wagging a finger at him negatively. \"Face\n reality, Lofting. Don't require or expect from Seymour Pond more\n than is to be found there. He is an average young man. Born in our\n Ultrawelfare State, he was guaranteed his fundamental womb-to-tomb\n security by being issued that minimum number of Basic shares in our\n society that allows him an income sufficient to secure the food,\n clothing, shelter, medical care and education to sustain a low level\n of subsistence. Percentages were against his ever being drafted\n into industry. Automation being what it is, only a fraction of the\n population is ever called up. But Pond was. His industrial aptitude", "dossier revealed him a possible candidate for space pilot, and it was\n you yourself who talked him into taking the training ... pointing out\n the more pragmatic advantages such as complete retirement after but six\n trips, added shares of Basic so that he could enjoy a more comfortable\n life than most and the fame that would accrue to him as one of the\n very few who still participate in travel to the planets. Very well.\n He was sold. Took his training, which, of course, required long years\n of drudgery to him. Then, performing his duties quite competently, he\n made his six trips. He is now legally eligible for retirement. He was\n drafted into the working force reserves, served his time, and is now\n free from toil for the balance of his life. Why should he listen to\n our pleas for a few more trips?\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "\"That's nonsense, Hans. Zoroaster! Either you or I would gladly take\n Pond's place were we capable of performing the duties for which he has\n been trained. There aren't two men on North America—there aren't two\n men in the world!—who better realize the urgency of continuing our\n delving into space.\" Gubelin snapped his fingers. \"Like that, either of\n us would give our lives to prevent man from completely abandoning the\n road to his destiny.\"\n\n\n His friend said drily, \"Either of us could have volunteered for pilot\n training forty years ago, Lofting. We didn't.\"\n\n\n \"At that time there wasn't such a blistering percentage of funkers\n throughout this whole blistering Ultrawelfare State! Who could\n foresee that eventually our whole program would face ending due to\n lack of courageous young men willing to take chances, willing to face\n adventure, willing to react to the stimulus of danger in the manner our\n ancestors did?\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "They gave him a gold watch. It was meant to be symbolical, of course.\n In the old tradition. It was in the way of an antique, being one of the\n timepieces made generations past in the Alpine area of Eur-Asia. Its\n quaintness lay in the fact that it was wound, not electronically by\n power-radio, but by the actual physical movements of the bearer, a free\n swinging rotor keeping the mainspring at a constant tension.\n\n\n They also had a banquet for him, complete with speeches by such\n bigwigs of the Department of Space Exploration as Academician Lofting\n Gubelin and Doctor Hans Girard-Perregaux. There was also somebody\n from the government who spoke, but he was one of those who were\n pseudo-elected and didn't know much about the field of space travel\n nor the significance of Seymour Pond's retirement. Si didn't bother to\n remember his name. He only wondered vaguely why the cloddy had turned\n up at all.", "Gubelin grunted bitterly. \"Unfortunately, our present-day sailor\n can't be separated from his money quite so easily. If he could, I'd\n personally be willing to lure him down some dark alley, knock him over\n the head and roll him myself. Just to bring him back to his job again.\"\n\n\n He brought his wallet from his pocket, and flicked it open to his\n universal credit card. \"The ultimate means of exchange,\" he grunted.\n \"Nobody can spend your money, but you, yourself. Nobody can steal it,\n nobody can, ah,\ncon\nyou out of it. Just how do you expect to sever\n our present-day sailor and his accumulated nest egg?\"\n\n\n The other chuckled again. \"It is simply a matter of finding more modern\n methods, my dear chap.\"\nII", "That was only an alibi so far as his closest associate, Hans\n Girard-Perregaux, was concerned. Doctor Girard-Perregaux was convinced\n Gubelin would have even worn facial hair, had he but a touch more\n courage. Gubelin longed for yesteryear, a seldom found phenomenon under\n the Ultrawelfare State.\n\n\n Slumped in an autochair in the escape room of his Floridian home,\n Lofting Gubelin scowled at his friend. He said, acidly, \"Any more\n bright schemes, Hans? I presume you now acknowledge that appealing to\n the cloddy's patriotism, sentiment and desire for public acclaim have\n miserably failed.\"\n\n\n Girard-Perregaux said easily, \"I wouldn't call Seymour Pond a cloddy.\n In his position, I am afraid I would do the same thing he has.\"", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Nothing but the best. Wine, women, song, food, entertainment. The\n works. But nothing but the best.\nTo start off, he dressed with great care in the honorable\n retirement-rank suit he had so recently purchased. His space pin he\n attached carefully to the lapel. That was a good beginning, he decided.\n A bit of prestige didn't hurt you when you went out on the town. In\n the Ultrawelfare State hardly one person in a hundred actually ever\n performed anything of value to society. The efforts of most weren't\n needed. Those few who did contribute were awarded honors, decorations,\n titles.\n\n\n Attired satisfactorily, Si double-checked to see that his credit\n card was in his pocket. As an after-thought, he went over to the\n auto-apartment's teevee-phone, flicked it on, held the card to the\n screen and said, \"Balance check, please.\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"" ], [ "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "The drinks in the Kudos Room might be concocted by hand, but Si noticed\n they had the routine teevee screens built into the bar for payment.\n He put his credit card on the screen immediately before him when the\n drink came, and had to quell his desire to dial for a balance check, so\n as to be able to figure out what the Sour had cost him.\n\n\n Well, this was something like it. This was the sort of thing he'd\n dreamed about, out there in the great alone, seated in the confining\n conning tower of his space craft. He sipped at the drink, finding it up\n to his highest expectations, and then swiveled slightly on his stool to\n take a look at the others present.\n\n\n To his disappointment, there were no recognizable celebrities. None\n that he placed, at least—top teevee stars, top politicians of the\n Ultrawelfare State or Sports personalities.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "\"I cried when they gave you that antique watch,\" she said, her tone\n such that it was obvious she hadn't quite adjusted as yet to having\n met him.\n\n\n Si Pond was surprised. \"Cried?\" he said. \"Well, why? I was kind of\n bored with the whole thing. But old Doc Gubelin, I used to work under\n him in the Space Exploration department, he was hot for it.\"\n\n\n \"\nAcademician\nGubelin?\" she said. \"You just call him\nDoc\n?\"", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "He didn't take the time to flick on the menu, next to the auto-dining\n table, nor to check the endless potables on the autobar list. All that,\n he well knew, would be superlative. Besides, he didn't plan to dine\n or do much drinking in his suite. He made a mock leer. Not unless he\n managed to acquire some feminine companionship, that was.\n\n\n He looked briefly into the swimming pool and bath, then flopped\n himself happily onto the bed. It wasn't up to the degree of softness\n he presently desired, and he dialed the thing to the ultimate in that\n direction so that with a laugh he sank almost out of sight into the\n mattress.\n\n\n He came back to his feet, gave his suit a quick patting so that it\n fell into press and, taking his credit card from his pocket, put it\n against the teevee-phone screen and pressed the hotel button so that\n registration could be completed.", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"" ], [ "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"", "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "He was going to do this one right. This was the big one. He'd\n accumulated a lot of dollars these past few months and he intended\n to blow them, or at least a sizeable number of them. His credit card\n was burning a hole in his pocket, as the expression went. However, he\n wasn't going to rush into things. This had to be done correctly.\n\n\n Too many a spree was played by ear. You started off with a few drinks,\n fell in with some second rate mopsy and usually wound up in a third\n rate groggery where you spent just as much as though you'd been in the\n classiest joint in town. Came morning and you had nothing to show for\n all the dollars that had been spent but a rum-head.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "In a moment, the teevee-phone's robot voice reported, \"Ten shares of\n Inalienable Basic. Twelve shares of Variable Basic, current value, four\n thousand, two hundred and thirty-three dollars and sixty-two cents\n apiece. Current cash credit, one thousand and eighty-four dollars.\" The\n screen went dead.\n\n\n One thousand and eighty-four dollars. That was plenty. He could safely\n spend as much as half of it, if the spree got as lively as he hoped it\n would. His monthly dividends were due in another week or so, and he\n wouldn't have to worry about current expenses. Yes, indeedy, Si Pond\n was as solvent as he had ever been in his thirty years.\n\n\n He opened the small, closet-like door which housed his vacuum-tube\n two-seater, and wedged himself into the small vehicle. He brought down\n the canopy, dropped the pressurizer and considered the dial. Only one\n place really made sense. The big city.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "He didn't take the time to flick on the menu, next to the auto-dining\n table, nor to check the endless potables on the autobar list. All that,\n he well knew, would be superlative. Besides, he didn't plan to dine\n or do much drinking in his suite. He made a mock leer. Not unless he\n managed to acquire some feminine companionship, that was.\n\n\n He looked briefly into the swimming pool and bath, then flopped\n himself happily onto the bed. It wasn't up to the degree of softness\n he presently desired, and he dialed the thing to the ultimate in that\n direction so that with a laugh he sank almost out of sight into the\n mattress.\n\n\n He came back to his feet, gave his suit a quick patting so that it\n fell into press and, taking his credit card from his pocket, put it\n against the teevee-phone screen and pressed the hotel button so that\n registration could be completed.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard." ], [ "Sitting in the Kudos Room with the most beautiful girl to whom he had\n ever talked, Si could be nonchalant about the subject. \"Old Gubelin\n keeps that angle mostly hushed up and out of the magazine and newspaper\n articles. Says there's enough adverse publicity about space exploration\n already. But at this stage of the game when the whole ship's crammed\n tight with this automatic scientific apparatus and all, there's\n precious little room in the conning tower and you're the only man\n aboard. The Doc says later on when ships are bigger and there's a whole\n flock of people aboard, there won't be any such thing as space cafard,\n but....\" Of a sudden the right side of Si Pond's mouth began to tic\n and he hurriedly took up his drink and knocked it back.", "Si chuckled. \"A real buff, eh? You know, it's kind of funny. I was\n never much interested in it. And I got a darn sight less interested\n after my first run and I found out what space cafard was.\"\n\n\n She frowned. \"I don't believe I know much about that.\"", "He'd had plenty of time to figure it out, there alone in space on the\n Moon run, there on the Venus or Mars runs. There on the long, long\n haul to the Jupiter satellites, fearfully checking the symptoms of\n space cafard, the madness compounded of claustrophobia, monotony,\n boredom and free fall. Plenty of time. Time to decide that a one\n room mini-auto-apartment, complete with an autochair and built-in\n autobar, and with one wall a teevee screen, was all he needed to\n find contentment for a mighty long time. Possibly somebody like\n Doc Girard-Perregaux might be horrified at the idea of living in a\n mini-auto-apartment ... not realizing that to a pilot it was roomy\n beyond belief compared to the conning tower of a space craft.", "Si was expansive. \"Why, sure. In the Space Department we don't have\n much time for formality. Everybody's just Si, and Doc, and Jim. Like\n that. But how come you cried?\"\nShe looked down into the drink the bartender had placed before her,\n as though avoiding his face. \"I ... I suppose it was that speech\n Doctor Girard-Perregaux made. There you stood, so fine and straight in\n your space-pilot uniform, the veteran of six exploration runs to the\n planets....\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Si said modestly, \"two of my runs were only to the Moon.\"\n\n\n \"... and he said all those things about man's conquest of space. And\n the dream of the stars which man has held so long. And then the fact\n that you were the last of the space pilots. The last man in the whole\n world trained to pilot a space craft. And here you were, retiring.\"", "Si grunted. \"Yeah. That's all part of the Doc's scheme to get me to\n take on another three runs. They're afraid the whole department'll be\n dropped by the Appropriations Committee on this here Economic Planning\n Board. Even if they can find some other patsy to train for the job,\n it'd take maybe a year before you could even send him on a Moon hop.\n So old man Gubelin, and Girard-Perregaux too, they're both trying to\n pressure me into more trips. Otherwise they got a Space Exploration\n Department, with all the expense and all, but nobody to pilot their\n ships. It's kind of funny, in a way. You know what one of those\n spaceships costs?\"\n\n\n \"Funny?\" she said. \"Why, I don't think it's funny at all.\"\n\n\n Si said, \"Look, how about another drink?\"", "No. Even as Si listened to their speeches, accepted the watch and\n made a halting little talk of his own, he was grinning inwardly. There\n wasn't anything they could do. He had them now. He had enough Basic to\n keep him comfortably, by his standards, for the rest of his life. He\n was never going to subject himself to space cafard again. Just thinking\n about it, now, set the tic to going at the side of his mouth.\n\n\n They could count down and blast off, for all he gave a damn.\nThe gold watch idea had been that of Lofting Gubelin, which was\n typical, he being in the way of a living anachronism himself. In fact,\n Academician Gubelin was possibly the only living man on North America\n who still wore spectacles. His explanation was that a phobia against\n having his eyes touched prohibited either surgery to remould his\n eyeballs and cure his myopia, or contact lenses.", "Si cleared his throat. \"Hey,\" he said, \"how about letting this one be\n on me?\"\n\n\n Her eyebrows, which had been plucked and penciled to carry out her\n Oriental motif, rose. \"Really!\" she said, drawing it out.\n\n\n The bartender said hurriedly, \"I beg your pardon, sir....\"\n\n\n The girl, her voice suddenly subtly changed, said, \"Why, isn't that a\n space pin?\"\n\n\n Si, disconcerted by the sudden reversal, said, \"Yeah ... sure.\"\n\n\n \"Good Heavens, you're a spaceman?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" He pointed at the lapel pin. \"You can't wear one unless you\n been on at least a Moon run.\"", "Si Pond was a great believer in the institution of the spree. Any\n excuse would do. Back when he had finished basic education at the age\n of twenty-five and was registered for the labor draft, there hadn't\n been a chance in a hundred that he'd have the bad luck to have his\n name pulled. But when it had been, Si had celebrated.\n\n\n When he had been informed that his physical and mental qualifications\n were such that he was eligible for the most dangerous occupation in\n the Ultrawelfare State and had been pressured into taking training\n for space pilot, he had celebrated once again. Twenty-two others had\n taken the training with him, and only he and Rod Cameroon had passed\n the finals. On this occasion, he and Rod had celebrated together. It\n had been quite a party. Two weeks later, Rod had burned on a faulty\n take-off on what should have been a routine Moon run.", "Natalie Paskov said, \"Oh, I'd love to have a drink with you, Mr....\"\n\"Si,\" Si said. He motioned to the bartender with a circular twist of\n the hand indicating their need for two more of the same. \"How come you\n know so much about it? You don't meet many people who are interested\n in space any more. In fact, most people are almost contemptuous, like.\n Think it's kind of a big boondoggle deal to help use up a lot of\n materials and all and keep the economy going.\"\n\n\n Natalie said earnestly, \"Why, I've been a space fan all my life. I've\n read all about it. Have always known the names of all the space pilots\n and everything about them, ever since I was a child. I suppose you'd\n say I have the dream that Doctor Girard-Perregaux spoke about.\"", "\"You must realize, my dear Lofting, that our Si Pond is nothing more\n than a latter-day sailor, with many of the problems and view-points,\n tendencies and weaknesses of the voyager of the past. Have you never\n heard of the seaman who dreamed of returning to the village of his\n birth and buying a chicken farm or some such? All the long months at\n sea—and sometimes the tramp freighters or whaling craft would be out\n for years at a stretch before returning to home port—he would talk\n of his retirement and his dream. And then? Then in port, it would be\n one short drink with the boys, before taking his accumulated pay and\n heading home. The one short drink would lead to another. And morning\n would find him, drunk, rolled, tattooed and possibly sleeping it off in\n jail. So back to sea he'd have to go.\"", "Thus, Si was vaguely aware, it had always been down through the\n centuries since the Phoenecian sailor, back from his year-long trip to\n the tin mines of Cornwall, blew his hard earned share of the voyage's\n profits in a matter of days in the wine shops of Tyre. Nobody gets\n quite so little for his money as that loneliest of all workers, he who\n must leave his home for distant lands, returning only periodically and\n usually with the salary of lengthy, weary periods of time to be spent\n hurriedly in an attempt to achieve the pleasure and happiness so long\n denied him.\n\n\n Si was going to do it differently this time.", "She was obviously both taken back and impressed. \"Why,\" she said,\n \"you're Seymour Pond, the pilot. I tuned in on the banquet they gave\n you.\"\n\n\n Si, carrying his glass, moved over to the stool next to her. \"Call me\n Si,\" he said. \"Everybody calls me Si.\"\n\n\n She said, \"I'm Natalie. Natalie Paskov. Just Natalie. Imagine meeting\n Seymour Pond. Just sitting down next to him at a bar. Just like that.\"\n\n\n \"Si,\" Si said, gratified. Holy Zoroaster, he'd never seen anything\n like this rarified pulchritude. Maybe on teevee, of course, one of the\n current sex symbols, but never in person. \"Call me Si,\" he said again.\n \"I been called Si so long, I don't even know who somebody's talking to\n if they say Seymour.\"", "His friend and colleague changed subjects abruptly, impatiently. \"Let's\n leave this blistering jabber about Pond's motivation and get to the\n point. The man is the only trained space pilot in the world. It will\n take months, possibly more than a year, to bring another novitiate\n pilot to the point where he can safely be trusted to take our next\n explorer craft out. Appropriations for our expeditions have been\n increasingly hard to come by—even though in\nour\nminds, Hans, we are\n near important breakthroughs, breakthroughs which might possibly so\n spark the race that a new dream to push man out to the stars will take\n hold of us. If it is admitted that our organization has degenerated\n to the point that we haven't a single pilot, then it might well be\n that the Economic Planning Board, and especially those cloddies\n on Appropriations, will terminate the whole Department of Space\n Exploration.\"\n\n\n \"So....\" Girard-Perregaux said gently.", "In common with recipients of gold watches of a score of generations\n before him, Si Pond would have preferred something a bit more tangible\n in the way of reward, such as a few shares of Variable Basic to add to\n his portfolio. But that, he supposed, was asking too much.\n\n\n The fact of the matter was, Si knew that his retiring had set them\n back. They hadn't figured he had enough shares of Basic to see him\n through decently. Well, possibly he didn't, given their standards.\n But Space Pilot Seymour Pond didn't have their standards. He'd had\n plenty of time to think it over. It was better to retire on a limited\n crediting, on a confoundedly limited crediting, than to take the two or\n three more trips in hopes of attaining a higher standard.", "The auto-elevator murmured politely, \"Yes, sir, the Kudos Room.\"\nAt the door to the famous rendezvous of the swankiest set, Si paused a\n moment and looked about. He'd never been in a place like this, either.\n However, he stifled his first instinct to wonder about what this was\n going to do to his current credit balance with an inner grin and made\n his way to the bar.\n\n\n There was actually a bartender.\n\n\n Si Pond suppressed his astonishment and said, offhand, attempting an\n air of easy sophistication, \"Slivovitz Sour.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"", "The car hesitated for a moment, that brief hesitation before the\n shot, and Si took the involuntary breath from which only heroes could\n refrain. He sank back slowly into the seat. Moments passed, and the\n direction of the pressure was reversed.\n\n\n Manhattan. The shuttling began again, and one or two more traversing\n sub-shots. Finally, the dash threw a green light and Si opened the\n canopy and stepped into his hotel room.\n\n\n A voice said gently, \"If the quarters are satisfactory, please present\n your credit card within ten minutes.\"\n\n\n Si took his time. Not that he really needed it. It was by far the most\n swank suite he had ever seen. One wall was a window of whatever size\n the guest might desire and Si touched the control that dilated it to\n the full. His view opened in such wise that he could see both the\n Empire State Building Museum and the Hudson. Beyond the river stretched\n the all but endless city which was Greater Metropolis.", "Each time Si returned from one of his own runs, he celebrated. A spree,\n a bust, a bat, a wing-ding, a night on the town. A commemoration of\n dangers met and passed.\n\n\n Now it was all over. At the age of thirty he was retired. Law prevented\n him from ever being called up for contributing to the country's labor\n needs again. And he most certainly wasn't going to volunteer.\n\n\n He had taken his schooling much as had his contemporaries. There wasn't\n any particular reason for trying to excell. You didn't want to get the\n reputation for being a wise guy, or a cloddy either. Just one of the\n fellas. You could do the same in life whether you really studied or\n not. You had your Inalienable Basic stock, didn't you? What else did\n you need?\n\n\n It had come as a surprise when he'd been drafted for the labor force.", "He considered for a moment, decided against the boroughs of Baltimore\n and Boston, and selected Manhattan instead. He had the resources. He\n might as well do it up brown.\n\n\n He dialed Manhattan and felt the sinking sensation that presaged his\n car's dropping to tube level. While it was being taken up by the robot\n controls, being shuttled here and there preparatory to the shot to his\n destination, he dialed the vehicle's teevee-phone for information on\n the hotels of the island of the Hudson. He selected a swank hostelry\n he'd read about and seen on the teevee casts of society and celebrity\n gossip reporters, and dialed it on the car's destination dial.\n\n\n \"Nothing too good for ex-Space Pilot Si Pond,\" he said aloud.", "He turned back to his drink and noticed, for the first time, the girl\n who occupied the stool two down from him. Si Pond blinked. He blinked\n and then swallowed.\n\n\n \"\nZo-ro-as-ter\n,\" he breathed.\n\n\n She was done in the latest style from Shanghai, even to the point of\n having cosmetically duplicated the Mongolian fold at the corners of her\n eyes. Every pore, but\nevery\npore, was in place. She sat with the easy\n grace of the Orient, so seldom found in the West.\n\n\n His stare couldn't be ignored.\n\n\n She looked at him coldly, turned to the bartender and murmured, \"A Far\n Out Cooler, please, Fredric.\" Then deliberately added, \"I thought the\n Kudos Room was supposed to be exclusive.\"\n\n\n There was nothing the bartender could say to that, and he went about\n building the drink.", "For a moment he stood in the center of the floor, in thought. Take it\n easy, Si Pond, take it all easy, this time. No throwing his dollars\n around in second-class groggeries, no eating in automated luncheterias.\n This time, be it the only time in his life, he was going to frolic in\n the grand manner. No cloddy was Si Pond.\n\n\n He decided a drink was in order to help him plan his strategy. A drink\n at the hotel's famous Kudos Room where celebrities were reputed to be a\n dime a dozen.\n\n\n He left the suite and stepped into one of the elevators. He said,\n \"Kudos Room.\"" ] ]
train	61405	[ "Where did Mia grow up?", "What is the Trial?", "What happened to Earth?", "What is the name of the first person to talk to Mia on Tintera?", "What is NOT a reason that Mia pulled out her pistol the first time?", "What did Mia have for siblings?", "Why did Mia begin to feel defeated and tired?", "What DIDN'T Mia learn at the campsite she located?" ]	[ [ "Earth", "a space ship", "Tintera", "The Third Level" ], [ "your chance to find a suitable partner", "your first flight away from Earth", "proving your ability to survive on your own", "defending your right to have children" ], [ "People divided into small, vicious colonies", "Overpopulation caused a war", "People discovered more planets and chose to move", "Everyone chose to live in space" ], [ "Jimmy", "Ninc", "Horst", "Losel" ], [ "She felt threatened by the group of men", "They made her feel uncomfortable", "She couldn't see all of the men at the same time", "Someone was about to pull a gun on her" ], [ "a brother and a sister", "no siblings", "two sisters", "one brother" ], [ "She was out of food", "She'd been riding for over a week", "She missed her family", "She didn't understand the planet she was dropped in" ], [ "Why the ship flew over her head", "People grow old and gray on this planet", "The Trial kids weren't welcome on Tintera", "Horst keeps his animals in the pen" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot." ], [ "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "\"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be\n taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to\n court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving\n you your freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Why would they be doing that?\" I asked. I slipped my hand under my\n jacket.\n\n\n \"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the\n Ships,\" Horst said. \"That be enough. They already have one of you brats\n in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with\n all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.\n\n\n He said, \"The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what\n this be for.\" He held out my pickup signal.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob." ], [ "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They\n swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and\nfour\nchildren. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me\n then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I\n closed my eyes until it passed.\nThe first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and\n criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The\n evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people\n wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have\nbeen\neight billion people.\n But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in\n their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth\n had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "The gravity is always wrong, for one thing. Either your arches and\n calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on\n a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere\n and little grubby things just looking for\nyou\nto crawl on. If you\n can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty\n imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've\n been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but\n not for me.\n\n\n We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a\n thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up\n a level or down a level and be back in civilization.", "The first of the Great Ships was finished in 2025. One of the eight,\n as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything\n else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies\n were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that\ncould\nhave been substituted but, even if they had, they would have\n had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll\n bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses.\nWe'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the\n road. That much water makes me nervous, and roads have to go somewhere.\n\n\n I came on my first travelers three hours later. I rounded a tree-lined\n bend, ducking an overhanging branch, and pulled Ninc to a stop. There\n were five men on horseback herding a bunch of the ugliest creatures\n alive.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody\n else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when\n I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that\n wasn't in public.\nIt wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,\n because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me\n unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.\n Planets make me feel wretched.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN\nBY ALEXEI PANSHIN\nThe ancient rule was sink or swim—swim\n\n in the miasma of a planet without\n\n spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship.\n The scout bay is no more than a great oversized airlock with a dozen\n small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship\n that I might ever see, so I took a long final look from the top of the\n ramp.", "I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the\n late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was\n starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the\n sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what\n had gone wrong.\n\n\n I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.\n The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to\n drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I\n triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't\n know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the\n hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching\n it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a\n hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks\n of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't\n identify.\n\n\n One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when\n they dropped the colonies. I say \"they\" because, while we did the\n actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on\n Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were\n established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have\n draft animals.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet." ], [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "When we reached Tintera, they started dropping us. We swung over the\n sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested\n hills. Finally George spotted a clear area and dropped into it. They\n don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his\n gear and then led his horse down the ramp. I think he was still\n smarting from the slap I'd given him.\n\n\n In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see\n Jimmy—if he would get back alive.\n\n\n It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the\n nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound\n like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody\n questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving\n silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've\n seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.\n\n\n Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received\n a jolt that sickened me.\n\n\n By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were\n cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to\n a gallop.\n\n\n I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all\n stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were\n no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the\n edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the\n window—INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "I had a good month for Trial. My birthday is in November—too close to\n Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was\n spring on Tintera, but it was December in the Ship, and after we got\n back we had five days of Holiday to celebrate. It gave me something to\n look forward to.\n\n\n In two days of riding, I ran onto nothing but a few odd-looking\n animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty\n good, though not as good as a slice from Hambone No. 4, to my mind the\n best meat vat on the Ship. I've eaten things so gruey-looking that I\n wondered that anybody had the guts to try them in the first place and\n they've turned out to taste good. And I've seen things that looked good\n that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me." ], [ "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "I whipped my sonic pistol out so fast that he was caught leaning over\n with the rifle half out. His jaw dropped. He knew what I held and he\n didn't want to be fried.\n\n\n I said, \"Ease your rifles out and drop them gently to the ground.\"\n\n\n They did, watching me all the while with wary expressions.\n\n\n When all the rifles were on the ground, I said, \"All right, let's go.\"\n\n\n They didn't want to move. They didn't want to leave the rifles. I\n could see that. Horst didn't say anything. He just watched me with\n narrowed eyes. But one of the others held up a hand and in wheedling\n tones said, \"Look here, kid....\"", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "Horst looked at it, then handed it back. \"Throw it away,\" he said.\n\n\n I leveled my gun at them—Hell on Wheels strikes again! I said, \"Hand\n that over to me.\"\n\n\n Horst made a disgusted sound.\n\n\n \"Don't make any noise,\" I said, \"or you'll fry. Now hand it over.\"\n\n\n I stowed it away, then paused with one hand on the leather horn of the\n saddle. \"What's the name of the kid in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" he said. \"But it be coming to me. Hold on.\"\n\n\n I waited. Then suddenly my arm was hit a numbing blow from behind\n and the gun went flying. Jack pounced after it and Horst said, \"Good\n enough,\" to the others who'd come up behind me.\n\n\n I felt like a fool.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "\"Boy, boy. Don't talk about the courts. I be doing you a favor. I be\n taking what I can use of your gear, but I be letting you go. You go to\n court and they'll take everything and lock you up besides. I be leaving\n you your freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Why would they be doing that?\" I asked. I slipped my hand under my\n jacket.\n\n\n \"Every time you open your mouth you shout that you be off one of the\n Ships,\" Horst said. \"That be enough. They already have one of you brats\n in jail in Forton.\"\n\n\n I was about to bring my gun out when up came Jack leading Ninc, with\n all my stuff loaded on. I mentally thanked him.\n\n\n He said, \"The kid's got some good equipment. But I can't make out what\n this be for.\" He held out my pickup signal.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for." ], [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and\n knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for\n faces. But they walked on their hind legs and they had paws that were\n almost hands, and that was enough to make them seem almost human. They\n made a wordless, chilling, lowing sound as they milled and plodded\n along.\n\n\n I started Ninc up again and moved slowly to catch up with them. All the\n men on horseback had guns in saddle boots. They looked as nervous as\n cats with kittens. One of them had a string of packhorses on a line\n and he saw me and called to another who seemed to be the leader. That\n one wheeled his black horse and rode back toward me.", "When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my\n great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,\n nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than\n the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.\n\n\n My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.\n\n\n The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave\n way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of\n the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before\n hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.\n\n\n But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or\n something.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "\"Where be you from?\" he asked.\n\n\n I pointed to the road behind us.\n\n\n \"And where be you going?\"\n\n\n I pointed ahead. No other way to go.\n\n\n He seemed exasperated. I have that effect sometimes. Even on Mother and\n Daddy, who should know better.\n\n\n We were coming up on the others now, and the man said, \"Maybe you'd\n better ride on from here with us. For protection.\"\n\n\n He had an odd way of twisting his sounds, almost as though he had a\n mouthful of mush. I wondered whether he were just an oddball or whether\n everybody here spoke the same way. I'd never heard International\n English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit\n with him.\n\n\n One of the other outriders came easing by then. I suppose they'd been\n watching us all the while. He called to the hard man.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council." ], [ "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody\n else was breaking down, so I didn't. I did feel miserable. I cried when\n I said good-by to Mother and Daddy—a real emotional scene—but that\n wasn't in public.\nIt wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really,\n because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me\n unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month.\n Planets make me feel wretched.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow\n for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They\n do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time\n you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to\n the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship\n is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that\n something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population\n from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. And it helps to\n keep the population steady.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "He said, \"Look, boy. You may not know it, but you be in a lot of\n trouble. So don't give me a hard time.\"\n\n\n He still thought I was a boy. It was not time to correct him, but I\n didn't like to see the point go unchallenged. It was unflattering.\n\n\n \"The courts won't let you get away with this,\" I said. I'd passed\n a courthouse in the town with a carved motto over the doors: EQUAL\n JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW or TRUTH OUR SHIELD AND JUSTICE OUR SWORD or\n something stuffy like that.\n\n\n He laughed, not a phony, villian-type laugh, but a real laugh, so I\n knew I'd goofed.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They\n swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and\nfour\nchildren. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me\n then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I\n closed my eyes until it passed.\nThe first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and\n criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The\n evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people\n wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have\nbeen\neight billion people.\n But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in\n their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth\n had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job." ], [ "The old man had just finished and they were starting to drag the kids\n off to bed when there was a commotion on the road at the edge of the\n camp. I looked but my eyes were adjusted to the light of the fire and I\n couldn't see far into the dark.\n\n\n A voice there said, \"I'll be damned if I'll take another day like this\n one, Horst. We should have been here hours ago. It be your fault we're\n not.\"\n\n\n Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the\n campfire. I got up and eased away as Horst and his men came up to the\n fire, and cut back to where Ninc was parked. I grabbed up my blankets\n and mattress and started to roll them up. I had a pretty good idea now\n what they used the high-walled pen for.", "The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my\n head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started\n bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain\n idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me\n overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.\n Not too different, but not ours.\nOne more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and\n we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that\n takes an advanced technology to build.\nI felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to\n a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't\n help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent\n buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more\n than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.", "I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,\n his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and\n playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father\n came and pulled him away.\n\n\n The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said\n hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I\n had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until\n that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these\n kids. Isn't that horrible?\n\n\n About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man\n I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He\n had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never\n seen before.", "When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered\n around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the\n children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,\n so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd\n accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,\n it seemed just right.\n\n\n It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in\n a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a\n nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony\n errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the\n poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the\n handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her\n dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to\n defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.\n\n\n I wished for the same for myself.", "There were sixteen of us girls and thirteen boys. We took our places\n in the seats in the center of the scout. Riggy Allen made a joke that\n nobody bothered to laugh at, and then we were all silent. I was feeling\n lost and just beginning to enjoy it when Jimmy Dentremont came over to\n me. He's red-headed and has a face that makes him look about ten. An\n intelligent runt like me.\n\n\n He said what I expected. \"Mia, do you want to go partners if we can get\n together when we get down?\"\n\n\n I guess he thought that because we were always matched on study I liked\n him. Well, I did when I wasn't mad at him, but now I had that crack\n he'd made about being a snob in mind, so I said, \"Not likely. I want to\n come back alive.\" It wasn't fair, but it was a good crack and he went\n back to his place without saying anything.", "I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be\n found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes.\n Venie Morlock has got a crush on Jimmy D., and when she saw me start\n getting ready to go, she began to check her gear, too. At our next\n landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. It didn't\n have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the\n bad moment any longer.\n\n\n The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird,\n and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the\n color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last.\nII", "He was a middle-aged man, maybe as old as my Daddy. He was large and he\n had a hard face. Normal enough, but hard. He pulled to a halt when we\n reached each other, but I kept going. He had to come around and follow\n me. I believe in judging a person by his face. A man can't help the\n face he owns, but he can help the expression he wears on it. If a man\n looks mean, I generally believe that he is. This one looked mean. That\n was why I kept riding.\n\n\n He said, \"What be you doing out here, boy? Be you out of your head?\n There be escaped Losels in these woods.\"\n\n\n I told you I hadn't finished filling out yet, but I hadn't thought it\n was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though.\n Generally, I can't keep my bloody mouth shut, but now I didn't say\n anything. It seemed smart.", "The first night was hell, I guess because I'm not used to having the\n lights out. That's when you really start to feel lonely, being alone in\n the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach\n if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in\n thirty gone.\n\n\n I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three\n things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others.\n The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot\n I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to\n camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces,\n though not with that meatball Jimmy D.\n\n\n No, he isn't really a meatball. The trouble is that I don't take\n nothing from nobody, especially him, and he doesn't take nothing from\n nobody, especially me. So we do a lot of fighting.", "My name is Mia Havero. I'm fourteen, of course, or I wouldn't be\n telling this. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that\n scrawniness to last much longer. Mother is very good looking. In the\n meantime, I've got brains as a consolation.\n\n\n After we were all settled, George Fuhonin, the pilot, raised the ramps.\n We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and\n then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to\n leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot.\n\n\n Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's\n the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go\n partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that\n crack about being a snob.", "I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk\n again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's\n smart and brains I needed.\n\n\n How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.\n For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you\n want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?\n Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind\n up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think\n of was to find a library, but that might be a job.", "I opened my mouth to scream—I have a good scream—but a rough smelly\n hand clamped down over it before I had a chance to get more than a\n lungful of air. I bit down hard—5000 lbs. psi, I'm told—but he\n didn't let me go. I started to kick, but Horst jerked me off my feet\n and dragged me off.\n\n\n When we were behind the pen and out of earshot of the fire, he stopped\n dragging me and dropped me in a heap. \"Make any noise,\" he said, \"and\n I'll hurt you.\"\n\n\n That was a silly way to put it, but somehow it said more than if he'd\n threatened to break my arm or my head. It left him a latitude of things\n to do if he pleased. He examined his hand. There was enough moonlight\n for that. \"I ought to club you anyway,\" he said.", "\"Shut up,\" I said, in as mean a voice as I could muster, and he did. It\n surprised me. I didn't think I sounded\nthat\nmean. I decided he just\n didn't trust the crazy kid not to shoot.\n\n\n After twenty minutes of easy riding for us and hard walking for the\n creatures, I said, \"If you want your rifles, you can go back and get\n them now.\" I dug my heels into Ninc's sides and rode on. At the next\n bend I looked back and saw four of them holding their packhorses and\n the creatures still while one beat a dust-raising retreat down the road.\n\n\n I put this episode in the \"file and hold for analysis\" section in my\n mind and rode on, feeling good. I think I even giggled once. Sometimes\n I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels.\nIII", "On the third day, I found the road. I brought Ninc down off the\n hillside, losing sight of the road in the trees, and then reaching\n it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a\n hard base. Out of the marks in the sand, I could pick out the tracks\n of horses and both narrow and wide wheels. Other tracks I couldn't\n identify.\n\n\n One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when\n they dropped the colonies. I say \"they\" because, while we did the\n actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on\n Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were\n established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have\n draft animals.", "I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the\n night. I should have used my head. I hadn't and now it was time to take\n leave.\n\n\n I never got the chance.\nI was just heaving the saddle up on Ninc when I felt a hand on my\n shoulder and I was swung around.\n\n\n \"Well, well. Horst, look who we have here,\" he called. It was the one\n who'd made the joke about me being beneath the notice of a Losel. He\n was alone with me now, but with that call the others would be up fast.\n\n\n I brought the saddle around as hard as I could and then up, and he\n went down. He started to get up again, so I dropped the saddle on him\n and reached inside my jacket for my gun. Somebody grabbed me then from\n behind and pinned my arms to my side.", "But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't\n see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There\n were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All\n the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why\n Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but\n I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the\n clocks tick on this planet.", "I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough\n foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some\n others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I\n wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.\n\n\n What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up\n blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The\n older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the\n Council should know.\n\n\n For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt\nreally\nfrightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I\n felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I\n whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.", "\"He be awfully small, Horst. I doubt me a Losel'd even notice him at\n all. We mought as well throw him back again.\"\n\n\n The rider looked at me. When I didn't dissolve in terror as he\n expected, he shrugged and one of the other men laughed.\n\n\n The hard man said to the others, \"This boy will be riding along with us\n to Forton for protection.\"\n\n\n I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving\n along and one looked back at me with dull, expressionless golden eyes.\n I felt uncomfortable.\n\n\n I said, \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\n What the man did then surprised me. He said, \"I do think so,\" and\n reached for the rifle in his saddle boot.", "The one I'd dropped the saddle on came up then. The others were putting\n the animals in the pen. He started to kick me, but Horst stopped him.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said. \"Look through the kid's gear, bring the horse and what\n we can use.\"\n\n\n The other one didn't move. \"Get going, Jack,\" Horst said in a menacing\n tone and they stood toe to toe for a long moment before Jack finally\n backed down. It seemed to me that Horst wasn't so much objecting to me\n being kicked, but was rather establishing who did the kicking in his\n bunch.\n\n\n But I wasn't done yet. I was scared, but I still had the pistol under\n my jacket.\n\n\n Horst turned back to me and I said, \"You can't do this and get away\n with it.\"", "Horst stalked over and got the signal. He dropped it on the ground and\n said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was\n natural and mine wasn't, \"The piece be yours.\" Then he tromped on it\n until it cracked and fell apart.\n\n\n Then he said, \"Pull a gun on me twice. Twice.\" He slapped me so hard\n that my ears rang. \"You dirty little punk.\"\n\n\n I said calmly, \"You big louse.\"\n\n\n It was a time I would have done better to keep my mouth shut. All I can\n remember is a flash of pain as his fist crunched against the side of my\n face and then nothing.\n\n\n Brains are no good if you don't use them.", "The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact\n the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was\n almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council\n debate a little before they dropped us there, but they decided it was\n all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us\n kids because they never tell you anything about the place they're going\n to drop you. All I knew was the name. I wouldn't have known that much\n if Daddy weren't Chairman of the Council." ] ]
train	61097	[ "From the passage, what can be inferred about Retief's personality?", "What can be inferred from the passage about Jorgensen's Worlds?", "How do you think Retief felt during his time on the ship?", "What would have likely happened if Tony had attempted to apprehend and remove Retief himself?", "Why did the guard tell Retief that the schedule for Jorgensen's World was filled up?", "Why did the Captain decide to change course and skip Jorgensen's World?", "What can be inferred about the destination decision at the end of the passsage?", "Why was Retief's mission to Jorgensen's Worlds so important?", "What can be inferred about the personality of Chip?" ]	[ [ "He's a \"hick\" as he is referred ", "He's careful with his decisions", "He's scared to push the buttons on the wrong person", "He's tough and determined " ], [ "It's difficult to locate and makes travel rather uncommon", "Tourists are no longer welcome and travel has been halted.", "It's existence is only known as top-secret so there is no information about it. ", "Ships are unable to land due to too many tourists" ], [ "Overwhelmed by bullies", "Fearful of what he would encounter once they landed", "Scared of what they had planned for him", "Annoyed by the grievance he was receiving. " ], [ "He would see the same fate as the others who had stood against Retief", "Retief would have backed off and accepted he was not welcome", "Retief would have communicated with him and solved their issue", "Tony would have won any kind of fight by using his weapon" ], [ "The gates were closing and he didn't want to take the time for the boarding session", "The VIP accommodation requested no tourists", "He was lazy and didn't want to do his job. ", "There were too many tourists on board already and the ship was full" ], [ "They were avoiding going to Jorgensen's World because of Retief's presence", "The journey was too dangerous and long to travel ", "Alabaster was a better opportunity for all on board", "They had to retreat because of the trouble with the Sweaties" ], [ "They will be turning back around to where they came from and calling off the trip", "Retief will ensure the ship travels to Jorgensen's World, as initially planned", "It's still unclear at the end of the passage ", "They will be traveling to Alabaster in stead, per the Captain's orders" ], [ "He held vital information that could change the picture of the future of the area", "He was a useful aggressor who could take down an entire army if needed", "He was responsible for ensuring that Tony did not enter Jorgensen's Worlds", "He was the only member who was skilled in traveling " ], [ "He was selfish and wanted everyone else to suffer", "He was caring and generous when no one else was", "He was an old, hateful man who didn't appreciate back talk", "He only cared about the food he prepared " ] ]	[ 4, 2, 4, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him.", "\"Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point.\"\n\n\n \"You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed\n up with mushrooms and garlic butter.\n\n\n \"I'm Chip,\" the chef said. \"I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I\n said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties,\n look at a man like he was a worm.\"\n\n\n \"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the\n right idea on the Soetti, too,\" Retief said. He poured red wine into a\n glass. \"Here's to you.\"", "\"I don't think I want my coffee,\" he said. He looked at the thug. \"You\n drink it.\"\n\n\n The thug squinted at Retief. \"A wise hick,\" he began.\n\n\n With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's\n face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug\n went down.\n\n\n Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed.\n\n\n \"You can take your playmates away now, Tony,\" he said. \"And don't\n bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough.\"\n\n\n Mr. Tony found his voice.\n\n\n \"Take him, Marbles!\" he growled.\n\n\n The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a\n long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in.", "Retief heard the panel open beside him.\n\n\n \"Here you go, Mister,\" Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed\n french knife lay on the sill.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Chip,\" Retief said. \"I won't need it for these punks.\"\n\n\n Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him\n under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol\n from his shoulder holster.\n\n\n \"Aim that at me, and I'll kill you,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Go on, burn him!\" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared,\n white-faced.\n\n\n \"Put that away, you!\" he yelled. \"What kind of—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" Mr. Tony said. \"Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum\n later.\"", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "\"I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters.\"\n\n\n \"We'll see about you, mister.\" The man turned and went out. Retief\n sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in\n the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an\n oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it,\n glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned.\n\n\n \"All right, you. Out,\" he growled. \"Or have I got to have you thrown\n out?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a\n handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved\n the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the\n door.", "\"You'd better be getting started,\" Magnan said, shuffling papers.\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Retief said. \"If I work at it, I might manage a\n snootful by takeoff.\" He went to the door. \"No objection to my checking\n out a needler, is there?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked up. \"I suppose not. What do you want with it?\"\n\n\n \"Just a feeling I've got.\"\n\n\n \"Please yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Retief said, \"I may take you up on that.\"\nII", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "The thick-necked man paused at the door. \"We'll see you when you come\n out.\"\nIII\n\n\n Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned\n against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm.\n\n\n At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform\n and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male\n passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional\n glances Retief's way.\n\n\n A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes\n peered out from under a white chef's cap.\n\n\n \"Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"Looks like it, old-timer,\" Retief said. \"Maybe I'd better go join the\n skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun.\"", "\"They don't scare me none.\" Chip picked up the tray. \"I'll scout around\n a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything\n about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try\n nothin' close to port.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do\n anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now.\"\n\n\n Chip looked at Retief. \"You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much.\n You didn't come out here for fun, did you?\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Retief said, \"would be a hard one to answer.\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief awoke at a tap on his door.\n\n\n \"It's me, Mister. Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Come on in.\"", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "\"Power Section, this is the captain,\" he said. Retief reached across\n the desk, gripped the captain's wrist.\n\n\n \"Tell the mate to hold his present course,\" he said softly.\n\n\n \"Let go my hand, buster,\" the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he\n eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the\n drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike.\n\n\n \"You busted it, you—\"\n\n\n \"And one to go,\" Retief said. \"Tell him.\"\n\n\n \"I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!\"\n\n\n \"You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley\n hoods.\"\n\n\n \"You can't put it over, hick.\"\n\n\n \"Tell him.\"", "\"Not on this vessel, you won't,\" the captain said shakily. \"I got my\n charter to consider.\"\n\n\n \"Ram your charter,\" Hoany said harshly. \"You won't be needing it long.\"\n\n\n \"Button your floppy mouth, damn you!\" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at\n the man on the floor. \"Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the\n slob.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came\n up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room.\n\n\n The panel opened.\n\n\n \"I usta be about your size, when I was your age,\" Chip said. \"You\n handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day.\"\n\n\n \"How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?\" Retief said.", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"", "The chef entered the room, locking the door.\n\n\n \"You shoulda had that door locked.\" He stood by the door, listening,\n then turned to Retief.\n\n\n \"You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The\n Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the\n remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call\n Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and\n talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give\n some orders to the Mate.\"\n\n\n Retief sat up and reached for a cigar.\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?\"", "\"I've never had the pleasure,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip\n out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'.\"\n\n\n There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor.\n\n\n \"I ain't superstitious ner nothin',\" Chip said. \"But I'll be\n triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door,\n accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy\n knock shook the door.\n\n\n \"They got to look you over,\" Chip whispered. \"Nosy damn Sweaties.\"\n\n\n \"Unlock it, Chip.\" The chef opened the door.\n\n\n \"Come in, damn you,\" he said.", "\"Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and\n I'm tempted to test it.\"\n\n\n \"Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those\n snappers.\"\n\n\n \"Last chance,\" Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch\n from Retief's eyes.\n\n\n \"Show him your papers, you damned fool,\" the captain said hoarsely. \"I\n got no control over Skaw.\"\nThe alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same\n instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien\n and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous\n knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering\n from the burst joint.\n\n\n \"I told you he was brittle,\" Retief said. \"Next time you invite pirates\n aboard, don't bother to call.\"" ], [ "\"A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately,\n Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're\n farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in\n their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war\n potential, by conventional standards, is nil.\"\n\n\n Magnan tapped the folder before him.\n\n\n \"I have here,\" he said solemnly, \"information which will change that\n picture completely.\" He leaned back and blinked at Retief.\n\"All right, Mr. Councillor,\" Retief said. \"I'll play along; what's in\n the folder?\"\n\n\n Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down.", "\"I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's\n Worlds like?\"\n\n\n \"One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the\n Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin'\n his own cookin' like he does somebody else's.\"\n\n\n \"That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got\n aboard for Jorgensen's?\"\n\n\n \"Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few\n weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says.\n Don't know what we even run in there for.\"\n\n\n \"Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?\"", "\"I'll carry it, sealed,\" Retief said. \"That way nobody can sweat it out\n of me.\"\n\n\n Magnan started to shake his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said. \"If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said. \"I remember an\n agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with\n cards and dice. Never played for money, though.\"\n\n\n \"Umm,\" Magnan said. \"Don't make the error of personalizing this\n situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these\n backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its\n natural course, as always.\"\n\n\n \"When does this attack happen?\"\n\n\n \"Less than four weeks.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't leave me much time.\"", "THE FROZEN PLANET\nBy Keith Laumer\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"It is rather unusual,\" Magnan said, \"to assign an officer of your rank\n to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission.\"\n\n\n Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew\n awkward, Magnan went on.\n\n\n \"There are four planets in the group,\" he said. \"Two double planets,\n all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're\n called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance\n whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti\n have been penetrating.", "\"Now—\" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—\"we have learned\n that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no\n opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they\n intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force.\"\n\n\n Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew\n carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned.\n\n\n \"This is open aggression, Retief,\" he said, \"in case I haven't made\n myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien\n species. Obviously, we can't allow it.\"\n\n\n Magnan drew a large folder from his desk.", "\"Less than four hours to departure time,\" he said. \"I'd better not\n start any long books.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination,\" Magnan\n said.\n\n\n Retief stood up. \"If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon.\"\n\n\n \"The allusion escapes me,\" Magnan said coldly. \"And one last word. The\n Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't\n get yourself interned.\"\n\n\n \"I'll tell you what,\" Retief said soberly. \"In a pinch, I'll mention\n your name.\"\n\n\n \"You'll be traveling with Class X credentials,\" Magnan snapped. \"There\n must be nothing to connect you with the Corps.\"\n\n\n \"They'll never guess,\" Retief said. \"I'll pose as a gentleman.\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "\"To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You\n ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?\"\n\n\n \"Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship.\"\n\n\n \"Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins.\" Chip puffed\n the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and\n brandy.\n\n\n \"Them Sweaties is what I don't like,\" he said.\n\n\n Retief looked at him questioningly.\n\n\n \"You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a\n lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin'\n head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled.\"", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the\n counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend\n \"ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.\" A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse\n and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching\n Retief from the corner of his eye.\n\n\n Retief glanced at him.\n\n\n The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and\n spat it on the floor.\n\n\n \"Was there something?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group,\" Retief said.\n \"Is it on schedule?\"\n\n\n The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. \"Filled\n up. Try again in a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\n \"What time does it leave?\"", "\"Dern right,\" Chip said. \"Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em.\n Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert.\n You like brandy in yer coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Chip, you're a genius.\"\n\n\n \"Like to see a feller eat,\" Chip said. \"I gotta go now. If you need\n anything, holler.\"\n\n\n Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to\n Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct,\n there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a\n temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It\n would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against.", "\"First,\" he said. \"The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate\n enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade\n Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti.\" He folded another\n finger. \"Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by\n the Theory group.\" He wrestled a third finger down. \"Lastly; an Utter\n Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration\n field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been\n holding in reserve for just such a situation.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all?\" Retief said. \"You've still got two fingers sticking up.\"\n\n\n Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away.\n\n\n \"This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this\n information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave\n this building.\"", "\"I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as\n Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest\n of the way.\"\n\n\n \"That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked sour. \"Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put\n all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is\n not misplaced.\"\n\n\n \"This antiac conversion; how long does it take?\"\n\n\n \"A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The\n Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets\n inside.", "\"Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation,\" he said. He hooked\n a finger inside the sequined collar. \"All tourist reservations were\n canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship\n next—\"\n\n\n \"Which gate?\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"For ... ah...?\"\n\n\n \"For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" the clerk said. \"Gate 19,\" he added quickly. \"But—\"\n\n\n Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign\n reading\nTo Gates 16-30\n.", "\"What do you think you're doing, busting in here?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you're planning a course change, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've got damn big ears.\"\n\n\n \"I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"You do, huh?\" the captain sat down. \"I'm in command of this vessel,\"\n he said. \"I'm changing course for Alabaster.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster,\" Retief said. \"So\n just hold your course for Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"Not bloody likely.\"\n\n\n \"Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to\n change course.\"\n\n\n The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "A tall and grotesque creature minced into the room, tiny hoof-like\n feet tapping on the floor. A flaring metal helmet shaded the deep-set\n compound eyes, and a loose mantle flapped around the knobbed knees.\n Behind the alien, the captain hovered nervously.\n\n\n \"Yo' papiss,\" the alien rasped.\n\n\n \"Who's your friend, Captain?\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Never mind; just do like he tells you.\"\n\n\n \"Yo' papiss,\" the alien said again.\n\n\n \"Okay,\" Retief said. \"I've seen it. You can take it away now.\"\n\"Don't horse around,\" the captain said. \"This fellow can get mean.\"\n\n\n The alien brought two tiny arms out from the concealment of the mantle,\n clicked toothed pincers under Retief's nose.\n\n\n \"Quick, soft one.\"", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "The chef entered the room, locking the door.\n\n\n \"You shoulda had that door locked.\" He stood by the door, listening,\n then turned to Retief.\n\n\n \"You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The\n Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the\n remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call\n Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and\n talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give\n some orders to the Mate.\"\n\n\n Retief sat up and reached for a cigar.\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?\"" ], [ "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him.", "The thick-necked man paused at the door. \"We'll see you when you come\n out.\"\nIII\n\n\n Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned\n against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm.\n\n\n At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform\n and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male\n passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional\n glances Retief's way.\n\n\n A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes\n peered out from under a white chef's cap.\n\n\n \"Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"Looks like it, old-timer,\" Retief said. \"Maybe I'd better go join the\n skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun.\"", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "\"I've never had the pleasure,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip\n out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'.\"\n\n\n There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor.\n\n\n \"I ain't superstitious ner nothin',\" Chip said. \"But I'll be\n triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door,\n accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy\n knock shook the door.\n\n\n \"They got to look you over,\" Chip whispered. \"Nosy damn Sweaties.\"\n\n\n \"Unlock it, Chip.\" The chef opened the door.\n\n\n \"Come in, damn you,\" he said.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "\"You'd better be getting started,\" Magnan said, shuffling papers.\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Retief said. \"If I work at it, I might manage a\n snootful by takeoff.\" He went to the door. \"No objection to my checking\n out a needler, is there?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked up. \"I suppose not. What do you want with it?\"\n\n\n \"Just a feeling I've got.\"\n\n\n \"Please yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Retief said, \"I may take you up on that.\"\nII", "\"Not on this vessel, you won't,\" the captain said shakily. \"I got my\n charter to consider.\"\n\n\n \"Ram your charter,\" Hoany said harshly. \"You won't be needing it long.\"\n\n\n \"Button your floppy mouth, damn you!\" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at\n the man on the floor. \"Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the\n slob.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came\n up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room.\n\n\n The panel opened.\n\n\n \"I usta be about your size, when I was your age,\" Chip said. \"You\n handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day.\"\n\n\n \"How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?\" Retief said.", "Retief heard the panel open beside him.\n\n\n \"Here you go, Mister,\" Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed\n french knife lay on the sill.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Chip,\" Retief said. \"I won't need it for these punks.\"\n\n\n Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him\n under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol\n from his shoulder holster.\n\n\n \"Aim that at me, and I'll kill you,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Go on, burn him!\" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared,\n white-faced.\n\n\n \"Put that away, you!\" he yelled. \"What kind of—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" Mr. Tony said. \"Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum\n later.\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "\"Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point.\"\n\n\n \"You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed\n up with mushrooms and garlic butter.\n\n\n \"I'm Chip,\" the chef said. \"I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I\n said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties,\n look at a man like he was a worm.\"\n\n\n \"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the\n right idea on the Soetti, too,\" Retief said. He poured red wine into a\n glass. \"Here's to you.\"", "\"Power Section, this is the captain,\" he said. Retief reached across\n the desk, gripped the captain's wrist.\n\n\n \"Tell the mate to hold his present course,\" he said softly.\n\n\n \"Let go my hand, buster,\" the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he\n eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the\n drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike.\n\n\n \"You busted it, you—\"\n\n\n \"And one to go,\" Retief said. \"Tell him.\"\n\n\n \"I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!\"\n\n\n \"You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley\n hoods.\"\n\n\n \"You can't put it over, hick.\"\n\n\n \"Tell him.\"", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "\"They don't scare me none.\" Chip picked up the tray. \"I'll scout around\n a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything\n about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try\n nothin' close to port.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do\n anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now.\"\n\n\n Chip looked at Retief. \"You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much.\n You didn't come out here for fun, did you?\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Retief said, \"would be a hard one to answer.\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief awoke at a tap on his door.\n\n\n \"It's me, Mister. Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Come on in.\"", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"", "The thick-necked man edged past him, looked at Retief and snorted,\n \"That's him, sure.\"\n\n\n \"I'm captain of this vessel,\" the first man said. \"You've got two\n minutes to haul your freight out of here, buster.\"\n\n\n \"When you can spare the time from your other duties,\" Retief said,\n \"take a look at Section Three, Paragraph One, of the Uniform Code.\n That spells out the law on confirmed space on vessels engaged in\n interplanetary commerce.\"\n\n\n \"A space lawyer.\" The captain turned. \"Throw him out, boys.\"\n\n\n Two big men edged into the cabin, looking at Retief.\n\n\n \"Go on, pitch him out,\" the captain snapped.\n\n\n Retief put his cigar in an ashtray, and swung his feet off the bunk.\n\n\n \"Don't try it,\" he said softly.", "\"I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters.\"\n\n\n \"We'll see about you, mister.\" The man turned and went out. Retief\n sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in\n the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an\n oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it,\n glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned.\n\n\n \"All right, you. Out,\" he growled. \"Or have I got to have you thrown\n out?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a\n handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved\n the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the\n door." ], [ "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "\"I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters.\"\n\n\n \"We'll see about you, mister.\" The man turned and went out. Retief\n sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in\n the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an\n oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it,\n glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned.\n\n\n \"All right, you. Out,\" he growled. \"Or have I got to have you thrown\n out?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a\n handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved\n the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the\n door.", "Retief heard the panel open beside him.\n\n\n \"Here you go, Mister,\" Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed\n french knife lay on the sill.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Chip,\" Retief said. \"I won't need it for these punks.\"\n\n\n Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him\n under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol\n from his shoulder holster.\n\n\n \"Aim that at me, and I'll kill you,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Go on, burn him!\" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared,\n white-faced.\n\n\n \"Put that away, you!\" he yelled. \"What kind of—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" Mr. Tony said. \"Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum\n later.\"", "The chef entered the room, locking the door.\n\n\n \"You shoulda had that door locked.\" He stood by the door, listening,\n then turned to Retief.\n\n\n \"You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The\n Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the\n remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call\n Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and\n talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give\n some orders to the Mate.\"\n\n\n Retief sat up and reached for a cigar.\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?\"", "\"I don't think I want my coffee,\" he said. He looked at the thug. \"You\n drink it.\"\n\n\n The thug squinted at Retief. \"A wise hick,\" he began.\n\n\n With a flick of the wrist, Retief tossed the coffee into the thug's\n face, then stood and slammed a straight right to the chin. The thug\n went down.\n\n\n Retief looked at Mr. Tony, still standing open-mouthed.\n\n\n \"You can take your playmates away now, Tony,\" he said. \"And don't\n bother to come around yourself. You're not funny enough.\"\n\n\n Mr. Tony found his voice.\n\n\n \"Take him, Marbles!\" he growled.\n\n\n The thick-necked man slipped a hand inside his tunic and brought out a\n long-bladed knife. He licked his lips and moved in.", "\"Not on this vessel, you won't,\" the captain said shakily. \"I got my\n charter to consider.\"\n\n\n \"Ram your charter,\" Hoany said harshly. \"You won't be needing it long.\"\n\n\n \"Button your floppy mouth, damn you!\" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at\n the man on the floor. \"Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the\n slob.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came\n up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room.\n\n\n The panel opened.\n\n\n \"I usta be about your size, when I was your age,\" Chip said. \"You\n handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day.\"\n\n\n \"How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?\" Retief said.", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him.", "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "\"Power Section, this is the captain,\" he said. Retief reached across\n the desk, gripped the captain's wrist.\n\n\n \"Tell the mate to hold his present course,\" he said softly.\n\n\n \"Let go my hand, buster,\" the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he\n eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the\n drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike.\n\n\n \"You busted it, you—\"\n\n\n \"And one to go,\" Retief said. \"Tell him.\"\n\n\n \"I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!\"\n\n\n \"You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley\n hoods.\"\n\n\n \"You can't put it over, hick.\"\n\n\n \"Tell him.\"", "\"Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point.\"\n\n\n \"You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed\n up with mushrooms and garlic butter.\n\n\n \"I'm Chip,\" the chef said. \"I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I\n said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties,\n look at a man like he was a worm.\"\n\n\n \"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the\n right idea on the Soetti, too,\" Retief said. He poured red wine into a\n glass. \"Here's to you.\"", "\"You'd better be getting started,\" Magnan said, shuffling papers.\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Retief said. \"If I work at it, I might manage a\n snootful by takeoff.\" He went to the door. \"No objection to my checking\n out a needler, is there?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked up. \"I suppose not. What do you want with it?\"\n\n\n \"Just a feeling I've got.\"\n\n\n \"Please yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Retief said, \"I may take you up on that.\"\nII", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "\"They don't scare me none.\" Chip picked up the tray. \"I'll scout around\n a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything\n about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try\n nothin' close to port.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do\n anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now.\"\n\n\n Chip looked at Retief. \"You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much.\n You didn't come out here for fun, did you?\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Retief said, \"would be a hard one to answer.\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief awoke at a tap on his door.\n\n\n \"It's me, Mister. Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Come on in.\"", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"" ], [ "Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the\n counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend\n \"ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.\" A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse\n and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching\n Retief from the corner of his eye.\n\n\n Retief glanced at him.\n\n\n The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and\n spat it on the floor.\n\n\n \"Was there something?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group,\" Retief said.\n \"Is it on schedule?\"\n\n\n The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. \"Filled\n up. Try again in a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\n \"What time does it leave?\"", "\"I'll carry it, sealed,\" Retief said. \"That way nobody can sweat it out\n of me.\"\n\n\n Magnan started to shake his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said. \"If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said. \"I remember an\n agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with\n cards and dice. Never played for money, though.\"\n\n\n \"Umm,\" Magnan said. \"Don't make the error of personalizing this\n situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these\n backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its\n natural course, as always.\"\n\n\n \"When does this attack happen?\"\n\n\n \"Less than four weeks.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't leave me much time.\"", "\"Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation,\" he said. He hooked\n a finger inside the sequined collar. \"All tourist reservations were\n canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship\n next—\"\n\n\n \"Which gate?\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"For ... ah...?\"\n\n\n \"For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" the clerk said. \"Gate 19,\" he added quickly. \"But—\"\n\n\n Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign\n reading\nTo Gates 16-30\n.", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "\"Now—\" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—\"we have learned\n that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no\n opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they\n intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force.\"\n\n\n Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew\n carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned.\n\n\n \"This is open aggression, Retief,\" he said, \"in case I haven't made\n myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien\n species. Obviously, we can't allow it.\"\n\n\n Magnan drew a large folder from his desk.", "\"A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately,\n Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're\n farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in\n their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war\n potential, by conventional standards, is nil.\"\n\n\n Magnan tapped the folder before him.\n\n\n \"I have here,\" he said solemnly, \"information which will change that\n picture completely.\" He leaned back and blinked at Retief.\n\"All right, Mr. Councillor,\" Retief said. \"I'll play along; what's in\n the folder?\"\n\n\n Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down.", "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "\"Less than four hours to departure time,\" he said. \"I'd better not\n start any long books.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination,\" Magnan\n said.\n\n\n Retief stood up. \"If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon.\"\n\n\n \"The allusion escapes me,\" Magnan said coldly. \"And one last word. The\n Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't\n get yourself interned.\"\n\n\n \"I'll tell you what,\" Retief said soberly. \"In a pinch, I'll mention\n your name.\"\n\n\n \"You'll be traveling with Class X credentials,\" Magnan snapped. \"There\n must be nothing to connect you with the Corps.\"\n\n\n \"They'll never guess,\" Retief said. \"I'll pose as a gentleman.\"", "\"First,\" he said. \"The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate\n enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade\n Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti.\" He folded another\n finger. \"Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by\n the Theory group.\" He wrestled a third finger down. \"Lastly; an Utter\n Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration\n field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been\n holding in reserve for just such a situation.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all?\" Retief said. \"You've still got two fingers sticking up.\"\n\n\n Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away.\n\n\n \"This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this\n information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave\n this building.\"", "\"I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as\n Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest\n of the way.\"\n\n\n \"That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked sour. \"Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put\n all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is\n not misplaced.\"\n\n\n \"This antiac conversion; how long does it take?\"\n\n\n \"A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The\n Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets\n inside.", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "\"What do you think you're doing, busting in here?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you're planning a course change, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've got damn big ears.\"\n\n\n \"I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"You do, huh?\" the captain sat down. \"I'm in command of this vessel,\"\n he said. \"I'm changing course for Alabaster.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster,\" Retief said. \"So\n just hold your course for Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"Not bloody likely.\"\n\n\n \"Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to\n change course.\"\n\n\n The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.", "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him.", "THE FROZEN PLANET\nBy Keith Laumer\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"It is rather unusual,\" Magnan said, \"to assign an officer of your rank\n to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission.\"\n\n\n Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew\n awkward, Magnan went on.\n\n\n \"There are four planets in the group,\" he said. \"Two double planets,\n all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're\n called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance\n whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti\n have been penetrating.", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "\"You'd better be getting started,\" Magnan said, shuffling papers.\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Retief said. \"If I work at it, I might manage a\n snootful by takeoff.\" He went to the door. \"No objection to my checking\n out a needler, is there?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked up. \"I suppose not. What do you want with it?\"\n\n\n \"Just a feeling I've got.\"\n\n\n \"Please yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Retief said, \"I may take you up on that.\"\nII" ], [ "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "\"I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's\n Worlds like?\"\n\n\n \"One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the\n Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin'\n his own cookin' like he does somebody else's.\"\n\n\n \"That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got\n aboard for Jorgensen's?\"\n\n\n \"Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few\n weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says.\n Don't know what we even run in there for.\"\n\n\n \"Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "\"What do you think you're doing, busting in here?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you're planning a course change, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've got damn big ears.\"\n\n\n \"I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"You do, huh?\" the captain sat down. \"I'm in command of this vessel,\"\n he said. \"I'm changing course for Alabaster.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster,\" Retief said. \"So\n just hold your course for Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"Not bloody likely.\"\n\n\n \"Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to\n change course.\"\n\n\n The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "THE FROZEN PLANET\nBy Keith Laumer\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"It is rather unusual,\" Magnan said, \"to assign an officer of your rank\n to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission.\"\n\n\n Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew\n awkward, Magnan went on.\n\n\n \"There are four planets in the group,\" he said. \"Two double planets,\n all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're\n called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance\n whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti\n have been penetrating.", "\"To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You\n ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?\"\n\n\n \"Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship.\"\n\n\n \"Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins.\" Chip puffed\n the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and\n brandy.\n\n\n \"Them Sweaties is what I don't like,\" he said.\n\n\n Retief looked at him questioningly.\n\n\n \"You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a\n lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin'\n head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled.\"", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "\"A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately,\n Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're\n farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in\n their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war\n potential, by conventional standards, is nil.\"\n\n\n Magnan tapped the folder before him.\n\n\n \"I have here,\" he said solemnly, \"information which will change that\n picture completely.\" He leaned back and blinked at Retief.\n\"All right, Mr. Councillor,\" Retief said. \"I'll play along; what's in\n the folder?\"\n\n\n Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down.", "\"Now—\" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—\"we have learned\n that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no\n opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they\n intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force.\"\n\n\n Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew\n carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned.\n\n\n \"This is open aggression, Retief,\" he said, \"in case I haven't made\n myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien\n species. Obviously, we can't allow it.\"\n\n\n Magnan drew a large folder from his desk.", "\"Captain, tell your friend to keep its distance. It looks brittle, and\n I'm tempted to test it.\"\n\n\n \"Don't start anything with Skaw; he can clip through steel with those\n snappers.\"\n\n\n \"Last chance,\" Retief said. Skaw stood poised, open pincers an inch\n from Retief's eyes.\n\n\n \"Show him your papers, you damned fool,\" the captain said hoarsely. \"I\n got no control over Skaw.\"\nThe alien clicked both pincers with a sharp report, and in the same\n instant Retief half-turned to the left, leaned away from the alien\n and drove his right foot against the slender leg above the bulbous\n knee-joint. Skaw screeched and floundered, greenish fluid spattering\n from the burst joint.\n\n\n \"I told you he was brittle,\" Retief said. \"Next time you invite pirates\n aboard, don't bother to call.\"", "\"I'll carry it, sealed,\" Retief said. \"That way nobody can sweat it out\n of me.\"\n\n\n Magnan started to shake his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said. \"If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said. \"I remember an\n agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with\n cards and dice. Never played for money, though.\"\n\n\n \"Umm,\" Magnan said. \"Don't make the error of personalizing this\n situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these\n backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its\n natural course, as always.\"\n\n\n \"When does this attack happen?\"\n\n\n \"Less than four weeks.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't leave me much time.\"", "Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the\n counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend\n \"ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.\" A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse\n and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching\n Retief from the corner of his eye.\n\n\n Retief glanced at him.\n\n\n The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and\n spat it on the floor.\n\n\n \"Was there something?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group,\" Retief said.\n \"Is it on schedule?\"\n\n\n The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. \"Filled\n up. Try again in a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\n \"What time does it leave?\"", "The thick-necked man paused at the door. \"We'll see you when you come\n out.\"\nIII\n\n\n Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned\n against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm.\n\n\n At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform\n and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male\n passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional\n glances Retief's way.\n\n\n A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes\n peered out from under a white chef's cap.\n\n\n \"Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"Looks like it, old-timer,\" Retief said. \"Maybe I'd better go join the\n skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun.\"", "\"Dern right,\" Chip said. \"Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em.\n Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert.\n You like brandy in yer coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Chip, you're a genius.\"\n\n\n \"Like to see a feller eat,\" Chip said. \"I gotta go now. If you need\n anything, holler.\"\n\n\n Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to\n Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct,\n there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a\n temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It\n would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against.", "The chef entered the room, locking the door.\n\n\n \"You shoulda had that door locked.\" He stood by the door, listening,\n then turned to Retief.\n\n\n \"You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The\n Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the\n remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call\n Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and\n talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give\n some orders to the Mate.\"\n\n\n Retief sat up and reached for a cigar.\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?\"", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "\"Power Section, this is the captain,\" he said. Retief reached across\n the desk, gripped the captain's wrist.\n\n\n \"Tell the mate to hold his present course,\" he said softly.\n\n\n \"Let go my hand, buster,\" the captain snarled. Eyes on Retief's, he\n eased a drawer open with his left hand, reached in. Retief kneed the\n drawer. The captain yelped and dropped the mike.\n\n\n \"You busted it, you—\"\n\n\n \"And one to go,\" Retief said. \"Tell him.\"\n\n\n \"I'm an officer of the Merchant Service!\"\n\n\n \"You're a cheapjack who's sold his bridge to a pack of back-alley\n hoods.\"\n\n\n \"You can't put it over, hick.\"\n\n\n \"Tell him.\"", "\"Less than four hours to departure time,\" he said. \"I'd better not\n start any long books.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination,\" Magnan\n said.\n\n\n Retief stood up. \"If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon.\"\n\n\n \"The allusion escapes me,\" Magnan said coldly. \"And one last word. The\n Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't\n get yourself interned.\"\n\n\n \"I'll tell you what,\" Retief said soberly. \"In a pinch, I'll mention\n your name.\"\n\n\n \"You'll be traveling with Class X credentials,\" Magnan snapped. \"There\n must be nothing to connect you with the Corps.\"\n\n\n \"They'll never guess,\" Retief said. \"I'll pose as a gentleman.\"" ], [ "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him.", "\"I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's\n Worlds like?\"\n\n\n \"One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the\n Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin'\n his own cookin' like he does somebody else's.\"\n\n\n \"That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got\n aboard for Jorgensen's?\"\n\n\n \"Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few\n weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says.\n Don't know what we even run in there for.\"\n\n\n \"Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?\"", "\"I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as\n Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest\n of the way.\"\n\n\n \"That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked sour. \"Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put\n all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is\n not misplaced.\"\n\n\n \"This antiac conversion; how long does it take?\"\n\n\n \"A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The\n Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets\n inside.", "\"I've never had the pleasure,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip\n out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'.\"\n\n\n There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor.\n\n\n \"I ain't superstitious ner nothin',\" Chip said. \"But I'll be\n triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door,\n accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy\n knock shook the door.\n\n\n \"They got to look you over,\" Chip whispered. \"Nosy damn Sweaties.\"\n\n\n \"Unlock it, Chip.\" The chef opened the door.\n\n\n \"Come in, damn you,\" he said.", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "\"You'd better be getting started,\" Magnan said, shuffling papers.\n\n\n \"You're right,\" Retief said. \"If I work at it, I might manage a\n snootful by takeoff.\" He went to the door. \"No objection to my checking\n out a needler, is there?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked up. \"I suppose not. What do you want with it?\"\n\n\n \"Just a feeling I've got.\"\n\n\n \"Please yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Some day,\" Retief said, \"I may take you up on that.\"\nII", "\"Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation,\" he said. He hooked\n a finger inside the sequined collar. \"All tourist reservations were\n canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship\n next—\"\n\n\n \"Which gate?\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"For ... ah...?\"\n\n\n \"For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" the clerk said. \"Gate 19,\" he added quickly. \"But—\"\n\n\n Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign\n reading\nTo Gates 16-30\n.", "\"Another smart alec,\" the clerk said behind him.\nRetief followed the signs, threaded his way through crowds, found a\n covered ramp with the number 228 posted over it. A heavy-shouldered man\n with a scarred jawline and small eyes was slouching there in a rumpled\n gray uniform. He put out a hand as Retief started past him.\n\n\n \"Lessee your boarding pass,\" he muttered.\n\n\n Retief pulled a paper from an inside pocket, handed it over.\n\n\n The guard blinked at it.\n\n\n \"Whassat?\"\n\n\n \"A gram confirming my space,\" Retief said. \"Your boy on the counter\n says he's out to lunch.\"\n\n\n The guard crumpled the gram, dropped it on the floor and lounged back\n against the handrail.\n\n\n \"On your way, bub,\" he said.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "\"What do you think you're doing, busting in here?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you're planning a course change, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've got damn big ears.\"\n\n\n \"I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"You do, huh?\" the captain sat down. \"I'm in command of this vessel,\"\n he said. \"I'm changing course for Alabaster.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster,\" Retief said. \"So\n just hold your course for Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"Not bloody likely.\"\n\n\n \"Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to\n change course.\"\n\n\n The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.", "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "\"Not on this vessel, you won't,\" the captain said shakily. \"I got my\n charter to consider.\"\n\n\n \"Ram your charter,\" Hoany said harshly. \"You won't be needing it long.\"\n\n\n \"Button your floppy mouth, damn you!\" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at\n the man on the floor. \"Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the\n slob.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came\n up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room.\n\n\n The panel opened.\n\n\n \"I usta be about your size, when I was your age,\" Chip said. \"You\n handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day.\"\n\n\n \"How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?\" Retief said.", "The thick-necked man paused at the door. \"We'll see you when you come\n out.\"\nIII\n\n\n Four waiters passed Retief's table without stopping. A fifth leaned\n against the wall nearby, a menu under his arm.\n\n\n At a table across the room, the Captain, now wearing a dress uniform\n and with his thin red hair neatly parted, sat with a table of male\n passengers. He talked loudly and laughed frequently, casting occasional\n glances Retief's way.\n\n\n A panel opened in the wall behind Retief's chair. Bright blue eyes\n peered out from under a white chef's cap.\n\n\n \"Givin' you the cold shoulder, heh, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"Looks like it, old-timer,\" Retief said. \"Maybe I'd better go join the\n skipper. His party seems to be having all the fun.\"", "\"Dern right,\" Chip said. \"Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em.\n Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert.\n You like brandy in yer coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Chip, you're a genius.\"\n\n\n \"Like to see a feller eat,\" Chip said. \"I gotta go now. If you need\n anything, holler.\"\n\n\n Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to\n Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct,\n there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a\n temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It\n would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against.", "\"Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point.\"\n\n\n \"You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed\n up with mushrooms and garlic butter.\n\n\n \"I'm Chip,\" the chef said. \"I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I\n said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties,\n look at a man like he was a worm.\"\n\n\n \"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the\n right idea on the Soetti, too,\" Retief said. He poured red wine into a\n glass. \"Here's to you.\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the\n counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend\n \"ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.\" A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse\n and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching\n Retief from the corner of his eye.\n\n\n Retief glanced at him.\n\n\n The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and\n spat it on the floor.\n\n\n \"Was there something?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group,\" Retief said.\n \"Is it on schedule?\"\n\n\n The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. \"Filled\n up. Try again in a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\n \"What time does it leave?\"", "\"To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You\n ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?\"\n\n\n \"Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship.\"\n\n\n \"Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins.\" Chip puffed\n the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and\n brandy.\n\n\n \"Them Sweaties is what I don't like,\" he said.\n\n\n Retief looked at him questioningly.\n\n\n \"You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a\n lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin'\n head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled.\"" ], [ "\"I'll carry it, sealed,\" Retief said. \"That way nobody can sweat it out\n of me.\"\n\n\n Magnan started to shake his head.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said. \"If it's trapped for destruction, I suppose—\"\n\n\n \"I've heard of these Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said. \"I remember an\n agent, a big blond fellow, very quick on the uptake. A wizard with\n cards and dice. Never played for money, though.\"\n\n\n \"Umm,\" Magnan said. \"Don't make the error of personalizing this\n situation, Retief. Overall policy calls for a defense of these\n backwater worlds. Otherwise the Corps would allow history to follow its\n natural course, as always.\"\n\n\n \"When does this attack happen?\"\n\n\n \"Less than four weeks.\"\n\n\n \"That doesn't leave me much time.\"", "\"A show of resistance at this point is necessary. Unfortunately,\n Jorgensen's Worlds are technologically undeveloped areas. They're\n farmers or traders. Their industry is limited to a minor role in\n their economy—enough to support the merchant fleet, no more. The war\n potential, by conventional standards, is nil.\"\n\n\n Magnan tapped the folder before him.\n\n\n \"I have here,\" he said solemnly, \"information which will change that\n picture completely.\" He leaned back and blinked at Retief.\n\"All right, Mr. Councillor,\" Retief said. \"I'll play along; what's in\n the folder?\"\n\n\n Magnan spread his fingers, folded one down.", "\"Now—\" Magnan leaned forward and lowered his voice—\"we have learned\n that the Soetti plan a bold step forward. Since they've met no\n opposition so far in their infiltration of Terrestrial space, they\n intend to seize Jorgensen's Worlds by force.\"\n\n\n Magnan leaned back, waiting for Retief's reaction. Retief drew\n carefully on his cigar and looked at Magnan. Magnan frowned.\n\n\n \"This is open aggression, Retief,\" he said, \"in case I haven't made\n myself clear. Aggression on Terrestrial-occupied territory by an alien\n species. Obviously, we can't allow it.\"\n\n\n Magnan drew a large folder from his desk.", "THE FROZEN PLANET\nBy Keith Laumer\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"It is rather unusual,\" Magnan said, \"to assign an officer of your rank\n to courier duty, but this is an unusual mission.\"\n\n\n Retief sat relaxed and said nothing. Just before the silence grew\n awkward, Magnan went on.\n\n\n \"There are four planets in the group,\" he said. \"Two double planets,\n all rather close to an unimportant star listed as DRI-G 33987. They're\n called Jorgensen's Worlds, and in themselves are of no importance\n whatever. However, they lie deep in the sector into which the Soetti\n have been penetrating.", "\"First,\" he said. \"The Soetti War Plan—in detail. We were fortunate\n enough to make contact with a defector from a party of renegade\n Terrestrials who've been advising the Soetti.\" He folded another\n finger. \"Next, a battle plan for the Jorgensen's people, worked out by\n the Theory group.\" He wrestled a third finger down. \"Lastly; an Utter\n Top Secret schematic for conversion of a standard anti-acceleration\n field into a potent weapon—a development our systems people have been\n holding in reserve for just such a situation.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all?\" Retief said. \"You've still got two fingers sticking up.\"\n\n\n Magnan looked at the fingers and put them away.\n\n\n \"This is no occasion for flippancy, Retief. In the wrong hands, this\n information could be catastrophic. You'll memorize it before you leave\n this building.\"", "\"Instead of strangling you, as you deserve,\" he said, \"I'm going to\n stay here and help you hold your course for Jorgensen's Worlds.\"\n\n\n The captain looked at Retief. He laughed, a short bark.\n\n\n \"Then I'll just stretch out and have a little nap, farmer. If you feel\n like dozing off sometime during the next eighteen hours, don't mind me.\"\n\n\n Retief took out the needler and put it on the desk before him.\n\n\n \"If anything happens that I don't like,\" he said, \"I'll wake you up.\n With this.\"", "Retief put down the heavy travel-battered suitcase and leaned on the\n counter, studying the schedules chalked on the board under the legend\n \"ALDO CERISE—INTERPLANETARY.\" A thin clerk in a faded sequined blouse\n and a plastic snakeskin cummerbund groomed his fingernails, watching\n Retief from the corner of his eye.\n\n\n Retief glanced at him.\n\n\n The clerk nipped off a ragged corner with rabbitlike front teeth and\n spat it on the floor.\n\n\n \"Was there something?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Two twenty-eight, due out today for the Jorgensen group,\" Retief said.\n \"Is it on schedule?\"\n\n\n The clerk sampled the inside of his right cheek, eyed Retief. \"Filled\n up. Try again in a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\n \"What time does it leave?\"", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "\"What do you think you're doing, busting in here?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you're planning a course change, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've got damn big ears.\"\n\n\n \"I think we'd better call in at Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"You do, huh?\" the captain sat down. \"I'm in command of this vessel,\"\n he said. \"I'm changing course for Alabaster.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't find it convenient to go to Alabaster,\" Retief said. \"So\n just hold your course for Jorgensen's.\"\n\n\n \"Not bloody likely.\"\n\n\n \"Your use of the word 'bloody' is interesting, Captain. Don't try to\n change course.\"\n\n\n The captain reached for the mike on his desk, pressed the key.", "\"Less than four hours to departure time,\" he said. \"I'd better not\n start any long books.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better waste no time getting over to Indoctrination,\" Magnan\n said.\n\n\n Retief stood up. \"If I hurry, maybe I can catch the cartoon.\"\n\n\n \"The allusion escapes me,\" Magnan said coldly. \"And one last word. The\n Soetti are patrolling the trade lanes into Jorgensen's Worlds; don't\n get yourself interned.\"\n\n\n \"I'll tell you what,\" Retief said soberly. \"In a pinch, I'll mention\n your name.\"\n\n\n \"You'll be traveling with Class X credentials,\" Magnan snapped. \"There\n must be nothing to connect you with the Corps.\"\n\n\n \"They'll never guess,\" Retief said. \"I'll pose as a gentleman.\"", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "\"To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You\n ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?\"\n\n\n \"Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship.\"\n\n\n \"Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins.\" Chip puffed\n the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and\n brandy.\n\n\n \"Them Sweaties is what I don't like,\" he said.\n\n\n Retief looked at him questioningly.\n\n\n \"You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a\n lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin'\n head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled.\"", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"I have your itinerary here. Your accommodations are clear as far as\n Aldo Cerise. You'll have to rely on your ingenuity to get you the rest\n of the way.\"\n\n\n \"That's a pretty rough trip, Mr. Councillor. Suppose I don't make it?\"\n\n\n Magnan looked sour. \"Someone at a policy-making level has chosen to put\n all our eggs in one basket, Retief. I hope their confidence in you is\n not misplaced.\"\n\n\n \"This antiac conversion; how long does it take?\"\n\n\n \"A skilled electronics crew can do the job in a matter of minutes. The\n Jorgensens can handle it very nicely; every other man is a mechanic of\n some sort.\"\n\n\n Retief opened the envelope Magnan handed him and looked at the tickets\n inside.", "\"Some ... ah ... VIP's required accommodation,\" he said. He hooked\n a finger inside the sequined collar. \"All tourist reservations were\n canceled. You'll have to try to get space on the Four-Planet Line ship\n next—\"\n\n\n \"Which gate?\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"For ... ah...?\"\n\n\n \"For the two twenty-eight for Jorgensen's Worlds,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Well,\" the clerk said. \"Gate 19,\" he added quickly. \"But—\"\n\n\n Retief picked up his suitcase and walked away toward the glare sign\n reading\nTo Gates 16-30\n.", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"", "\"Catch,\" he said between clenched teeth. The trunk slammed against the\n far wall of the corridor and burst.\n\n\n Retief turned to the baggage on the floor, tossed it into the hall. The\n face of the thick-necked man appeared cautiously around the door jamb.\n\n\n \"Mister, you must be—\"\n\n\n \"If you'll excuse me,\" Retief said, \"I want to catch a nap.\" He flipped\n the door shut, pulled off his shoes and stretched out on the bed.\nFive minutes passed before the door rattled and burst open.\n\n\n Retief looked up. A gaunt leathery-skinned man wearing white ducks, a\n blue turtleneck sweater and a peaked cap tilted raffishly over one eye\n stared at Retief.\n\n\n \"Is this the joker?\" he grated.", "Retief put his suitcase carefully on the floor, took a step and drove a\n right into the guard's midriff. He stepped aside as the man doubled and\n went to his knees.\n\n\n \"You were wide open, ugly. I couldn't resist. Tell your boss I sneaked\n past while you were resting your eyes.\" He picked up his bag, stepped\n over the man and went up the gangway into the ship.\n\n\n A cabin boy in stained whites came along the corridor.\n\n\n \"Which way to cabin fifty-seven, son?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"Up there.\" The boy jerked his head and hurried on. Retief made his way\n along the narrow hall, found signs, followed them to cabin fifty-seven.\n The door was open. Inside, baggage was piled in the center of the\n floor. It was expensive looking baggage.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "\"They don't scare me none.\" Chip picked up the tray. \"I'll scout around\n a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything\n about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try\n nothin' close to port.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do\n anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now.\"\n\n\n Chip looked at Retief. \"You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much.\n You didn't come out here for fun, did you?\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Retief said, \"would be a hard one to answer.\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief awoke at a tap on his door.\n\n\n \"It's me, Mister. Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Come on in.\"" ], [ "\"Dern right,\" Chip said. \"Dunno who ever thought up broiling 'em.\n Steaks, that is. I got a Baked Alaska coming up in here for dessert.\n You like brandy in yer coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Chip, you're a genius.\"\n\n\n \"Like to see a feller eat,\" Chip said. \"I gotta go now. If you need\n anything, holler.\"\n\n\n Retief ate slowly. Time always dragged on shipboard. Four days to\n Jorgensen's Worlds. Then, if Magnan's information was correct,\n there would be four days to prepare for the Soetti attack. It was a\n temptation to scan the tapes built into the handle of his suitcase. It\n would be good to know what Jorgensen's Worlds would be up against.", "\"You don't scare us, Cap'n,\" Chip said. \"Him and Mr. Tony and all his\n goons. You hit 'em where they live, that time. They're pals o' these\n Sweaties. Runnin' some kind o' crooked racket.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better take the captain's advice, Chip. There's no point in your\n getting involved in my problems.\"\n\n\n \"They'd of killed you before now, Mister, if they had any guts. That's\n where we got it over these monkeys. They got no guts.\"\n\n\n \"They act scared, Chip. Scared men are killers.\"", "\"Feller has to be mighty careless who he eats with to set over there.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point.\"\n\n\n \"You set right where you're at, Mister. I'll rustle you up a plate.\"\n\n\n Five minutes later, Retief cut into a thirty-two ounce Delmonico backed\n up with mushrooms and garlic butter.\n\n\n \"I'm Chip,\" the chef said. \"I don't like the Cap'n. You can tell him I\n said so. Don't like his friends, either. Don't like them dern Sweaties,\n look at a man like he was a worm.\"\n\n\n \"You've got the right idea on frying a steak, Chip. And you've got the\n right idea on the Soetti, too,\" Retief said. He poured red wine into a\n glass. \"Here's to you.\"", "The chef entered the room, locking the door.\n\n\n \"You shoulda had that door locked.\" He stood by the door, listening,\n then turned to Retief.\n\n\n \"You want to get to Jorgensen's perty bad, don't you, Mister?\"\n\n\n \"That's right, Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony give the captain a real hard time about old Skaw. The\n Sweaties didn't say nothin'. Didn't even act surprised, just took the\n remains and pushed off. But Mr. Tony and that other crook they call\n Marbles, they was fit to be tied. Took the cap'n in his cabin and\n talked loud at him fer half a hour. Then the cap'n come out and give\n some orders to the Mate.\"\n\n\n Retief sat up and reached for a cigar.\n\n\n \"Mr. Tony and Skaw were pals, eh?\"", "\"Not on this vessel, you won't,\" the captain said shakily. \"I got my\n charter to consider.\"\n\n\n \"Ram your charter,\" Hoany said harshly. \"You won't be needing it long.\"\n\n\n \"Button your floppy mouth, damn you!\" Mr. Tony snapped. He looked at\n the man on the floor. \"Get Marbles out of here. I ought to dump the\n slob.\"\n\n\n He turned and walked away. The captain signaled and two waiters came\n up. Retief watched as they carted the casualty from the dining room.\n\n\n The panel opened.\n\n\n \"I usta be about your size, when I was your age,\" Chip said. \"You\n handled them pansies right. I wouldn't give 'em the time o' day.\"\n\n\n \"How about a fresh cup of coffee, Chip?\" Retief said.", "\"They don't scare me none.\" Chip picked up the tray. \"I'll scout around\n a little and see what's goin' on. If the Sweaties figure to do anything\n about that Skaw feller they'll have to move fast; they won't try\n nothin' close to port.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry, Chip. I have reason to be pretty sure they won't do\n anything to attract a lot of attention in this sector just now.\"\n\n\n Chip looked at Retief. \"You ain't no tourist, Mister. I know that much.\n You didn't come out here for fun, did you?\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Retief said, \"would be a hard one to answer.\"\nIV\n\n\n Retief awoke at a tap on his door.\n\n\n \"It's me, Mister. Chip.\"\n\n\n \"Come on in.\"", "The captain groaned and picked up the mike. \"Captain to Power Section,\"\n he said. \"Hold your present course until you hear from me.\" He dropped\n the mike and looked up at Retief.\n\n\n \"It's eighteen hours yet before we pick up Jorgensen Control. You going\n to sit here and bend my arm the whole time?\"\n\n\n Retief released the captain's wrist and turned to the door.\n\n\n \"Chip, I'm locking the door. You circulate around, let me know what's\n going on. Bring me a pot of coffee every so often. I'm sitting up with\n a sick friend.\"\n\n\n \"Right, Mister. Keep an eye on that jasper; he's slippery.\"\n\n\n \"What are you going to do?\" the captain demanded.\n\n\n Retief settled himself in a chair.", "\"I've never had the pleasure,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You prob'ly have it perty soon. Them devils board us nigh ever trip\n out. Act like they was the Customs Patrol or somethin'.\"\n\n\n There was a distant clang, and a faint tremor ran through the floor.\n\n\n \"I ain't superstitious ner nothin',\" Chip said. \"But I'll be\n triple-damned if that ain't them boarding us now.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes passed before bootsteps sounded outside the door,\n accompanied by a clicking patter. The doorknob rattled, then a heavy\n knock shook the door.\n\n\n \"They got to look you over,\" Chip whispered. \"Nosy damn Sweaties.\"\n\n\n \"Unlock it, Chip.\" The chef opened the door.\n\n\n \"Come in, damn you,\" he said.", "Retief heard the panel open beside him.\n\n\n \"Here you go, Mister,\" Chip said. Retief darted a glance; a well-honed\n french knife lay on the sill.\n\n\n \"Thanks, Chip,\" Retief said. \"I won't need it for these punks.\"\n\n\n Thick-neck lunged and Retief hit him square in the face, knocking him\n under the table. The other man stepped back, fumbling a power pistol\n from his shoulder holster.\n\n\n \"Aim that at me, and I'll kill you,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Go on, burn him!\" Mr. Tony shouted. Behind him, the captain appeared,\n white-faced.\n\n\n \"Put that away, you!\" he yelled. \"What kind of—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" Mr. Tony said. \"Put it away, Hoany. We'll fix this bum\n later.\"", "\"To Alabaster. That's nine days' run in-sector from Jorgensen's. You\n ain't got another one of them cigars, have you?\"\n\n\n \"Have one, Chip. I guess I was lucky to get space on this ship.\"\n\n\n \"Plenty o' space, Mister. We got a dozen empty cabins.\" Chip puffed\n the cigar alight, then cleared away the dishes, poured out coffee and\n brandy.\n\n\n \"Them Sweaties is what I don't like,\" he said.\n\n\n Retief looked at him questioningly.\n\n\n \"You never seen a Sweaty? Ugly lookin' devils. Skinny legs, like a\n lobster; big chest, shaped like the top of a turnip; rubbery lookin'\n head. You can see the pulse beatin' when they get riled.\"", "\"You bluff easily, Captain. Show a few guns as you hand the body back.\n We know their secret now.\"\n\n\n \"What secret? I—\"\n\n\n \"Don't be no dumber than you got to, Cap'n,\" Chip said. \"Sweaties die\n easy; that's the secret.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe you got a point,\" the captain said, looking at Retief. \"All they\n got's a three-man scout. It could work.\"\n\n\n He went out, came back with two crewmen. They hauled the dead alien\n gingerly into the hall.\n\n\n \"Maybe I can run a bluff on the Soetti,\" the captain said, looking back\n from the door. \"But I'll be back to see you later.\"", "\"Sure, Mister. Anything else?\"\n\n\n \"I'll think of something,\" Retief said. \"This is shaping up into one of\n those long days.\"\n\"They don't like me bringing yer meals to you in yer cabin,\" Chip said.\n \"But the cap'n knows I'm the best cook in the Merchant Service. They\n won't mess with me.\"\n\n\n \"What has Mr. Tony got on the captain, Chip?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"They're in some kind o' crooked business together. You want some more\n smoked turkey?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. What have they got against my going to Jorgensen's Worlds?\"\n\n\n \"Dunno. Hasn't been no tourists got in there fer six or eight months. I\n sure like a feller that can put it away. I was a big eater when I was\n yer age.\"", "\"I'll bet you can still handle it, Old Timer. What are Jorgensen's\n Worlds like?\"\n\n\n \"One of 'em's cold as hell and three of 'em's colder. Most o' the\n Jorgies live on Svea; that's the least froze up. Man don't enjoy eatin'\n his own cookin' like he does somebody else's.\"\n\n\n \"That's where I'm lucky, Chip. What kind of cargo's the captain got\n aboard for Jorgensen's?\"\n\n\n \"Derned if I know. In and out o' there like a grasshopper, ever few\n weeks. Don't never pick up no cargo. No tourists any more, like I says.\n Don't know what we even run in there for.\"\n\n\n \"Where are the passengers we have aboard headed?\"", "\"Jesus, what did you do! They'll kill us!\" the captain gasped, staring\n at the figure flopping on the floor.\n\n\n \"Cart poor old Skaw back to his boat,\" Retief said. \"Tell him to pass\n the word. No more illegal entry and search of Terrestrial vessels in\n Terrestrial space.\"\n\n\n \"Hey,\" Chip said. \"He's quit kicking.\"\n\n\n The captain bent over Skaw, gingerly rolled him over. He leaned close\n and sniffed.\n\n\n \"He's dead.\" The captain stared at Retief. \"We're all dead men,\" he\n said. \"These Soetti got no mercy.\"\n\n\n \"They won't need it. Tell 'em to sheer off; their fun is over.\"\n\n\n \"They got no more emotions than a blue crab—\"", "Retief put his bag down. He turned at a sound behind him. A tall,\n florid man with an expensive coat belted over a massive paunch stood in\n the open door, looking at Retief. Retief looked back. The florid man\n clamped his jaws together, turned to speak over his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Somebody in the cabin. Get 'em out.\" He rolled a cold eye at Retief as\n he backed out of the room. A short, thick-necked man appeared.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Mr. Tony's room?\" he barked. \"Never mind! Clear\n out of here, fellow! You're keeping Mr. Tony waiting.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad,\" Retief said. \"Finders keepers.\"\n\n\n \"You nuts?\" The thick-necked man stared at Retief. \"I said it's Mr.\n Tony's room.\"", "\"I don't know Mr. Tony. He'll have to bull his way into other quarters.\"\n\n\n \"We'll see about you, mister.\" The man turned and went out. Retief\n sat on the bunk and lit a cigar. There was a sound of voices in\n the corridor. Two burly baggage-smashers appeared, straining at an\n oversized trunk. They maneuvered it through the door, lowered it,\n glanced at Retief and went out. The thick-necked man returned.\n\n\n \"All right, you. Out,\" he growled. \"Or have I got to have you thrown\n out?\"\n\n\n Retief rose and clamped the cigar between his teeth. He gripped a\n handle of the brass-bound trunk in each hand, bent his knees and heaved\n the trunk up to chest level, then raised it overhead. He turned to the\n door.", "Retief finished the steak, and the chef passed out the baked Alaska and\n coffee. Most of the other passengers had left the dining room. Mr. Tony\n and his retainers still sat at the Captain's table.\n\n\n As Retief watched, four men arose from the table and sauntered across\n the room. The first in line, a stony-faced thug with a broken ear, took\n a cigar from his mouth as he reached the table. He dipped the lighted\n end in Retief's coffee, looked at it, and dropped it on the tablecloth.\n\n\n The others came up, Mr. Tony trailing.\n\n\n \"You must want to get to Jorgensen's pretty bad,\" the thug said in a\n grating voice. \"What's your game, hick?\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the coffee cup, picked it up.", "One of the two wiped his nose on a sleeve, spat on his right palm, and\n stepped forward, then hesitated.\n\n\n \"Hey,\" he said. \"This the guy tossed the trunk off the wall?\"\n\n\n \"That's him,\" the thick-necked man called. \"Spilled Mr. Tony's\n possessions right on the deck.\"\n\n\n \"Deal me out,\" the bouncer said. \"He can stay put as long as he wants\n to. I signed on to move cargo. Let's go, Moe.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be getting back to the bridge, Captain,\" Retief said.\n \"We're due to lift in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n The thick-necked man and the Captain both shouted at once. The\n Captain's voice prevailed.\n\n\n \"—twenty minutes ... uniform Code ... gonna do?\"\n\n\n \"Close the door as you leave,\" Retief said.", "\"He hated Skaw's guts. But with him it was business. Mister, you got a\n gun?\"\n\n\n \"A 2mm needler. Why?\"\n\n\n \"The orders cap'n give was to change course fer Alabaster. We're\n by-passin' Jorgensen's Worlds. We'll feel the course change any minute.\"\n\n\n Retief lit the cigar, reached under the mattress and took out a\n short-barreled pistol. He dropped it in his pocket, looked at Chip.\n\n\n \"Maybe it was a good thought, at that. Which way to the Captain's\n cabin?\"\n\"This is it,\" Chip said softly. \"You want me to keep an eye on who\n comes down the passage?\"\n\n\n Retief nodded, opened the door and stepped into the cabin. The captain\n looked up from his desk, then jumped up.", "\"I don't think—\"\n\n\n \"Let's stick to facts,\" Retief said. \"Don't try to think. What time is\n it due out?\"\n\n\n The clerk smiled pityingly. \"It's my lunch hour,\" he said. \"I'll be\n open in an hour.\" He held up a thumb nail, frowned at it.\n\n\n \"If I have to come around this counter,\" Retief said, \"I'll feed that\n thumb to you the hard way.\"\n\n\n The clerk looked up and opened his mouth. Then he caught Retief's eye,\n closed his mouth and swallowed.\n\n\n \"Like it says there,\" he said, jerking a thumb at the board. \"Lifts in\n an hour. But you won't be on it,\" he added.\n\n\n Retief looked at him." ] ]
train	20012	[ "Who seems to be writing the most falsehoods?", "Do Cassidy and Arrow feel the same way about Krugman?", "Which writer seemed to like Krugman the most?", "Which would Fishman not use to describe Brian Arthur?", "What seems to be Krugman's biggest issue with Arthur?", "Which of the following most likely happened to Krugman after these letters?" ]	[ [ "M. Mitchell Waldrop", "John Cassidy", "Paul Krugman", "Kenneth J. Arrow" ], [ "No - Arrow finds him less offensive than Cassidy", "Yes - They both think he was misinformed", "No - Cassidy thinks he's a liar, but Arrow doesn't", "Yes - They both think he wrote inaccurate statements about people" ], [ "Waldrop", "Arrow", "Cassidy", "Fishman" ], [ "innovative", "vain", "a nice guy", "intelligent" ], [ "Arthur allows too many people to misquote him.", "Arthur received too much credit for increasing returns.", "Arthur provided inaccurate information.", "Arthur didn't do enough research on increasing returns." ], [ "Krugman wrote an official apology to the writers.", "Krugman wrote another book about increasing returns.", "Krugman quit writing in newspapers.", "Krugman lost credibility among his colleagues." ] ]	[ 3, 4, 1, 2, 2, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "When Waldrop's book came out, I wrote him as politely as I could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out of shape. ... So what we really learn from the legend of Arthur is that some journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really true.", "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "How did this fantasy come to be so widely believed? I am glad to hear that you tried to tell a more balanced story, Mr. Waldrop, even if sloppy paperwork kept it from seeing", "Harvard University Press, is far and away the best reporting on the subject, did include a sympathetic but devastating exposÃ© of Arthur's pretensions--but to little effect. [Click to read Warsh on Arthur.]) Only now did I have a publishable story:", "someone at some point.\" Yet up to now there was nothing anyone could do about the situation. The trouble was that while \"heroic rebel defies orthodoxy\" is a story so good that nobody even tries to check it out, \"guy makes", "5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. \"Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does", "seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to", "--John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: \n\n I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: \n\n Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story (\"The Legend of Arthur\"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre.", "not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light,\" he pronounces. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that", "I am truly sorry that The New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include a link directly to the Cassidy piece. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in \"Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.\" Cassidy did not present a story about one guy among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against the unified opposition of a narrow-minded profession both intellectually and politically conservative. As TBTF's host--not exactly a naive reader--put it, \"These ideas were anathema to mainstream economists in 1984 when Arthur first tried to publish them.\" \n\n That morality play--not the question of who deserves credit--was the main point of my column, because it is a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream economics.", "Let me say that I am actually quite grateful to Cassidy and The New Yorker . A number of people have long been furious about your book--for example, Victor Norman, whom you portrayed as", "The point is that it's not just a matter of failing to cite a few more people. Your book, like the Cassidy article, didn't just tell the story of Brian Arthur; it also painted a picture of the economics profession, its intellectual bigotry and prejudice, which happens to be a complete fabrication (with some real, named people cast as villains) that somehow someone managed to sell you. I wonder who? \n\n Even more to the point: How did Cassidy come by his story? Is it possible that he completely misunderstood what Brian Arthur was saying--that the whole business about the seminar at Harvard where nobody would accept increasing returns, about the lonely struggle of Arthur in the face of ideological rigidity, even the quotation from Arthur about economists being unwilling to consider the possibility of imperfect markets because of the Cold War (give me a break!) were all in Cassidy's imagination?", "Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. During my research for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, including Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, co-creator of the General Equilibrium Theory of economics that Brian so eloquently criticizes. They generally agreed that Brian was a maverick in the field--and perhaps a bit too much in love with his own self-image as a misunderstood outsider--but basically sound. None of them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due.", "has in fact said.", "That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. \n\n --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop:", "\"guy makes minor contribution to well-established field, portrays himself as heroic rebel--and The New Yorker believes him.\"", "historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur", "started an avalanche of derivative work, he was certainly joking--what he probably meant was \"Oh no, not you too.\" And let me say that I simply cannot believe that you could have talked about increasing returns with any significant number of", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "I \"don't like mainstream economists\" and that I am out to denigrate their work is malicious hogwash. The fact of the matter is that I spend much of my life reading the work of mainstream economists, speaking to them, and" ], [ "historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur", "5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. \"Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does", "Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: \n\n Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur (\"The Legend of Arthur\") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was \"just pissed off,\" not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.", "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons.", "Krugman's Life of Brian \n\n \n\n Where it all started: Paul Krugman's \"The Legend of Arthur.\" \n\n Letter from John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman \n\n David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe \n\n Letter from John Cassidy:", "What Cassidy in fact did in his article was to trace a line of influence between one of Arthur's early articles and the current claims of the Department of Justice against Microsoft. It appears that Cassidy based his article on several interviews, not just one. \n\n The point that Arthur has emphasized and which is influential in the current debates about antitrust policy is the dynamic implication of increasing returns. It is the concept of path-dependence, that small events, whether random or the result of corporate strategic choice, may have large consequences because of increasing returns of various kinds. Initial small advantages become magnified, for example, by creating a large installed base, and direct the future, possibly in an inefficient direction. Techniques of production may be locked in at an early stage. Similar considerations apply to regional development and learning. \n\n --Kenneth J. Arrow Nobel laureate and Joan Kenney professor of economics emeritus Stanford University \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman:", "in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that", "I am truly sorry that The New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include a link directly to the Cassidy piece. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in \"Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.\" Cassidy did not present a story about one guy among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against the unified opposition of a narrow-minded profession both intellectually and politically conservative. As TBTF's host--not exactly a naive reader--put it, \"These ideas were anathema to mainstream economists in 1984 when Arthur first tried to publish them.\" \n\n That morality play--not the question of who deserves credit--was the main point of my column, because it is a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream economics.", "seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to", "His theme is stated in his first paragraph: \"Cassidy's article [in The New Yorker of Jan. 12] tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "--John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: \n\n I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: \n\n Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story (\"The Legend of Arthur\"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre.", "enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it \"didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.\" Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact", "c) So, when I received Krugman's letter shortly after Complexity came out, I was puzzled: He was complaining that I hadn't referenced others in the increasing-returns field--Paul Krugman among them--although I had explicitly done so. \n\n d) But, when I checked the published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage mentioning Krugman wasn't there. \n\n e) Only then did I realize what had happened. After I had submitted the manuscript, my editor at Simon & Schuster had suggested a number of cuts to streamline what was already a long and involved chapter on Brian's ideas. I accepted some of the cuts, and restored others--including (I thought) the passage that mentioned Krugman. In the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor anyway, and I didn't notice until too late.", "2) Krugman wrote: \"Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns.\" I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been around since Adam Smith, and it was written about at length by Alfred Marshall in 1890. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the \"wreckage\" of a large part of economic theory.)", "returns.\" Cassidy, however, said nothing of the sort. The concept of increasing returns is indeed very old, and Cassidy at no point attributed that idea to Arthur. Indeed, the phrase \"increasing returns\" appears just once in Cassidy's article and then", "Let me say that I am actually quite grateful to Cassidy and The New Yorker . A number of people have long been furious about your book--for example, Victor Norman, whom you portrayed as", "Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: \n\n a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. \n\n b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891.", "Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. \n\n 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--\"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government\"--is \"pure fiction.\" Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story." ], [ "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons.", "Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: \n\n a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. \n\n b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891.", "c) So, when I received Krugman's letter shortly after Complexity came out, I was puzzled: He was complaining that I hadn't referenced others in the increasing-returns field--Paul Krugman among them--although I had explicitly done so. \n\n d) But, when I checked the published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage mentioning Krugman wasn't there. \n\n e) Only then did I realize what had happened. After I had submitted the manuscript, my editor at Simon & Schuster had suggested a number of cuts to streamline what was already a long and involved chapter on Brian's ideas. I accepted some of the cuts, and restored others--including (I thought) the passage that mentioned Krugman. In the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor anyway, and I didn't notice until too late.", "in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that", "enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it \"didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.\" Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact", "Krugman's Life of Brian \n\n \n\n Where it all started: Paul Krugman's \"The Legend of Arthur.\" \n\n Letter from John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman \n\n David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe \n\n Letter from John Cassidy:", "of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy.\" Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "and made references to the previous papers, including those of Paul Krugman. (See Arthur's papers collected in the volume Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, especially his preface and my foreword for longer comments on Arthur's work in", "historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur", "Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. \n\n 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--\"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government\"--is \"pure fiction.\" Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story.", "6) I might attach more weight to Krugman's criticisms if I hadn't recently reread his informative 1994 book Peddling Prosperity , in which he devotes a chapter to the rediscovery of", "5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. \"Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does", "3) Pace Krugman, I also did not claim that Arthur bears principal responsibility for the rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As Krugman notes, several scholars (himself included) who were working in the fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating increasing returns before Arthur did. My claim was simply that Arthur applied increasing returns to high-technology markets, and that his work influenced how other economists and government officials think about these markets. Krugman apart, virtually every economist I have spoken to, including Daniel Rubinfeld, a former Berkeley professor who is now the chief economist at the Justice Department's antitrust division, told me this was the case. (Rubinfeld also mentioned several other economists who did influential work, and I cited three of them in the article.)", "Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: \n\n Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur (\"The Legend of Arthur\") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was \"just pissed off,\" not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.", "found him disarmingly generous in giving credit to the biologists, physicists, and fellow economists who have helped advance his own thinking. Savvy to the journalist's quest for heroes, Arthur urged me to focus on his ideas, not his rank among", "--John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: \n\n I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: \n\n Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story (\"The Legend of Arthur\"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre.", "not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light,\" he pronounces. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that", "2) Krugman wrote: \"Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns.\" I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been around since Adam Smith, and it was written about at length by Alfred Marshall in 1890. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the \"wreckage\" of a large part of economic theory.)" ], [ "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. During my research for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, including Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, co-creator of the General Equilibrium Theory of economics that Brian so eloquently criticizes. They generally agreed that Brian was a maverick in the field--and perhaps a bit too much in love with his own self-image as a misunderstood outsider--but basically sound. None of them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due.", "--Ted C. Fishman \n\n (For additional background on the history of \"increasing returns\" and Brian Arthur's standing in the field, click for David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe article on Brian Arthur)", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "His theme is stated in his first paragraph: \"Cassidy's article [in The New Yorker of Jan. 12] tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing", "merely to say that Arthur had used the term while others refer to network externalities. Further, Arthur has never made any such preposterous claim at any other time. On the contrary, his papers have fully cited the history of the field", "seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to", "Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: \n\n Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur (\"The Legend of Arthur\") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was \"just pissed off,\" not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.", "The point is that it's not just a matter of failing to cite a few more people. Your book, like the Cassidy article, didn't just tell the story of Brian Arthur; it also painted a picture of the economics profession, its intellectual bigotry and prejudice, which happens to be a complete fabrication (with some real, named people cast as villains) that somehow someone managed to sell you. I wonder who? \n\n Even more to the point: How did Cassidy come by his story? Is it possible that he completely misunderstood what Brian Arthur was saying--that the whole business about the seminar at Harvard where nobody would accept increasing returns, about the lonely struggle of Arthur in the face of ideological rigidity, even the quotation from Arthur about economists being unwilling to consider the possibility of imperfect markets because of the Cold War (give me a break!) were all in Cassidy's imagination?", "found him disarmingly generous in giving credit to the biologists, physicists, and fellow economists who have helped advance his own thinking. Savvy to the journalist's quest for heroes, Arthur urged me to focus on his ideas, not his rank among", "are the straight men in the stories you tell? For example, your book starts with the story of Arthur's meeting in 1987 with Al Fishlow at Berkeley, in which Fishlow supposedly said, \"We know that increasing returns can't exist\"--and Arthur", "Krugman's Life of Brian \n\n \n\n Where it all started: Paul Krugman's \"The Legend of Arthur.\" \n\n Letter from John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman \n\n David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe \n\n Letter from John Cassidy:", "returns.\" Cassidy, however, said nothing of the sort. The concept of increasing returns is indeed very old, and Cassidy at no point attributed that idea to Arthur. Indeed, the phrase \"increasing returns\" appears just once in Cassidy's article and then", "That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. \n\n --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop:", "What Cassidy in fact did in his article was to trace a line of influence between one of Arthur's early articles and the current claims of the Department of Justice against Microsoft. It appears that Cassidy based his article on several interviews, not just one. \n\n The point that Arthur has emphasized and which is influential in the current debates about antitrust policy is the dynamic implication of increasing returns. It is the concept of path-dependence, that small events, whether random or the result of corporate strategic choice, may have large consequences because of increasing returns of various kinds. Initial small advantages become magnified, for example, by creating a large installed base, and direct the future, possibly in an inefficient direction. Techniques of production may be locked in at an early stage. Similar considerations apply to regional development and learning. \n\n --Kenneth J. Arrow Nobel laureate and Joan Kenney professor of economics emeritus Stanford University \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman:", "his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons.", "Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: \n\n a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. \n\n b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891.", "that Arthur has started to receive some public recognition. The eminent MIT professor, whose early academic work received widespread media attention, is far too generous a scholar to succumb to such pettiness.", "I am truly sorry that The New Yorker has not yet established a Web presence so that we could include a link directly to the Cassidy piece. However, you can get a pretty good idea of what the piece said by reading the summary of it presented in \"Tasty Bits from the Technology Front.\" Cassidy did not present a story about one guy among many who worked on increasing returns. On the contrary: He presented a morality play in which a lonely hero struggled to make his ideas heard against the unified opposition of a narrow-minded profession both intellectually and politically conservative. As TBTF's host--not exactly a naive reader--put it, \"These ideas were anathema to mainstream economists in 1984 when Arthur first tried to publish them.\" \n\n That morality play--not the question of who deserves credit--was the main point of my column, because it is a pure (and malicious) fantasy that has nonetheless become part of the story line people tell about increasing returns and its relationship to mainstream economics.", "Among many other things, Complexity tells the story of the Irish-born economist Brian Arthur and how he came to champion a principle known as \"increasing returns.\" The recent New Yorker article explains how that principle has since become the intellectual foundation of the Clinton administration's antitrust case against Microsoft. Krugman's complaint is that the popular press--including Complexity and The New Yorker --is now hailing Brian Arthur as the originator of increasing returns, even though Krugman and many others had worked on the idea long before Arthur did. \n\n I leave it for others to decide whether I was too gullible in writing Complexity . For the record, however, I would like to inject a few facts into Krugman's story, which he summarizes nicely in the final paragraph:" ], [ "historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur", "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons.", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to", "Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. \n\n 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--\"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government\"--is \"pure fiction.\" Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story.", "of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy.\" Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important", "Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: \n\n Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur (\"The Legend of Arthur\") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was \"just pissed off,\" not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.", "and made references to the previous papers, including those of Paul Krugman. (See Arthur's papers collected in the volume Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy, especially his preface and my foreword for longer comments on Arthur's work in", "3) Pace Krugman, I also did not claim that Arthur bears principal responsibility for the rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As Krugman notes, several scholars (himself included) who were working in the fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating increasing returns before Arthur did. My claim was simply that Arthur applied increasing returns to high-technology markets, and that his work influenced how other economists and government officials think about these markets. Krugman apart, virtually every economist I have spoken to, including Daniel Rubinfeld, a former Berkeley professor who is now the chief economist at the Justice Department's antitrust division, told me this was the case. (Rubinfeld also mentioned several other economists who did influential work, and I cited three of them in the article.)", "Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. During my research for Complexity I spoke to a number of economists about his work, including Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, co-creator of the General Equilibrium Theory of economics that Brian so eloquently criticizes. They generally agreed that Brian was a maverick in the field--and perhaps a bit too much in love with his own self-image as a misunderstood outsider--but basically sound. None of them warned me that he was usurping credit where credit was not due.", "Krugman's Life of Brian \n\n \n\n Where it all started: Paul Krugman's \"The Legend of Arthur.\" \n\n Letter from John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman \n\n David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe \n\n Letter from John Cassidy:", "2) Krugman wrote: \"Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns.\" I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. The notion of increasing returns has been around since Adam Smith, and it was written about at length by Alfred Marshall in 1890. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the \"wreckage\" of a large part of economic theory.)", "enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it \"didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.\" Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact", "Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: \n\n a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. \n\n b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891.", "--John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: \n\n I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: \n\n Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story (\"The Legend of Arthur\"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre.", "in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that", "Among many other things, Complexity tells the story of the Irish-born economist Brian Arthur and how he came to champion a principle known as \"increasing returns.\" The recent New Yorker article explains how that principle has since become the intellectual foundation of the Clinton administration's antitrust case against Microsoft. Krugman's complaint is that the popular press--including Complexity and The New Yorker --is now hailing Brian Arthur as the originator of increasing returns, even though Krugman and many others had worked on the idea long before Arthur did. \n\n I leave it for others to decide whether I was too gullible in writing Complexity . For the record, however, I would like to inject a few facts into Krugman's story, which he summarizes nicely in the final paragraph:", "That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. \n\n --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop:", "6) I might attach more weight to Krugman's criticisms if I hadn't recently reread his informative 1994 book Peddling Prosperity , in which he devotes a chapter to the rediscovery of" ], [ "c) So, when I received Krugman's letter shortly after Complexity came out, I was puzzled: He was complaining that I hadn't referenced others in the increasing-returns field--Paul Krugman among them--although I had explicitly done so. \n\n d) But, when I checked the published text, I was chagrined to discover that the critical passage mentioning Krugman wasn't there. \n\n e) Only then did I realize what had happened. After I had submitted the manuscript, my editor at Simon & Schuster had suggested a number of cuts to streamline what was already a long and involved chapter on Brian's ideas. I accepted some of the cuts, and restored others--including (I thought) the passage that mentioned Krugman. In the rush to get Complexity to press, however, that passage somehow wound up on the cutting-room floor anyway, and I didn't notice until too late.", "Krugman's Life of Brian \n\n \n\n Where it all started: Paul Krugman's \"The Legend of Arthur.\" \n\n Letter from John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow \n\n Letter from Ted C. Fishman \n\n David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe \n\n Letter from John Cassidy:", "his peers. Krugman has made a career out of telling other economists to pay better attention to the facts, yet as a chronicler of Arthur's career and inner life, Krugman seems to have listened only to his own demons.", "4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a \"nice guy,\" of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings.", "Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply. I remember the exchange very well. Obviously, however, my reply failed to make clear what I was really trying to say. So I'll try again: \n\n a) During our interviews, Brian went out of his way to impress upon me that many other economists had done work in increasing returns--Paul Krugman among them. He was anxious that they be given due credit in anything I wrote. So was I. \n\n b) Accordingly, I included a passage in Complexity in which Brian does indeed describe what others had done in the field--Paul Krugman among them. Elsewhere in that same chapter, I tried to make it clear that the concept of increasing returns was already well known to Brian's professors at Berkeley, where he first learned of it. Indeed, I quote Brian pointing out that increasing returns had been extensively discussed by the great English economist Alfred Marshall in 1891.", "enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it \"didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know.\" Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact", "historic perspective. Click to see the foreword.) Hence, Krugman's whole attack is directed at a statement made neither by Arthur nor by Cassidy. Krugman has not read Cassidy's piece with any care nor has he bothered to review what Arthur", "Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. \n\n 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--\"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government\"--is \"pure fiction.\" Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story.", "of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy.\" Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important", "in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). To claim, as Krugman does, that", "After reading Paul Krugman vent his spleen against fellow economist Brian Arthur in \"The Legend of Arthur,\" I couldn't help wondering whose reputation he was out to trash, Arthur's or his own. Krugman", "QWERTYUIOP?\" Krugman wrote. \"In the early 1980s, Paul David and his Stanford colleague Brian Arthur asked that question, and quickly realized that it led them into surprisingly deep waters. ... What Paul David, Brian Arthur, and a growing number", "went away in despair over the unwillingness of economists to think the unthinkable. Did you call Fishlow to ask whether he said it, and what he meant? Since by 1987 Paul Romer's 1986 papers on increasing returns and growth had", "seems to fear a plot to deny economists their intellectual due. If one exists, Arthur is not a likely suspect. In a series of long interviews with me a year ago (for Worth magazine), I tried, vainly, to get Arthur to", "Thank you, Mr. Cassidy. \n\n Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow: \n\n Paul Krugman's attack on Brian Arthur (\"The Legend of Arthur\") requires a correction of its misrepresentations of fact. Arthur is a reputable and significant scholar whose work is indeed having influence in the field of industrial organization and in particular public policy toward antitrust policy in high-tech industries. Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was \"just pissed off,\" not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.", "That oversight was my fault entirely, not my editor's, and certainly not Brian Arthur's. I take full responsibility, I regret it, and--if Simon & Schuster only published an errata column--I would happily correct it publicly. However, contrary to what Professor Krugman implies, it was an oversight, not a breezy disregard of facts for the sake of a good story. \n\n --M. Mitchell Waldrop Washington \n\n Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop:", "--John Cassidy \n\n Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: \n\n I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. If other journalists would do as much homework as he did, I wouldn't have had to write that article. \n\n Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop: \n\n Thanks to Paul Krugman for his lament about credulous reporters who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a good story (\"The Legend of Arthur\"). As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre.", "When Waldrop's book came out, I wrote him as politely as I could, asking exactly how he had managed to come up with his version of events. He did, to his credit, write back. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out of shape. ... So what we really learn from the legend of Arthur is that some journalists like a good story too much to find out whether it is really true.", "Harvard University Press, is far and away the best reporting on the subject, did include a sympathetic but devastating exposÃ© of Arthur's pretensions--but to little effect. [Click to read Warsh on Arthur.]) Only now did I have a publishable story:", "not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light,\" he pronounces. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that" ] ]
train	20014	[ "What best summarizes Fiss' main motive as discussed in the article?", "What would be Fiss' opinions on the current laws regarding self expression today?", "How would one describe Fiss' viewpoints.", "Would Fiss believe that free speech is really \"free?\"", "What is the overall mood portrayed by the article?", "What influence does Fiss intend for his ideas to have on people?", "What statement below would Fiss most likely agree with?", "What is an example of one flaw that Fiss picks out in contemporary liberals?", "Which statement about details within the article is NOT true." ]	[ [ "He wants to problematize the U.S. constitution and its values.", "He wants to build animosity against contemporary liberals.", "He wants to highlight problems with free speech.", "He wants to teach minority and underrepresented groups how to gain true free speech for themselves." ], [ "He thinks that the current laws are changing for the better.", "He thinks they are oppressive and dangerous.", "He thinks they unfortunately don't apply to everyone due to social constraints.", "He feels the laws are not written correctly." ], [ "They are out of the ordinary, considering he refutes the current First Amendment.", "They are condescending when applied across a large spectrum of social groups.", "When contemplated, they fit in with the customs and norms of society today.", "They are noncontroversial among politically conservative people." ], [ "No, because he believes free speech is an outdated concept.", "Yes, but he does propose minor critiques towards the concept of free speech.", "No, because Fiss believes free speech is not granted equally to everyone.", "Yes, because he has not advocated strongly against issues with free speech." ], [ "Resentment towards political conservatives.", "Dissatisfaction with current political matters.", "Disappointment with the American government.", "Fear of a future without free speech." ], [ "He hopes to promote his own political agenda for a future career in office.", "He wants people to recognize the dark side of free speech.", "He wants to glorify the idea of life without free speech.", "He wants to slam the workings of the government." ], [ "Historical laws should be left unchanged.", "He believes in equality for all.", "He believes in fair speech over free speech.", "The U.S. constitution needs a new amendment." ], [ "Their ideas are contradictory.", "They uphold a double standard for themselves.", "They are an uncohesive group.", "They strongly reject Fiss' ideas." ], [ "Fiss would support a minority movement before a movement from people in a \"majority\" social group.", "Despite his bitterness towards contemporary liberals, Fiss' ideologies are uniquely liberal in themselves.", "Nearly all Americans today would agree with Fiss' rationale.", "Fiss believes that inequality is a major contemporary issue." ] ]	[ 3, 3, 1, 3, 2, 2, 3, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths,", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "to defund the exhibit. Jesse Helms could not have demonized homosexuality more effectively--which, of course, is why he was pleased to draw public attention to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech." ], [ "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "The historical part of this analysis rests on a canard, which is the assertion that the constitutional law of free speech emerged from 19 th -century classical laissez-faire liberalism. It did not. It", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "time, that doctrine was construed to cover not the right to \"self-expression\" but the \"right to property.\" Turn-of-the-century courts did not display a libertarian attitude toward civil rights; they displayed a libertarian attitude toward economic rights, tending to throw", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "to defund the exhibit. Jesse Helms could not have demonized homosexuality more effectively--which, of course, is why he was pleased to draw public attention to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech.", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies." ], [ "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths,", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "emerged at the time of World War I, and the principal figures in its creation--Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Louis Brandeis--were not classical liberals; they were progressives. They abhorred the doctrine of natural rights because, in their" ], [ "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "The historical part of this analysis rests on a canard, which is the assertion that the constitutional law of free speech emerged from 19 th -century classical laissez-faire liberalism. It did not. It", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "to defund the exhibit. Jesse Helms could not have demonized homosexuality more effectively--which, of course, is why he was pleased to draw public attention to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech.", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "gays, victims of racial-hate speech, the poor (or, at least, the not-rich), and people who are critical of market capitalism--and to design a constitutional theory that will enable those groups to enlist the state in efforts either to suppress speech", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths," ], [ "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "to defund the exhibit. Jesse Helms could not have demonized homosexuality more effectively--which, of course, is why he was pleased to draw public attention to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech.", "the scope and direction of publicly funded medical research. To address those issues the public--represented by the casual museum visitor--needed an understanding of the lives and practices of the gay community, so long hidden from view.\" This seems completely wrongheaded. People", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths,", "at a time when AIDS had become a national health problem and the issue of gays in the military was about to arise, is ludicrous. Any NEA chairperson who had the interests of the gay community at heart would have rushed", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "(for the most part) didn't find Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio photographs objectionable because they depicted homosexuality. They found them objectionable because they depicted sadomasochism. The notion that", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "time, that doctrine was construed to cover not the right to \"self-expression\" but the \"right to property.\" Turn-of-the-century courts did not display a libertarian attitude toward civil rights; they displayed a libertarian attitude toward economic rights, tending to throw", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book." ], [ "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths,", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "the scope and direction of publicly funded medical research. To address those issues the public--represented by the casual museum visitor--needed an understanding of the lives and practices of the gay community, so long hidden from view.\" This seems completely wrongheaded. People" ], [ "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "it was what Fiss calls a \"source of empowerment for the members of the gay community\" to have homosexuality associated with snarling guys prancing around in leather jockstraps, using bullwhips as sex toys, and pissing in each other's mouths,", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "emerged at the time of World War I, and the principal figures in its creation--Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Louis Brandeis--were not classical liberals; they were progressives. They abhorred the doctrine of natural rights because, in their" ], [ "The argument is that \"the liberalism of the nineteenth century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for liberal government, [while] the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.\" The constitutional law of free speech, says Fiss, was shaped by the earlier type of liberalism--he calls it \"libertarian\"--which regarded free speech as a right of individual self-expression; it is now used to foil efforts to regulate speech in the name of the newer liberal value, equality. Contemporary liberals, inheriting both these traditions, find themselves in a bind. They want, let's say, black students to be free from harassment at institutions where they are, racially, in a minority, since liberals worry that black students cannot be \"equal\" if they feel intimidated. But those same liberals get upset at the thought of outlawing hate speech, since that would mean infringing upon the right of individuals to express themselves.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "-century classical liberals are Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich. Fiss' two \"liberalisms\" are, in fact, almost entirely different political philosophies.", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "in economic affairs--the passage of health and safety regulations, the protection of unions, the imposition of taxes, and so on. The post-New Deal liberals whom Fiss associates with the value of equality are their heirs. The heirs of the19 th", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "The historical part of this analysis rests on a canard, which is the assertion that the constitutional law of free speech emerged from 19 th -century classical laissez-faire liberalism. It did not. It", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "emerged at the time of World War I, and the principal figures in its creation--Learned Hand, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Louis Brandeis--were not classical liberals; they were progressives. They abhorred the doctrine of natural rights because, in their", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding" ], [ "The Irony of Free Speech is a discussion of several speech issues: campaign-finance laws, state funding for the arts, pornography, speech codes, and equal time. These discussions are not doctrinaire, but their general inclination is to favor state intervention, on political grounds, in each of those areas--that is, to favor restrictions on campaign spending, greater regulation of pornography, and so on. Fiss' analyses of specific cases are presented against a lightly sketched historical argument. Light though the sketching is, the historical argument is almost the most objectionable thing about the book, since it involves a distortion of the history of First Amendment law that is fairly plain even to someone who is not a professor at Yale Law School.", "This is what Fiss means by the \"irony\" in his title: that true freedom of speech for all requires suppressing the speech of some. This is not, technically, an irony. It is a", "an irony, he would undoubtedly have had some interesting things to say, for he is a learned and temperate writer. But he has, instead, chosen to address the issue as an advocate for specific groups he regards as politically disadvantaged--women,", "paradox. An irony would be the observation that an attempt to increase freedom for all often entails, despite our best efforts, a decrease in freedom for a few. If Fiss had addressed the subject of free speech in this spirit, as", "the scope and direction of publicly funded medical research. To address those issues the public--represented by the casual museum visitor--needed an understanding of the lives and practices of the gay community, so long hidden from view.\" This seems completely wrongheaded. People", "The historical part of this analysis rests on a canard, which is the assertion that the constitutional law of free speech emerged from 19 th -century classical laissez-faire liberalism. It did not. It", "Mapplethorpe's photographs seem to Fiss to qualify under these guidelines, since, he says, \"in the late 1980s the AIDS crisis confronted America in the starkest fashion and provoked urgent questions regarding", "Here, assuming we want to try the interventionist approach, it is hard to see how a one-size theory can possibly fit all cases. The issues underlying pornography, hate speech, arts grants, campaign finance, and equal-time provisions are all different. The ideological impetus behind judicial developments in the last two areas, campaign finance and equal-time provisions, is related less to speech, except as a kind of constitutional cover, than to a revival of the old \"right to property\"--that is, the Supreme Court tends to disapprove of legislative and administrative efforts to require broadcasters to carry \"opposing viewpoints\" on the grounds that since it's their property, owners of television stations should be able to broadcast what they like. Fiss believes that the need for equal-time laws is as urgent today as it was in the 1970s, which is peculiar in light of the proliferation of media outlets. But the state does arguably have an interest, compatible with the First Amendment, in stipulating the way those media are used, and Fiss' discussion of those issues is the least aggravating in his book.", "Still, that discussion, like his discussions of the other issues, rests on a claim long associated with the left--the claim, in a phrase, that the minority is really the majority. In the case of speech, Fiss appears to believe that the reason the American public is less enlightened than he would wish it to be concerning matters such as feminism, the rights of homosexuals, and regulation of industry is that people are denied access to the opinions and information that would enlighten them. The public is denied this access because the state, in thrall to the ideology of individualism, refuses either to interfere with speech bullies--such as pornographers--who \"silence\" women, or to subsidize the speech of the unorthodox, such as Robert Mapplethorpe.", "Fiss' analysis of the Mapplethorpe case offers a good example of the perils of his interventionist approach. Arts policy is, unquestionably, a mess. The solution usually proposed is divorce: Either get the state out of the business altogether or invent some ironclad process for distributing the money using strictly artistic criteria. Fiss rejects both solutions; he wants the criteria to be political. He thinks the NEA should subsidize art that will enhance the \"robustness\" of the debate and should therefore prefer unorthodox art--though only, of course, if it represents a viewpoint the endowment considers, by virtue of social need and a prior history of exclusion, worthy of its megaphone. (No Nazi art, in other words.)", "at a time when AIDS had become a national health problem and the issue of gays in the military was about to arise, is ludicrous. Any NEA chairperson who had the interests of the gay community at heart would have rushed", "Why does Fiss portray the history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this perverted way? Because he wants to line up his own free-speech argument within the conventional academic view that our problems are mostly the consequences of an antiquated and discreditable ideology of liberal individualism, and that they can mostly be solved by adopting a social-constructionist, or communitarian, or \"intersubjective\" view of human nature instead. The merits of liberal individualism vs. communitarianism can await another occasion to be debated. For since the law governing the freedom of speech does not emerge out of libertarianism, the matter does not boil down to replacing an obsolete belief in \"self-expression\" with a more up-to-date belief in \"robust debate,\" as Fiss would like to think it does. What it boils down to is whether we need to replace the Hand-Holmes-Brandeis way of maximizing the benefits of free speech in a democratic society, which tries to push the state as far out of the picture as possible, with a different way, which tries to get the state farther into the picture.", "Shut Up, He Explained \n\n Owen Fiss is a professor at the Yale Law School and a highly regarded scholar of constitutional law. The subject of this short book is the present direction of the law governing the freedom of speech. What Professor Fiss has to say about it is worth attending to not merely because of his prominence in the field but because his argument is planted in the common assumptive ground of a lot of contemporary academic thought about the bankruptcy of individualism. The thesis of the book is Fiss', but the wisdom is conventional.", "Fiss' suggestion--this is the chief theoretical proposal of his book--is that liberals should stop thinking about this as a conflict between liberty and equality and start thinking about it as a conflict between two kinds of liberty: social vs. individual. The First Amendment, he says, was intended to foster (in William Brennan's words) \"uninhibited, robust, and wide-open\" debate in society as a whole; speech that inhibits or monopolizes that debate should therefore fall outside the protection of the law. We can maximize the total freedom of speech by silencing people who prevent others from speaking--when they utter racial epithets, represent women in degrading ways, use their wealth to dominate the press and the political process, or block the funding of unorthodox art.", "to defund the exhibit. Jesse Helms could not have demonized homosexuality more effectively--which, of course, is why he was pleased to draw public attention to the pictures. Now that is what we call an irony of free speech.", "Awarding funding to the work of a gay artist because gay Americans need more political clout is an effort at cultural engineering, and the problem with cultural engineering is the problem with social engineering raised to a higher power. We have a hard enough time calculating the effects of the redistribution of wealth in our society. How can we possibly calculate the effects of redistributing the right to speak--of taking it away from people Professor Fiss feels have spoken long enough and mandating it for people he feels have not been adequately heard? One thing that is plain from the brief unhappy history of campus speech codes is that you automatically raise the value of the speech you punish and depress the value of the speech you sponsor. There are indeed many ironies here. Maybe someone will write a book about them.", "they dislike or to subsidize speech they do like, without running afoul of the First Amendment. Embarked on this task, the most learned and temperate writer in the world would have a hard time avoiding tendentiousness. Fiss does not avoid", "Hand, Holmes, and Brandeis based their First Amendment opinions not on some putative right to individual self-expression (an idea Holmes referred to as \"the right of the donkey to drool\") but on a democratic need for full and open political debate. First Amendment law since their time has performed its balancing acts on precisely that social value--the very value Fiss now proposes we need to insert into First Amendment jurisprudence. We don't need to insert it, because it was there from the start.", "(for the most part) didn't find Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio photographs objectionable because they depicted homosexuality. They found them objectionable because they depicted sadomasochism. The notion that", "Professor Fiss thinks the present direction of First Amendment law is a bad one, and he has an idea about how we might improve it. The short way to put his argument (though it is not quite the way he puts it) is to say that our approach to speech has become increasingly permissive. Courts have become more and more reluctant to allow the state to interfere with the rights of individual speakers to say what they wish, and it is time to roll back that permissiveness and to embark on a new approach that would permit the state to silence some speakers and promote others, but still, Fiss argues, in the name of freedom of speech." ] ]
train	51203	[ "What does the dead man represent for Ben?", "Why does Ben take offence to Cobb's comments about spacemen?", "Ben runs from the crime scene, but isn't remorseful for doing so. Why is that, even though he killed a man?", "What is the irony in Ben's contempt for a single action destroying \"a man's life and his dream?\"", "Why does the Martian boy speak so many languages?", "Why is the rumor that Martians can read minds especially scary to Ben?", "Why is Ben a potential asset to Maggie and her husband?", "What does Ben seem to fear, more than anything else?" ]	[ [ "His conscious. He is manifesting as Ben's rage, and the anger that he felt during the incident. ", "The end of his freedom. He represents his new life as an outlaw. ", "His conscious. He is manifesting as Ben's unaddressed guilt, and what he can never run away from. ", "The end of his career. He sees the dead man as the loss of his livelihood. " ], [ "He takes a lot of pride in his job, and dislikes Cobb disparaging it. ", "It's deeply personal to him. Because of his parent's death, he'd taken an interest in the job. ", "It's deeply personal to him. He grew up venerating space and space travel. He spent his whole life preparing for it. ", "He knows that spacemen account for the life people like Cobb can live, because of his work. " ], [ "It gave him enough time to remember the renegades, and make the plan to go meet them. ", "He felt he was justified in killing Cobb. ", "Running away game him opportunity to reflect.", "Running gave him autonomy, and to decide how the next part of his life would pan out. " ], [ "If he had stayed and made the decision to confess, he wouldn't have ruined his life. ", "He'd just deliberately ended a man's life, and his running from what he's done. ", "It's against the morals of what he claims to stand by. ", "He'd just done the same to a man by striking him without thought, and is now running from his guilt. " ], [ "He must meet humans from many places, and has just taken to learning a little of everything. ", "Martians have a different perception of Earth culture, and it's what he thinks is appropriate.", "He must meet humans from many places, and has only picked up bits of language here and there. ", "He is trying to confuse Ben, and get him to say something. " ], [ "If they can, they definitely know he's guilty of what he's done. ", "It would mean that Martians are fully aware of what Earth people are thinking, and manipulating them. ", "If they can, he's uncomfortable with the notion that they can read his thoughts. ", "Not being able to confirm if it's true or not makes Ben wary of interacting with any of them. " ], [ "He's an astrogator, and one that's now off the radar. He's free to do the kind of job they need. ", "He's an astrogator, and a very talented one at that. He can complete the job they need done. ", "As a space officer, he can help get them out of any legal trouble they might encounter. ", "He's in a position where he can't say no. He has to do whatever they tell him. " ], [ "The law, and atoning for his crime. ", "Losing his position and the chance to fly spaceships. ", "The dead man, and the way he persists in his mind. ", "Maggie and her husband, and the position they've put him in. " ] ]	[ 3, 3, 4, 4, 3, 1, 2, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "He didn't hear the answer or anything else.\nBen Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to\n consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black\n nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.\n\n\n He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,\n hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and\n sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to\n transfer itself to his own body.\n\n\n For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded\n shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way\n to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered\n constantly above him—a face, he supposed.\n\n\n He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was\n a deep, staccato grunting.", "Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A\n door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his\n vision—if he still had vision.\n\n\n \"You're sure?\" the voice persisted.\n\n\n \"I'm sure,\" Ben managed to say.\n\n\n \"I have no antidote. You may die.\"\n\n\n His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection,\n massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain\n within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to\n heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective\n weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender\n at once.\n\n\n \"Anti ... anti ...\" The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced\n from his throat. \"No ... I'm sure ... sure.\"", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "A Coffin for Jacob\nBy EDWARD W. LUDWIG\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWith never a moment to rest, the pursuit\n \nthrough space felt like a game of hounds\n \nand hares ... or was it follow the leader?\nBen Curtis eased his pale, gaunt body through the open doorway of the\n Blast Inn, the dead man following silently behind him.\n\n\n His fear-borne gaze traveled into the dimly illumined Venusian gin\n mill. The place was like an evil caldron steaming with a brew whose\n ingredients had been culled from the back corners of three planets.", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered.", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that\n someone had seized it.\n\n\n A soft feminine voice spoke to him. \"You're wounded? They hit you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word.\n\n\n \"You want to escape—even now?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You may die if you don't give yourself up.\"\n\n\n \"No, no.\"\n\n\n He tried to stumble toward the exit.\n\n\n \"All right then. Not that way. Here, this way.\"\n\n\n Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight\n flicked on.", "\"Swallow this now. That's it. You must have food.\" Or, \"Close your\n eyes. Don't strain. It won't be long. You're getting better.\"\nBetter\n, he'd think.\nGetting better....\nAt last, after one of the periods of lethargy, his eyes opened. The\n mist brightened, then dissolved.\n\n\n He beheld the cracked, unpainted ceiling of a small room, its colorless\n walls broken with a single, round window. He saw the footboard of his\n aluminite bed and the outlines of his feet beneath a faded blanket.\n\n\n Finally he saw the face and figure that stood at his side.", "But he heard someone say, \"Don't try to talk.\" It was the same gentle\n voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. \"Don't talk. Just lie still and\n rest. Everything'll be all right.\"\nEverything all right\n, he thought dimly.\n\n\n There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There\n were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of\n things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen\n mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets\n swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and\n he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach.\n\n\n Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring\n mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears:", "Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of\n faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon\n faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and\n occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a\n face with a red beard.\n\n\n A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of\n a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.\n\n\n He needed help.\n\n\n But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A\n reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The\n Martian kid, perhaps?\n\n\n Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of\n white. He tensed.\n\n\n Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought." ], [ "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys\n Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among\n the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who\n understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the\n U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.\n\n\n And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the\nOdyssey\n—the first ship, it\n was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps\n beyond.\n\n\n Cobb was persistent: \"Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.\n What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?\"\nThe guy's drunk\n, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three\n stools down the bar.\n\n\n Cobb followed. \"You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like\n people to call you a sucker.\"", "\"You are spacemen?\"\n\n\n Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. \"Here. Take off, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. \"\nIch danke, senor.\nYou\n know why city is called Hoover City?\"\n\n\n Ben didn't answer.\n\n\n \"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a\n thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,\nmonsieur\n?\"\n\n\n Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.\n\n\n \"\nAi-yee\n, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music.\"\n\n\n The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run.\n Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision.\nYou can do two things\n, he thought.\nYou can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do.\n That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary\n manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in\n prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free.\nBut you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new\n men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class\n jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. You'd", "And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the\n souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their\n headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and\n fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a\n red-bearded giant.\nSo\n, Ben reflected,\nyou can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.\n You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your\n name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your\n duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from\n Earth.\nAfter all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant\n second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?\nHe was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last\n flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new\n personnel even more so.\n\n\n Ben Curtis made it to Venus.", "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered.", "\"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them\n to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be\n pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited\n boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It\ncould\nbe us, you\n know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You\n can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up\n your own.\"\nBen stiffened. \"And that's why you want me for an astrogator.\"\n\n\n Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. \"If you want to come—and if you get\n well.\" She looked at him strangely.\n\n\n \"Suppose—\" He fought to find the right words. \"Suppose I got well and\n decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me\n go?\"", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for\n resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and\n through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.\nThey passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed\n Earthmen—merchant spacemen.\n\n\n They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian\n marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed\n tombstones.\n\n\n Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO\n 2\n -breathing\n Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.\n\n\n They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape.\n They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes\n unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard\n they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised.\n\n\n A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with\n feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained\n undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in\n Ben's direction.\n\n\n \"Curtis!\" one of the policemen yelled. \"You're covered! Hold it!\"\n\n\n Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into\n which the musicians had disappeared.\n\n\n A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air\n escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall\n ahead of him crumbled.\n\n\n He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the\n mildly stunning neuro-clubs.", "He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she\n was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:\n\n\n \"A Space Officer Is Honest\" \"A Space Officer Is Loyal.\" \"A Space\n Officer Is Dutiful.\"\n\n\n Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts,\n mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it\n prisoner for half a million years.\n\n\n Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead,\n would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.", "But he heard someone say, \"Don't try to talk.\" It was the same gentle\n voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. \"Don't talk. Just lie still and\n rest. Everything'll be all right.\"\nEverything all right\n, he thought dimly.\n\n\n There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There\n were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of\n things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen\n mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets\n swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and\n he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach.\n\n\n Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring\n mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears:", "\"You were accepted as junior astrogation officer aboard the\nOdyssey\n.\n You did well on your flight from Roswell to Luna City. In a barroom\n fight in Luna City, you struck and killed a man named Arthur Cobb, a\n pre-fab salesman. You've been charged with second degree murder and\n escape. A reward of 5,000 credits has been offered for your capture.\n You came to Hoover City in the hope of finding a renegade group of\n spacemen who operate beyond Mars. You were looking for them in the\n Blast Inn.\"\n\n\n He gaped incredulously, struggling to rise from his pillows. \"I—don't\n get it.\"\n\n\n \"There are ways of finding out what we want to know. As I told you, we\n have many friends.\"\n\n\n He fell back into his pillows, breathing hard. She rose quickly." ], [ "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run.\n Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision.\nYou can do two things\n, he thought.\nYou can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do.\n That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary\n manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in\n prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free.\nBut you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new\n men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class\n jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. You'd", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A\n door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his\n vision—if he still had vision.\n\n\n \"You're sure?\" the voice persisted.\n\n\n \"I'm sure,\" Ben managed to say.\n\n\n \"I have no antidote. You may die.\"\n\n\n His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection,\n massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain\n within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to\n heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective\n weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender\n at once.\n\n\n \"Anti ... anti ...\" The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced\n from his throat. \"No ... I'm sure ... sure.\"", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised.\n\n\n A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with\n feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained\n undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in\n Ben's direction.\n\n\n \"Curtis!\" one of the policemen yelled. \"You're covered! Hold it!\"\n\n\n Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into\n which the musicians had disappeared.\n\n\n A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air\n escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall\n ahead of him crumbled.\n\n\n He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the\n mildly stunning neuro-clubs.", "He didn't hear the answer or anything else.\nBen Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to\n consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black\n nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.\n\n\n He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,\n hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and\n sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to\n transfer itself to his own body.\n\n\n For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded\n shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way\n to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered\n constantly above him—a face, he supposed.\n\n\n He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was\n a deep, staccato grunting.", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that\n someone had seized it.\n\n\n A soft feminine voice spoke to him. \"You're wounded? They hit you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word.\n\n\n \"You want to escape—even now?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You may die if you don't give yourself up.\"\n\n\n \"No, no.\"\n\n\n He tried to stumble toward the exit.\n\n\n \"All right then. Not that way. Here, this way.\"\n\n\n Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight\n flicked on.", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "\"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them\n to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be\n pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited\n boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It\ncould\nbe us, you\n know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You\n can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up\n your own.\"\nBen stiffened. \"And that's why you want me for an astrogator.\"\n\n\n Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. \"If you want to come—and if you get\n well.\" She looked at him strangely.\n\n\n \"Suppose—\" He fought to find the right words. \"Suppose I got well and\n decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me\n go?\"", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "Another hiss passed his cheek. He was about twelve feet from the exit.\nAnother second\n, his brain screamed.\nJust another second—\nOr would the exits be guarded?\n\n\n He heard the hiss.\n\n\n It hit directly in the small of his back. There was no pain, just a\n slight pricking sensation, like the shallow jab of a needle.\nHe froze as if yanked to a stop by a noose. His body seemed to be\n growing, swelling into balloon proportions. He knew that the tiny\n needle had imbedded itself deep in his flesh, knew that the paralyzing\n mortocain was spreading like icy fire into every fiber and muscle of\n his body.\n\n\n He staggered like a man of stone moving in slow motion. He'd have\n fifteen—maybe twenty—seconds before complete lethargy of mind and\n body overpowered him.\n\n\n In the dark world beyond his fading consciousness, he heard a voice\n yell, \"Turn on the damn lights!\"", "\"You're the one who carried me when I was shot?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n Suddenly he began to cough. Breath came hard. She held the oxygen mask\n in readiness. He shook his head, not wanting it.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he asked again.\n\n\n \"It would be a long story. Perhaps I'll tell you tomorrow.\"\n\n\n A new thought, cloaked in sudden fear, entered his murky consciousness.\n \"Tell me, will—will I be well again? Will I be able to walk?\"\n\n\n He lay back then, panting, exhausted.\n\n\n \"You have nothing to worry about,\" the girl said softly. Her cool hand\n touched his hot forehead. \"Rest. We'll talk later.\"\n\n\n His eyes closed and breath came easier. He slept." ], [ "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys\n Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among\n the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who\n understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the\n U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.\n\n\n And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the\nOdyssey\n—the first ship, it\n was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps\n beyond.\n\n\n Cobb was persistent: \"Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.\n What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?\"\nThe guy's drunk\n, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three\n stools down the bar.\n\n\n Cobb followed. \"You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like\n people to call you a sucker.\"", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the\n souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their\n headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and\n fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a\n red-bearded giant.\nSo\n, Ben reflected,\nyou can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.\n You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your\n name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your\n duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from\n Earth.\nAfter all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant\n second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?\nHe was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last\n flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new\n personnel even more so.\n\n\n Ben Curtis made it to Venus.", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "\"You are spacemen?\"\n\n\n Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. \"Here. Take off, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. \"\nIch danke, senor.\nYou\n know why city is called Hoover City?\"\n\n\n Ben didn't answer.\n\n\n \"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a\n thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,\nmonsieur\n?\"\n\n\n Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.\n\n\n \"\nAi-yee\n, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music.\"\n\n\n The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "\"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them\n to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be\n pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited\n boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It\ncould\nbe us, you\n know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You\n can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up\n your own.\"\nBen stiffened. \"And that's why you want me for an astrogator.\"\n\n\n Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. \"If you want to come—and if you get\n well.\" She looked at him strangely.\n\n\n \"Suppose—\" He fought to find the right words. \"Suppose I got well and\n decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me\n go?\"", "He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run.\n Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision.\nYou can do two things\n, he thought.\nYou can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do.\n That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary\n manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in\n prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free.\nBut you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new\n men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class\n jet-men on beat-up freighters—they don't want convicted killers. You'd", "He didn't hear the answer or anything else.\nBen Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to\n consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black\n nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.\n\n\n He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,\n hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and\n sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to\n transfer itself to his own body.\n\n\n For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded\n shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way\n to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered\n constantly above him—a face, he supposed.\n\n\n He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was\n a deep, staccato grunting.", "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered.", "The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised.\n\n\n A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with\n feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained\n undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in\n Ben's direction.\n\n\n \"Curtis!\" one of the policemen yelled. \"You're covered! Hold it!\"\n\n\n Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into\n which the musicians had disappeared.\n\n\n A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air\n escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall\n ahead of him crumbled.\n\n\n He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the\n mildly stunning neuro-clubs." ], [ "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered.", "\"You are spacemen?\"\n\n\n Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. \"Here. Take off, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. \"\nIch danke, senor.\nYou\n know why city is called Hoover City?\"\n\n\n Ben didn't answer.\n\n\n \"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a\n thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,\nmonsieur\n?\"\n\n\n Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.\n\n\n \"\nAi-yee\n, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music.\"\n\n\n The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for\n their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of\n their\ncirillas\nor crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider\n legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still\n seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and\n forgotten grandeur.", "At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys\n Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among\n the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who\n understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the\n U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.\n\n\n And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the\nOdyssey\n—the first ship, it\n was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps\n beyond.\n\n\n Cobb was persistent: \"Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.\n What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?\"\nThe guy's drunk\n, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three\n stools down the bar.\n\n\n Cobb followed. \"You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like\n people to call you a sucker.\"", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for\n resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and\n through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.\nThey passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed\n Earthmen—merchant spacemen.\n\n\n They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian\n marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed\n tombstones.\n\n\n Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO\n 2\n -breathing\n Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.\n\n\n They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape.\n They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes\n unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard\n they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.", "He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she\n was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:\n\n\n \"A Space Officer Is Honest\" \"A Space Officer Is Loyal.\" \"A Space\n Officer Is Dutiful.\"\n\n\n Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts,\n mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it\n prisoner for half a million years.\n\n\n Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead,\n would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "When he next awoke, his gaze turned first to the window. There was\n light outside, but he had no way of knowing if this was morning, noon\n or afternoon—or on what planet.\n\n\n He saw no white-domed buildings of Hoover City, no formal lines of\n green-treed parks, no streams of buzzing gyro-cars. There was only a\n translucent and infinite whiteness. It was as if the window were set on\n the edge of the Universe overlooking a solemn, silent and matterless\n void.\n\n\n The girl entered the room.\n\n\n \"Hi,\" she said, smiling. The dark half-moons under her eyes were less\n prominent. Her face was relaxed.\n\n\n She increased the pressure in his rubberex pillows and helped him rise\n to a sitting position.\n\n\n \"Where are we?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Venus.\"", "She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. \"I know everything about you,\n Lieutenant Curtis.\"\n\n\n \"How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four,\n you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated\n from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation.\n Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a\n class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in\n History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?\"\n\n\n Fascinated, Ben nodded.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "But he heard someone say, \"Don't try to talk.\" It was the same gentle\n voice he'd heard in the Blast Inn. \"Don't talk. Just lie still and\n rest. Everything'll be all right.\"\nEverything all right\n, he thought dimly.\n\n\n There were long periods of lethargy when he was aware of nothing. There\n were periods of light and of darkness. Gradually he grew aware of\n things. He realized that the soft rubber mouth of a spaceman's oxygen\n mask was clamped over his nose. He felt the heat of electric blankets\n swathed about his body. Occasionally a tube would be in his mouth and\n he would taste liquid food and feel a pleasant warmth in his stomach.\n\n\n Always, it seemed, the face was above him, floating in the obscuring\n mist. Always, it seemed, the soft voice was echoing in his ears:", "And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the\n souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their\n headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and\n fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a\n red-bearded giant.\nSo\n, Ben reflected,\nyou can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.\n You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your\n name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your\n duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from\n Earth.\nAfter all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant\n second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?\nHe was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last\n flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new\n personnel even more so.\n\n\n Ben Curtis made it to Venus.", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of\n faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon\n faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and\n occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a\n face with a red beard.\n\n\n A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of\n a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.\n\n\n He needed help.\n\n\n But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A\n reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The\n Martian kid, perhaps?\n\n\n Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of\n white. He tensed.\n\n\n Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought.", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "\"You were accepted as junior astrogation officer aboard the\nOdyssey\n.\n You did well on your flight from Roswell to Luna City. In a barroom\n fight in Luna City, you struck and killed a man named Arthur Cobb, a\n pre-fab salesman. You've been charged with second degree murder and\n escape. A reward of 5,000 credits has been offered for your capture.\n You came to Hoover City in the hope of finding a renegade group of\n spacemen who operate beyond Mars. You were looking for them in the\n Blast Inn.\"\n\n\n He gaped incredulously, struggling to rise from his pillows. \"I—don't\n get it.\"\n\n\n \"There are ways of finding out what we want to know. As I told you, we\n have many friends.\"\n\n\n He fell back into his pillows, breathing hard. She rose quickly." ], [ "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "\"You are spacemen?\"\n\n\n Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. \"Here. Take off, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. \"\nIch danke, senor.\nYou\n know why city is called Hoover City?\"\n\n\n Ben didn't answer.\n\n\n \"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a\n thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,\nmonsieur\n?\"\n\n\n Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.\n\n\n \"\nAi-yee\n, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music.\"\n\n\n The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for\n resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and\n through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.\nThey passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed\n Earthmen—merchant spacemen.\n\n\n They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian\n marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed\n tombstones.\n\n\n Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO\n 2\n -breathing\n Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.\n\n\n They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape.\n They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes\n unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard\n they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.", "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered.", "The white-clad men charged, neuro-clubs upraised.\n\n\n A woman screamed. The music ceased. The Martian orchestra slunk with\n feline stealth to a rear exit. Only the giant Venusians remained\n undisturbed. They stood unmoving, their staring eyes shifting lazily in\n Ben's direction.\n\n\n \"Curtis!\" one of the policemen yelled. \"You're covered! Hold it!\"\n\n\n Ben whirled away from the advancing police, made for the exit into\n which the musicians had disappeared.\n\n\n A hissing sound traveled past his left ear, a sound like compressed air\n escaping from a container. A dime-sized section of the concrete wall\n ahead of him crumbled.\n\n\n He stumbled forward. They were using deadly neuro-pistols now, not the\n mildly stunning neuro-clubs.", "She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. \"I know everything about you,\n Lieutenant Curtis.\"\n\n\n \"How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four,\n you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated\n from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation.\n Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a\n class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in\n History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?\"\n\n\n Fascinated, Ben nodded.", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of\n faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon\n faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and\n occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a\n face with a red beard.\n\n\n A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of\n a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.\n\n\n He needed help.\n\n\n But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A\n reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The\n Martian kid, perhaps?\n\n\n Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of\n white. He tensed.\n\n\n Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought.", "At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys\n Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among\n the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who\n understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the\n U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.\n\n\n And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the\nOdyssey\n—the first ship, it\n was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps\n beyond.\n\n\n Cobb was persistent: \"Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.\n What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?\"\nThe guy's drunk\n, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three\n stools down the bar.\n\n\n Cobb followed. \"You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like\n people to call you a sucker.\"", "The Martians were fragile, doll-like creatures with heads too large for\n their spindly bodies. Their long fingers played upon the strings of\n their\ncirillas\nor crawled over the holes of their flutes like spider\n legs. Their tune was sad. Even when they played an Earth tune, it still\n seemed a song of old Mars, charged with echoes of lost voices and\n forgotten grandeur.", "And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the\n souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their\n headquarters was Venus. Their leader—a subject of popular and\n fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines—was rumored to be a\n red-bearded giant.\nSo\n, Ben reflected,\nyou can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.\n You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your\n name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your\n duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from\n Earth.\nAfter all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant\n second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?\nHe was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last\n flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new\n personnel even more so.\n\n\n Ben Curtis made it to Venus.", "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"" ], [ "\"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them\n to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be\n pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited\n boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It\ncould\nbe us, you\n know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You\n can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up\n your own.\"\nBen stiffened. \"And that's why you want me for an astrogator.\"\n\n\n Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. \"If you want to come—and if you get\n well.\" She looked at him strangely.\n\n\n \"Suppose—\" He fought to find the right words. \"Suppose I got well and\n decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me\n go?\"", "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "\"We're not in Hoover City?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n He looked at her, wondering. \"You won't tell me?\"\n\n\n \"Not yet. Later, perhaps.\"\n\n\n \"Then how did you get me here? How did we escape from the Inn?\"\nShe shrugged. \"We have friends who can be bribed. A hiding place in the\n city, the use of a small desert-taxi, a pass to leave the city—these\n can be had for a price.\"\n\n\n \"You'll tell me your name?\"\n\n\n \"Maggie.\"\n\n\n \"Why did you save me?\"\n\n\n Her eyes twinkled mischievously. \"Because you're a good astrogator.\"\n\n\n His own eyes widened. \"How did you know that?\"", "\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I shouldn't have told you yet. I felt so happy\n because you're alive. Rest now. We'll talk again soon.\"\n\n\n \"Maggie, you—you said I'd live. You didn't say I'd be able to walk\n again.\"\n\n\n She lowered her gaze. \"I hope you'll be able to.\"\n\n\n \"But you don't think I will, do you?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. We'll try walking tomorrow. Don't think about it now.\n Rest.\"\n\n\n He tried to relax, but his mind was a vortex of conjecture.\n\n\n \"Just one more question,\" he almost whispered.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"The man I killed—did he have a wife?\"", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "He didn't hear the answer or anything else.\nBen Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to\n consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black\n nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.\n\n\n He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,\n hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and\n sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to\n transfer itself to his own body.\n\n\n For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded\n shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way\n to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered\n constantly above him—a face, he supposed.\n\n\n He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was\n a deep, staccato grunting.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. \"I know everything about you,\n Lieutenant Curtis.\"\n\n\n \"How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four,\n you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated\n from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation.\n Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a\n class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in\n History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?\"\n\n\n Fascinated, Ben nodded.", "Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of\n faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon\n faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and\n occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a\n face with a red beard.\n\n\n A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of\n a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.\n\n\n He needed help.\n\n\n But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A\n reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The\n Martian kid, perhaps?\n\n\n Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of\n white. He tensed.\n\n\n Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought.", "Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A\n door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his\n vision—if he still had vision.\n\n\n \"You're sure?\" the voice persisted.\n\n\n \"I'm sure,\" Ben managed to say.\n\n\n \"I have no antidote. You may die.\"\n\n\n His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection,\n massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain\n within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to\n heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective\n weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender\n at once.\n\n\n \"Anti ... anti ...\" The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced\n from his throat. \"No ... I'm sure ... sure.\"", "\"Don't the authorities object?\"\n\n\n \"Not very strongly. The I. B. I. has too many problems right here to\n search the whole System for a few two-bit crooks. Besides, we carry\n cargoes of almost pure uranium and tungsten and all the stuff that's\n scarce on Earth and Mars and Venus. Nobody really cares whether it\n comes from the asteroids or Hades. If we want to risk our lives mining\n it, that's our business.\"\n\n\n She pursed her lips. \"But if they guessed how strong we are or that we\n have friends planted in the I. B. I.—well, things might be different.\n There probably would be a crackdown.\"\n\n\n Ben scowled. \"What happens if there\nis\na crackdown? And what will you\n do when Space Corps ships officially reach the asteroids? They can't\n ignore you then.\"", "\"You are spacemen?\"\n\n\n Ben threw a fifty-cent credit piece on the table. \"Here. Take off, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Spiderlike fingers swept down upon the coin. \"\nIch danke, senor.\nYou\n know why city is called Hoover City?\"\n\n\n Ben didn't answer.\n\n\n \"They say it is because after women come, they want first thing a\n thousand vacuum cleaners for dust. What is vacuum cleaner,\nmonsieur\n?\"\n\n\n Ben raised his hand as if to strike the boy.\n\n\n \"\nAi-yee\n, I go. You keep listen to good Martian music.\"\n\n\n The toothpick of a body melted into the semi-darkness.", "Most of the big room lay obscured behind a shimmering veil of tobacco\n smoke and the sweet, heavy fumes of Martian Devil's Egg. Here and\n there, Ben saw moving figures. He could not tell if they were Earthmen,\n Martians or Venusians.\n\n\n Someone tugged at his greasy coat. He jumped, thinking absurdly that it\n was the dead man's hand.\n\n\n \"\nComa esta, senor?\n\" a small voice piped. \"\nSpeken die Deutsch?\n Desirez-vous d'amour? Da? Nyet?\n\"\n\n\n Ben looked down.\n\n\n The speaker was an eager-eyed Martian boy of about ten. He was like\n a red-skinned marionette with pipestem arms and legs, clad in a torn\n skivvy shirt and faded blue dungarees.\n\n\n \"I'm American,\" Ben muttered." ], [ "The dead man returned to him. Bloodied lips cursed at him. Glassy eyes\n accused him. Somewhere were two lost children crying in the night.\n\n\n And towering above him was a red-bearded man whose great hands reached\n down and beckoned to him. Ben crawled through the night on hands and\n knees, his legs numb and useless. The crying of the children was a\n chilling wail in his ears.\n\n\n His head rose and turned to the red-bearded man. His pleading voice\n screamed out to him in a thick, harsh cackle. Yet even as he screamed,\n the giant disappeared, to be replaced by white-booted feet stomping\n relentlessly toward him.\n\n\n He awoke still screaming....\n\n\n A night without darkness passed. Ben lay waiting for Maggie's return, a\n question already formed in his mind.\n\n\n She came and at once he asked, \"Who is the man with the red beard?\"", "Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror—just as,\n a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.\n\n\n He ran.\nFor some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world\n of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.\n\n\n At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw\n that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the\n city.\n\n\n He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.\n A thousand stars—a thousand motionless balls of silver fire—shone\n above him through Luna City's transparent dome.", "His body was buried now—probably in the silent gray wastes outside\n Luna City. But he'd become a kind of invisible Siamese twin, as much a\n part of Ben as sight in his eyes.\n\n\n Sometimes the image would be shuffling drunkenly beside him, its lips\n spitting whiskey-slurred curses.\n\n\n Again, its face would be a pop-eyed mask of surprise as Ben's fist\n thudded into its jaw. More often, the face would be frozen in the\n whiteness of death. The large eyes would stare. Blood would trickle\n from a corner of the gaping mouth.\n\n\n You can forget a living man. You can defeat him or submit to him or\n ignore him, and the matter is over and done. You can't escape from a\n memory that has burned into your mind.", "He didn't hear the answer or anything else.\nBen Curtis had no precise sensation of awakening. Return to\n consciousness was an intangible evolution from a world of black\n nothingness to a dream-like state of awareness.\n\n\n He felt the pressure of hands on his naked arms and shoulders,\n hands that massaged, manipulated, fought to restore circulation and\n sensitivity. He knew they were strong hands. Their strength seemed to\n transfer itself to his own body.\n\n\n For a long time, he tried to open his eyes. His lids felt welded\n shut. But after a while, they opened. His world of darkness gave way\n to a translucent cloak of mist. A round, featureless shape hovered\n constantly above him—a face, he supposed.\n\n\n He tried to talk. Although his lips moved slightly, the only sound was\n a deep, staccato grunting.", "His gaze shifted to another aisle and another hint of whiteness.\n\n\n And then he saw another and another and another.\n\n\n Each whiteness became brighter and closer, like shrinking spokes of a\n wheel with Ben as their focal point.\nYou idiot! The damned Martian kid! You should have known!\nLight showered the room in a dazzling explosion. Ben, half blinded,\n realized that a broad circle of unshaded globes in the ceiling had been\n turned on.\n\n\n The light washed away the room's strangeness and its air of brooding\n wickedness, revealing drab concrete walls and a debris-strewn floor.\n\n\n Eyes blinked and squinted. There were swift, frightened movements and\n a chorus of angry murmurs. The patrons of the Blast Inn were like\n tatter-clad occupants of a house whose walls have been ripped away.\n\n\n Ben Curtis twisted his lean body erect. His chair tumbled backward,\n falling.", "There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the\n memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him\n as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.\n\n\n But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead\n voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways\n obscure the dead face?\n\n\n So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,\n and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.\n\n\n \"You look for someone,\nsenor\n?\"\n\n\n He jumped. \"Oh. You still here?\"\n\n\n \"\nOui.\n\" The Martian kid grinned, his mouth full of purple teeth. \"I\n keep you company on your first night in Hoover City,\nn'est-ce-pas\n?\"\n\n\n \"This isn't my first night here,\" Ben lied. \"I've been around a while.\"", "Once he spied a white-uniformed officer of Hoover City's Security\n Police. The man was striding down an aisle, idly tapping his neuro-club\n against the stone booths.\nKeep walking\n, Ben told himself.\nYou look the same as anyone else\n here. Keep walking. Look straight ahead.\nThe officer passed. Ben breathed easier.\n\n\n \"Here we are,\nmonsieur\n,\" piped the Martian boy. \"A\ntres\nfine table.\n Close in the shadows.\"\n\n\n Ben winced. How did this kid know he wanted to sit in the shadows?\n Frowning, he sat down—he and the dead man.\n\n\n He listened to the lonely rhythms of the four-piece Martian orchestra.", "She hesitated. He thought,\nDamn it, of all the questions, why did I\n ask that?\nFinally she said, \"He had a wife.\"\n\n\n \"Children?\"\n\n\n \"Two. I don't know their ages.\"\n\n\n She left the room.\nHe sank into the softness of his bed. As he turned over on his side,\n his gaze fell upon an object on a bureau in a far corner of the room.\n\n\n He sat straight up, his chest heaving.\n\n\n The object was a tri-dimensional photo of a rock-faced man in a\n merchant spaceman's uniform. He was a giant of a man with a neatly\n trimmed\nred beard\n!\n\n\n Ben stared at the photo for a long time. At length, he slipped into\n restless sleep. Images of faces and echoes of words spun through his\n brain.", "Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and\n held him there.\n\n\n \"Thas what you are—a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll\n be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!\"\n\n\n Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and\n without warning, it welled up into savage fury.\n\n\n His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked\n horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of\n the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of\n life.\n\n\n He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.\n\n\n Ben knew that he was dead.", "For an instant, Ben's mind rose above the haunting vision of the dead\n man. He thought,\nWhat are they doing here, these Martians? Here, in\n a smoke-filled room under a metalite dome on a dust-covered world?\n Couldn't they have played their music on Mars? Or had they, like me,\n felt the challenge of new worlds?\nHe sobered. It didn't matter. He ordered a whiskey from a Chinese\n waiter. He wet his lips but did not drink. His gaze wandered over the\n faces of the Inn's other occupants.\nYou've got to find him\n, he thought.\nYou've got to find the man with\n the red beard. It's the only way you can escape the dead man.\nThe dead man was real. His name was Cobb. He was stout and flabby and\n about forty and he hated spacemen.", "It had begun a week ago in Luna City. The flight from White Sands had\n been successful. Ben, quietly and moderately, wanted to celebrate.\n He stopped alone in a rocketfront bar for a beer. The man named Cobb\n plopped his portly and unsteady posterior on the stool next to him.\n\n\n \"Spacemen,\" he muttered, \"are getting like flies. Everywhere, all you\n see's spacemen.\"\n\n\n He was a neatly dressed civilian.\n\n\n Ben smiled. \"If it weren't for spacemen, you wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\n \"The name's Cobb.\" The man hiccoughed. \"Spacemen in their white monkey\n suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a\n little tin god.\" He downed a shot of whiskey.", "Hands were guiding him. He was aware of being pushed and pulled. A\n door closed behind him. The glare of the flashlight faded from his\n vision—if he still had vision.\n\n\n \"You're sure?\" the voice persisted.\n\n\n \"I'm sure,\" Ben managed to say.\n\n\n \"I have no antidote. You may die.\"\n\n\n His mind fought to comprehend. With the anti-paralysis injection,\n massage and rest, a man could recover from the effects of mortocain\n within half a day. Without treatment, the paralysis could spread to\n heart and lungs. It could become a paralysis of death. An effective\n weapon: the slightest wound compelled the average criminal to surrender\n at once.\n\n\n \"Anti ... anti ...\" The words were as heavy as blobs of mercury forced\n from his throat. \"No ... I'm sure ... sure.\"", "The boy grabbed his hand. Because Ben could think of no reason for\n resisting, he followed. They plunged into shifting layers of smoke and\n through the drone of alcohol-cracked voices.\nThey passed the bar with its line of lean-featured, slit-eyed\n Earthmen—merchant spacemen.\n\n\n They wormed down a narrow aisle flanked by booths carved from Venusian\n marble that jutted up into the semi-darkness like fog-blanketed\n tombstones.\n\n\n Several times, Ben glimpsed the bulky figures of CO\n 2\n -breathing\n Venusians, the first he'd ever seen.\n\n\n They were smoky gray, scaly, naked giants, toads in human shape.\n They stood solitary and motionless, aloof, their green-lidded eyes\n unblinking. They certainly didn't look like telepaths, as Ben had heard\n they were, but the thought sent a fresh rivulet of fear down his spine.", "Minutes passed. There were two more whiskeys. A ceaseless parade of\n faces broke through the smoky veil that enclosed him—reddish balloon\n faces, scaly reptilian faces, white-skinned, slit-eyed faces, and\n occasionally a white, rouged, powdered face. But nowhere was there a\n face with a red beard.\n\n\n A sense of hopelessness gripped Ben Curtis. Hoover City was but one of\n a dozen cities of Venus. Each had twenty dives such as this.\n\n\n He needed help.\n\n\n But his picture must have been 'scoped to Venusian visiscreens. A\n reward must have been offered for his capture. Whom could he trust? The\n Martian kid, perhaps?\n\n\n Far down the darkened aisle nearest him, his eyes caught a flash of\n white. He tensed.\n\n\n Like the uniform of a Security Policeman, he thought.", "\"Ah,\nbuena\n! I speak English\ntres\nfine,\nsenor\n. I have Martian\n friend, she\ntres\npretty and\ntres\nfat. She weigh almost eighty\n pounds,\nmonsieur\n. I take you to her,\nsi\n?\"\n\n\n Ben shook his head.\nHe thought,\nI don't want your Martian wench. I don't want your opium\n or your Devil's Egg or your Venusian kali. But if you had a drug that'd\n bring a dead man to life, I'd buy and pay with my soul.\n\"It is deal,\nmonsieur\n? Five dollars or twenty\nkeelis\nfor visit\n Martian friend. Maybe you like House of Dreams. For House of Dreams—\"\n\n\n \"I'm not buying.\"\n\n\n The dirty-faced kid shrugged. \"Then I show you to good table,—\ntres\n bien\n. I do not charge you,\nsenor\n.\"", "\"Then we move on. We dream up new gimmicks for our crates and take them\n to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. In time, maybe, we'll be\n pushed out of the System itself. Maybe it won't be the white-suited\n boys who'll make that first hop to the stars. It\ncould\nbe us, you\n know—if we live long enough. But that Asteroid Belt is murder. You\n can't follow the text-book rules of astrogation out there. You make up\n your own.\"\nBen stiffened. \"And that's why you want me for an astrogator.\"\n\n\n Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. \"If you want to come—and if you get\n well.\" She looked at him strangely.\n\n\n \"Suppose—\" He fought to find the right words. \"Suppose I got well and\n decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me\n go?\"", "Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,\n crimson-braided uniform of the\nOdyssey's\njunior astrogation officer.\n He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining\n uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.\n\n\n He'd sought long for that key.\nAt the age of five—perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'\n death in a recent strato-jet crash—he'd spent hours watching the night\n sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground\n his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on\n the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his\n collection of astronomy and rocketry books.", "Another hiss passed his cheek. He was about twelve feet from the exit.\nAnother second\n, his brain screamed.\nJust another second—\nOr would the exits be guarded?\n\n\n He heard the hiss.\n\n\n It hit directly in the small of his back. There was no pain, just a\n slight pricking sensation, like the shallow jab of a needle.\nHe froze as if yanked to a stop by a noose. His body seemed to be\n growing, swelling into balloon proportions. He knew that the tiny\n needle had imbedded itself deep in his flesh, knew that the paralyzing\n mortocain was spreading like icy fire into every fiber and muscle of\n his body.\n\n\n He staggered like a man of stone moving in slow motion. He'd have\n fifteen—maybe twenty—seconds before complete lethargy of mind and\n body overpowered him.\n\n\n In the dark world beyond his fading consciousness, he heard a voice\n yell, \"Turn on the damn lights!\"", "Then a pressure and a coldness were on his left hand. He realized that\n someone had seized it.\n\n\n A soft feminine voice spoke to him. \"You're wounded? They hit you?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" His thick lips wouldn't let go of the word.\n\n\n \"You want to escape—even now?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You may die if you don't give yourself up.\"\n\n\n \"No, no.\"\n\n\n He tried to stumble toward the exit.\n\n\n \"All right then. Not that way. Here, this way.\"\n\n\n Heavy footsteps thudded toward them. A few yards away, a flashlight\n flicked on.", "She sat on a plain chair beside his bed. \"I know everything about you,\n Lieutenant Curtis.\"\n\n\n \"How did you learn my name? I destroyed all my papers—\"\n\n\n \"I know that you're twenty-four. Born July 10, 1971. Orphaned at four,\n you attended Boys Town in the Catskills till you were 19. You graduated\n from the Academy at White Sands last June with a major in Astrogation.\n Your rating for the five-year period was 3.8—the second highest in a\n class of fifty-seven. Your only low mark in the five years was a 3.2 in\n History of Martian Civilization. Want me to go on?\"\n\n\n Fascinated, Ben nodded." ] ]
train	51310	[ "Why didn't Bradley mop up her cell?", "Why was Bradley in the Jug?", "Which of the following didn't O'Leary agree with?", "What seems to be a reason for many being sent to prison?", "What are the tangler fields?", "How did the Block O guards feel about their position?", "Why did Sauer and Flock yell so much?", "Why was O'Leary sharing his concerns with the warden?", "Why was the warden so annoyed with O'Leary?" ]	[ [ "she wanted Mathias to do it for her", "she wanted to start a riot", "she didn't deserve to be in the Jug", "she didn't understand the slang in the command" ], [ "she didn't understand the people she was supposed to be working with", "she wanted to be part of the Civil Service group instead of the laborer group", "she caused a fight in the lunch room", "she believed people should be able to choose their path in life" ], [ "rules are meant to be followed", "the Jug was running as smoothly as it could", "he was meant to be part of the Civil Service group", "having specializations was good for civilization" ], [ "petty theft and small crimes", "rioting over the rules imposed by the government", "conspiracy theorizing", "people resenting the jobs they're assigned" ], [ "a type of uniform meant to keep the inmates secure", "electronic fields in Block O that identify inmates", "replacement for guards in Block O", "electronic fields near the floor to stop prisoners" ], [ "that they could have far worse jobs if they quit", "that it was a fitting position for people like them", "that it wasn't worth it to stay in the job", "honored to be given that role" ], [ "to scare the new Block O prisoners", "they were angry at the system they were a part of", "they were trying to distract the guards ", "they wanted to make Bradley cry" ], [ "he was frustrated with the lack of help he was getting", "he was mad that inmates were playing together", "he was hoping to stop a potential riot", "he thought the prison had a terrible smell" ], [ "O'Leary didn't understand the class system as well as he should", "O'Leary was interrupting his breakfast", "O'Leary was trying to take his job from him", "O'Leary was bothering him with non-warden problems" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. \"Take it easy,\n auntie. Come on, get in your cell.\" He steered her in the right\n direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot.\n \"Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules\n say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She's crying!\" He shook his\n head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry\n in the Greensleeves.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "\"Rest period\" it was called—in the rule book. The inmates had a less\n lovely term for it.\nAt the guard's yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.\n\n\n Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat\n bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields\n had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn't cry out.\n Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed\n the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly, for the eddy\n currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against\n rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge." ], [ "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and\n once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The\n breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever\n known.\n\n\n But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to\n come.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"Rest period\" it was called—in the rule book. The inmates had a less\n lovely term for it.\nAt the guard's yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.\n\n\n Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat\n bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields\n had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn't cry out.\n Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed\n the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly, for the eddy\n currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against\n rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"" ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked." ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in\n every limb and class. In its ten million homes, in its hundreds of\n thousands of public places, the city-state's people shook under the\n impact of the news from the prison.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and\n once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The\n breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever\n known.\n\n\n But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to\n come.", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by\n different names. Old Marquette called it \"the canary;\" Louisiana State\n called it \"the red hats;\" elsewhere it was called \"the hole,\" \"the\n snake pit,\" \"the Klondike.\" When you're in it, you don't much care what\n it is called; it is a place for punishment.\n\n\n And punishment is what you get.\n\n\n Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the\n disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its\n inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of\n its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And\n like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.\n Their names were Sauer and Flock.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain." ], [ "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "\"Rest period\" it was called—in the rule book. The inmates had a less\n lovely term for it.\nAt the guard's yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.\n\n\n Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat\n bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields\n had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn't cry out.\n Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed\n the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly, for the eddy\n currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against\n rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. \"Take it easy,\n auntie. Come on, get in your cell.\" He steered her in the right\n direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot.\n \"Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules\n say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She's crying!\" He shook his\n head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry\n in the Greensleeves.", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame." ], [ "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by\n different names. Old Marquette called it \"the canary;\" Louisiana State\n called it \"the red hats;\" elsewhere it was called \"the hole,\" \"the\n snake pit,\" \"the Klondike.\" When you're in it, you don't much care what\n it is called; it is a place for punishment.\n\n\n And punishment is what you get.\n\n\n Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the\n disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its\n inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of\n its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And\n like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.\n Their names were Sauer and Flock.", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching." ], [ "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by\n different names. Old Marquette called it \"the canary;\" Louisiana State\n called it \"the red hats;\" elsewhere it was called \"the hole,\" \"the\n snake pit,\" \"the Klondike.\" When you're in it, you don't much care what\n it is called; it is a place for punishment.\n\n\n And punishment is what you get.\n\n\n Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the\n disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its\n inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of\n its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And\n like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.\n Their names were Sauer and Flock.", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. \"Take it easy,\n auntie. Come on, get in your cell.\" He steered her in the right\n direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot.\n \"Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules\n say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She's crying!\" He shook his\n head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry\n in the Greensleeves.", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"" ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved." ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over." ] ]
train	51249	[ "Why did the story open the way it did?", "Who is most likely to end up going to Jupiter?", "Which word least describes Charlie?", "What isn't a reason for Ben to want to be a rocketman?", "What isn't a reason that Charlie came to visit?", "Which isn't true?", "Why didn't Laura say yes?", "What isn't true about Charlie?", "What finally helped Ben make his final decision?", "Why did Ben leave with two rings?" ]	[ [ "to show how frustrated he was with space", "because his training was good and bad", "because that was how long he'd been away from Laura", "to describe how torn Ben was in his decisions" ], [ "Mickey", "Dean Dawson", "Ben", "Charlie" ], [ "proud", "sick", "experienced", "regretful" ], [ "he wanted to be the best for Laura", "he wants to travel to unexplored places", "he didn't have family to come home to", "he wanted to be like Stardust Charlie" ], [ "he wanted to convince him to stay on Earth", "he cared for him like a father", "he wanted to celebrate Ben's graduation", "he wanted to say goodbye" ], [ "Stardust Charlie was proud of Ben", "Mickey is jealous of Ben's future job", "Laura was hoping to settle down with Ben", "Ben wants to travel to other planets" ], [ "she isn't interested in marrying Ben", "Mickey wouldn't want that", "she was jealous of Ben's future plans", "she knows he wants to go to space" ], [ "he was a great space traveler ", "he regretted the life he chose", "he drugged himself to watch Ben graduate", "he was sick with lung-rot" ], [ "finding out Charlie was dead", "spending the evening with Laura", "looking at the box Charlie left him", "talking to Dean Dawson on the visiphone" ], [ "to symbolize the life he's giving up", "to represent his marriage to Luna", "to remind him to come home and get married", "to honor Stardust Charlie" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4, 2, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOne man's retreat is another's prison ... and\n \nit takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home!\nForty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's\n been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you\n what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the\n stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing\n fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an\n evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura.\n\n\n Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning....\n\n\n It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos,\n were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and\n laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after\n spawning its first-born.", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "At the dinner table he stared glassily at nothing and grated, \"Only hit\n Mars once, but I'll never forget the kid who called himself a medic.\n Skipper started coughing, kept it up for three days. Whoopin' cough,\n the medic says, not knowin' the air had chemicals that turned to acid\n in your lungs. I'd never been to Mars before, but I knew better'n that.\n Hell, I says, that ain't whoopin' cough, that's lung-rot.\"\n\n\n That was when your father said he wasn't so hungry after all.\n\n\n Afterward, you and I walked onto the terrace, into the moonlit night,\n to watch for crimson-tailed continental rockets that occasionally\n streaked up from White Sands.", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "There was silence.\n\n\n You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were\n flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the\n feeling that I shouldn't have come here.\n\n\n You kept looking at me until I had to ask: \"What are you thinking,\n Laura?\"\n\n\n You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. \"No, I shouldn't be\n thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that.\"\n\n\n \"I could never hate you.\"\n\n\n \"It—it's about the stars,\" you said very softly. \"I understand why you\n want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were\n kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I\n dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I\n lived for months, just thinking about it.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, \"Sure,\n I'll stay, Mickey. Sure.\"\nForty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the\n little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying\n down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to\n teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon\n and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and\n promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted.\n\n\n One morning I thought,\nWhy must I make a choice? Why can't I have both\n you and the stars? Would that be asking too much?\nAll day the thought lay in my mind like fire.\n\n\n That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: \"Laura, I\n want you to be my wife.\"", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions—a few wrinkled\n photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god,\n a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol.\nThis was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space.\n It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters\n instead of children, a medal instead of a home.\nIt'd be a great future\n, I thought.\nYou'd dream of sitting in a dingy\n stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky,\n stinking candles. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls\n with dirty feet for company. And a sudden cough that would be the first\n sign of lung-rot.\nTo hell with it!\n\n\n I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visiphone.", "For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class\n of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.\n\n\n The\nfirst\ngraduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important,\n because we were the\nfirst\n.\n\n\n We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach\n of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New\n Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and\n grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time\n ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken\n wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had\n never really existed.\n\n\n But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us\n with pride in their eyes.", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "I stared almost rudely. You were like a doll lost in the immensity\n of your fluffy pink dress. Your hair was long and transformed into a\n golden froth where sunlight touched it. But your eyes were the eyes\n of a woman, glowing like dark stars and reflecting a softness, a\n gentleness that I'd never seen in eyes before.\n\n\n \"I'm happy to meet you, Ben,\" you said. \"I've heard of no one else for\n the past year.\"\n\n\n A tide of heat crept up from my collar. I stuttered through an\n introduction of Charlie.\n\n\n You and Mickey looked strangely at Charlie, and I realized that old\n Stardust was not a cadet's notion of the ideal spaceman. Charlie\n scorned the skin-tight uniforms of the government service and wore a\n shiny black suit that was a relic of Everson's early-day Moon Patrol.\n His tie was clumsily knotted, and a button on his coat was missing.", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"" ], [ "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that\n I'd never noticed before.\nYou can go into space\n, I thought,\nand try to do as much living in\n ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died\n in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie\n buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like\n Charlie—a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally\n alone, never finding a home.\nOr there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth\n in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with\n a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow\n old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who\n fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous\n dust.\n\"I'm sorry,\" you said. \"I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben.\"", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "\"Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't\n you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?\"\n\n\n Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears\n glittering in your eyes.\n\n\n \"Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened\n on the\nCyclops\n. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was\n flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The\n men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it\n was—\"\n\n\n \"I know, Laura. Don't say it.\"\n\n\n You had to finish. \"It was a monster.\"", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. \"... these boys have worked\n hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things.\n They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately\n need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land\n that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most\n important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up\n at them and feel humility—for mankind needs humility.\"\n\n\n The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on\n Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and\n who had just returned from his second hop to Venus.", "\"No. I got a couple of possibilities. Could get a berth on the\nOdyssey\n, the new ship being finished at Los Angeles. They want me,\n too, for the Moon Patrol, but that's old stuff, not much better than\n teaching. I want to be in deep space.\"\n\n\n \"Well, how about staying with us till you decide? Might as well enjoy\n Earth life while you can. Okay?\"\n\n\n I felt like running from the house, to forget that it existed. I wanted\n someone to tell me one of the old stories about space, a tale of\n courage that would put fuel on dying dreams.\n\n\n But I wanted, also, to be with you, Laura, to see your smile and the\n flecks of silver in your eyes and the way your nose turned upward ever\n so slightly when you laughed. You see, I loved you already, almost as\n much as I loved the stars.", "\"One summer we went. I had fun. I saw the old buildings and castles,\n and the spaceports and the Channel Tube. But after it was over, I\n realized England wasn't so different from America. Places seem exciting\n before you get to them, and afterward they're not really.\"\n\n\n I frowned. \"And you mean it might be the same with the stars? You think\n maybe I haven't grown up yet?\"\n\n\n Anxiety darkened your features. \"No, it'd be good to be a spaceman,\n to see the strange places and make history. But is it worth it? Is it\n worth the things you'd have to give up?\"\n\n\n I didn't understand at first, and I wanted to ask, \"Give up\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n Then I looked at you and the promise in your eyes, and I knew.\n\n\n All through the years I'd been walking down a single, narrow path.", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class\n of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.\n\n\n The\nfirst\ngraduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important,\n because we were the\nfirst\n.\n\n\n We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach\n of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New\n Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and\n grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time\n ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken\n wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had\n never really existed.\n\n\n But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us\n with pride in their eyes.", "Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions—a few wrinkled\n photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god,\n a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol.\nThis was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space.\n It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters\n instead of children, a medal instead of a home.\nIt'd be a great future\n, I thought.\nYou'd dream of sitting in a dingy\n stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky,\n stinking candles. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls\n with dirty feet for company. And a sudden cough that would be the first\n sign of lung-rot.\nTo hell with it!\n\n\n I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visiphone.", "There was silence.\n\n\n You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were\n flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the\n feeling that I shouldn't have come here.\n\n\n You kept looking at me until I had to ask: \"What are you thinking,\n Laura?\"\n\n\n You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. \"No, I shouldn't be\n thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that.\"\n\n\n \"I could never hate you.\"\n\n\n \"It—it's about the stars,\" you said very softly. \"I understand why you\n want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were\n kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I\n dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I\n lived for months, just thinking about it.", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "I tried to laugh. \"You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie.\"\n\n\n He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. \"Maybe. Anyway, I'm\n gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell\n you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just\n off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a\n look inside. I'll probably be there.\"\n\n\n He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears.\n\n\n \"Not used to this Earth air,\" he muttered. \"What I need's some Martian\n climate.\"\n\n\n Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered,\n too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were\n drugged.", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"" ], [ "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "\"Sure,\" I said to Mickey, \"we can still have a good weekend.\"\nI liked your folks, Laura. There was no star-hunger in them, of course.\n They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things,\n deep-rooted, belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was\n cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional\n video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or\n housework.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sand-monkey in a\n shower, but he tried courageously to be himself.", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster.", "I stared almost rudely. You were like a doll lost in the immensity\n of your fluffy pink dress. Your hair was long and transformed into a\n golden froth where sunlight touched it. But your eyes were the eyes\n of a woman, glowing like dark stars and reflecting a softness, a\n gentleness that I'd never seen in eyes before.\n\n\n \"I'm happy to meet you, Ben,\" you said. \"I've heard of no one else for\n the past year.\"\n\n\n A tide of heat crept up from my collar. I stuttered through an\n introduction of Charlie.\n\n\n You and Mickey looked strangely at Charlie, and I realized that old\n Stardust was not a cadet's notion of the ideal spaceman. Charlie\n scorned the skin-tight uniforms of the government service and wore a\n shiny black suit that was a relic of Everson's early-day Moon Patrol.\n His tie was clumsily knotted, and a button on his coat was missing.", "And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the\n result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so\n accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them; but others, I\n knew, would find them ugly.\n\n\n You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: \"It's a privilege to\n meet you, Charlie. Just think—one of Everson's men, one of the first\n to reach the Moon!\"\n\n\n Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: \"Still going to spend the\n weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're\n planning to see the town tonight.\"", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "I tried to laugh. \"You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie.\"\n\n\n He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. \"Maybe. Anyway, I'm\n gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell\n you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just\n off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a\n look inside. I'll probably be there.\"\n\n\n He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears.\n\n\n \"Not used to this Earth air,\" he muttered. \"What I need's some Martian\n climate.\"\n\n\n Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered,\n too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were\n drugged.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about\n going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna.\n\n\n We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I.\n\n\n \"When will you be back?\" you asked.\n\n\n Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. \"Maybe a\n couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen.\"\n\n\n Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man.\n\n\n I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill\n the doubt worming through my brain.", "Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why. He was a\n veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years\n ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the\nLunar\n Lady\n, a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White\n Sands.\n\n\n I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island\n Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like\n me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I\n remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet.\n\n\n My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It\n wasn't surprising. The\nLunar Lady\nwas in White Sands now, but\n liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars.\nIt doesn't matter\n, I told myself.", "Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions—a few wrinkled\n photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god,\n a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol.\nThis was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space.\n It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters\n instead of children, a medal instead of a home.\nIt'd be a great future\n, I thought.\nYou'd dream of sitting in a dingy\n stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky,\n stinking candles. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls\n with dirty feet for company. And a sudden cough that would be the first\n sign of lung-rot.\nTo hell with it!\n\n\n I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visiphone.", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"" ], [ "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that\n I'd never noticed before.\nYou can go into space\n, I thought,\nand try to do as much living in\n ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died\n in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie\n buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like\n Charlie—a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally\n alone, never finding a home.\nOr there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth\n in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with\n a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow\n old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who\n fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous\n dust.\n\"I'm sorry,\" you said. \"I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben.\"", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face\n flushed.\n\n\n Then you murmured, \"I—I want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me\n to marry a spaceman or a teacher?\"\n\n\n \"Can't a spaceman marry, too?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't you see,\n Ben? You'd be like Charlie. Gone for\nmaybe\ntwo months,\nmaybe\ntwo\n years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty—and I'd have what?\"\n\n\n Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. \"I wouldn't\n have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years,\n then teach.\"", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "\"Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't\n you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?\"\n\n\n Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears\n glittering in your eyes.\n\n\n \"Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened\n on the\nCyclops\n. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was\n flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The\n men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it\n was—\"\n\n\n \"I know, Laura. Don't say it.\"\n\n\n You had to finish. \"It was a monster.\"", "Then Mickey stiffened. \"I see 'em, Ben! There in the fifth row!\"\n\n\n Usually Mickey was the same whether in a furnace-hot engine room or a\n garden party, smiling, accepting whatever the world offered. But now a\n tenseness and an excitement had gripped even him. I was grateful that\n he was beside me; we'd been a good team during those final months at\n the Academy and I knew we'd be a good team in space. The Universe was\n mighty big, but with two of us to face it together, it would be only\n half as big.", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. \"... these boys have worked\n hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things.\n They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately\n need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land\n that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most\n important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up\n at them and feel humility—for mankind needs humility.\"\n\n\n The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on\n Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and\n who had just returned from his second hop to Venus.", "\"One summer we went. I had fun. I saw the old buildings and castles,\n and the spaceports and the Channel Tube. But after it was over, I\n realized England wasn't so different from America. Places seem exciting\n before you get to them, and afterward they're not really.\"\n\n\n I frowned. \"And you mean it might be the same with the stars? You think\n maybe I haven't grown up yet?\"\n\n\n Anxiety darkened your features. \"No, it'd be good to be a spaceman,\n to see the strange places and make history. But is it worth it? Is it\n worth the things you'd have to give up?\"\n\n\n I didn't understand at first, and I wanted to ask, \"Give up\nwhat\n?\"\n\n\n Then I looked at you and the promise in your eyes, and I knew.\n\n\n All through the years I'd been walking down a single, narrow path.", "\"No. I got a couple of possibilities. Could get a berth on the\nOdyssey\n, the new ship being finished at Los Angeles. They want me,\n too, for the Moon Patrol, but that's old stuff, not much better than\n teaching. I want to be in deep space.\"\n\n\n \"Well, how about staying with us till you decide? Might as well enjoy\n Earth life while you can. Okay?\"\n\n\n I felt like running from the house, to forget that it existed. I wanted\n someone to tell me one of the old stories about space, a tale of\n courage that would put fuel on dying dreams.\n\n\n But I wanted, also, to be with you, Laura, to see your smile and the\n flecks of silver in your eyes and the way your nose turned upward ever\n so slightly when you laughed. You see, I loved you already, almost as\n much as I loved the stars.", "But he rounded a corner, still grinning and waving, and then he was\n gone.\nThat afternoon Mickey showed me his room. It was more like a boy's\n room than a spaceman's. In it were all the little things that kids\n treasure—pennants, models of Everson's two ships, a tennis trophy,\n books, a home-made video.\n\n\n I began to realize how important a room like this could be to a boy.\n I could imagine, too, the happiness that parents felt as they watched\n their children grow to adulthood.", "Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why. He was a\n veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years\n ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the\nLunar\n Lady\n, a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White\n Sands.\n\n\n I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island\n Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like\n me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I\n remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet.\n\n\n My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It\n wasn't surprising. The\nLunar Lady\nwas in White Sands now, but\n liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars.\nIt doesn't matter\n, I told myself.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"" ], [ "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "I tried to laugh. \"You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie.\"\n\n\n He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. \"Maybe. Anyway, I'm\n gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell\n you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just\n off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a\n look inside. I'll probably be there.\"\n\n\n He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears.\n\n\n \"Not used to this Earth air,\" he muttered. \"What I need's some Martian\n climate.\"\n\n\n Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered,\n too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were\n drugged.", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster.", "I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about\n going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna.\n\n\n We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I.\n\n\n \"When will you be back?\" you asked.\n\n\n Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. \"Maybe a\n couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen.\"\n\n\n Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man.\n\n\n I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill\n the doubt worming through my brain.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why. He was a\n veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years\n ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the\nLunar\n Lady\n, a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White\n Sands.\n\n\n I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island\n Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like\n me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I\n remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet.\n\n\n My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It\n wasn't surprising. The\nLunar Lady\nwas in White Sands now, but\n liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars.\nIt doesn't matter\n, I told myself.", "And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the\n result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so\n accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them; but others, I\n knew, would find them ugly.\n\n\n You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: \"It's a privilege to\n meet you, Charlie. Just think—one of Everson's men, one of the first\n to reach the Moon!\"\n\n\n Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: \"Still going to spend the\n weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're\n planning to see the town tonight.\"", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "\"Sure,\" I said to Mickey, \"we can still have a good weekend.\"\nI liked your folks, Laura. There was no star-hunger in them, of course.\n They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things,\n deep-rooted, belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was\n cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional\n video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or\n housework.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sand-monkey in a\n shower, but he tried courageously to be himself.", "Then, finally, I fingered his meager possessions—a few wrinkled\n photos, some letters, a small black statue of a forgotten Martian god,\n a gold service medal from the Moon Patrol.\nThis was what remained of Charlie after twenty-five years in space.\n It was a bitter bargain. A statue instead of a wife, yellowed letters\n instead of children, a medal instead of a home.\nIt'd be a great future\n, I thought.\nYou'd dream of sitting in a dingy\n stone dive on the Grand Canal with sand-wasps buzzing around smoky,\n stinking candles. A bottle of luchu juice and a couple of Martian girls\n with dirty feet for company. And a sudden cough that would be the first\n sign of lung-rot.\nTo hell with it!\n\n\n I walked into your living room and called Dean Dawson on the visiphone." ], [ "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "At the dinner table he stared glassily at nothing and grated, \"Only hit\n Mars once, but I'll never forget the kid who called himself a medic.\n Skipper started coughing, kept it up for three days. Whoopin' cough,\n the medic says, not knowin' the air had chemicals that turned to acid\n in your lungs. I'd never been to Mars before, but I knew better'n that.\n Hell, I says, that ain't whoopin' cough, that's lung-rot.\"\n\n\n That was when your father said he wasn't so hungry after all.\n\n\n Afterward, you and I walked onto the terrace, into the moonlit night,\n to watch for crimson-tailed continental rockets that occasionally\n streaked up from White Sands.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "There was silence.\n\n\n You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were\n flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the\n feeling that I shouldn't have come here.\n\n\n You kept looking at me until I had to ask: \"What are you thinking,\n Laura?\"\n\n\n You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. \"No, I shouldn't be\n thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that.\"\n\n\n \"I could never hate you.\"\n\n\n \"It—it's about the stars,\" you said very softly. \"I understand why you\n want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were\n kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I\n dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I\n lived for months, just thinking about it.", "But he rounded a corner, still grinning and waving, and then he was\n gone.\nThat afternoon Mickey showed me his room. It was more like a boy's\n room than a spaceman's. In it were all the little things that kids\n treasure—pennants, models of Everson's two ships, a tennis trophy,\n books, a home-made video.\n\n\n I began to realize how important a room like this could be to a boy.\n I could imagine, too, the happiness that parents felt as they watched\n their children grow to adulthood.", "I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about\n going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna.\n\n\n We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I.\n\n\n \"When will you be back?\" you asked.\n\n\n Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. \"Maybe a\n couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen.\"\n\n\n Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man.\n\n\n I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill\n the doubt worming through my brain.", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, \"Sure,\n I'll stay, Mickey. Sure.\"\nForty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the\n little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying\n down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to\n teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon\n and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and\n promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted.\n\n\n One morning I thought,\nWhy must I make a choice? Why can't I have both\n you and the stars? Would that be asking too much?\nAll day the thought lay in my mind like fire.\n\n\n That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: \"Laura, I\n want you to be my wife.\"", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster.", "For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class\n of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.\n\n\n The\nfirst\ngraduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important,\n because we were the\nfirst\n.\n\n\n We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach\n of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New\n Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and\n grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time\n ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken\n wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had\n never really existed.\n\n\n But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us\n with pride in their eyes.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"" ], [ "And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, \"Sure,\n I'll stay, Mickey. Sure.\"\nForty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the\n little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying\n down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to\n teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon\n and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and\n promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted.\n\n\n One morning I thought,\nWhy must I make a choice? Why can't I have both\n you and the stars? Would that be asking too much?\nAll day the thought lay in my mind like fire.\n\n\n That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: \"Laura, I\n want you to be my wife.\"", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "There was silence.\n\n\n You were lovely, your soft hair like strands of gold, and there were\n flecks of silver in your dark eyes. Somehow I was afraid. I had the\n feeling that I shouldn't have come here.\n\n\n You kept looking at me until I had to ask: \"What are you thinking,\n Laura?\"\n\n\n You laughed, but it was a sad, fearful laugh. \"No, I shouldn't be\n thinking it. You'd hate me if I told you, and I wouldn't want that.\"\n\n\n \"I could never hate you.\"\n\n\n \"It—it's about the stars,\" you said very softly. \"I understand why you\n want to go to them. Mickey and I used to dream about them when we were\n kids. Of course I was a girl, so it was just a game to me. But once I\n dreamed of going to England. Oh, it was going to be so wonderful. I\n lived for months, just thinking about it.", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "\"No. I got a couple of possibilities. Could get a berth on the\nOdyssey\n, the new ship being finished at Los Angeles. They want me,\n too, for the Moon Patrol, but that's old stuff, not much better than\n teaching. I want to be in deep space.\"\n\n\n \"Well, how about staying with us till you decide? Might as well enjoy\n Earth life while you can. Okay?\"\n\n\n I felt like running from the house, to forget that it existed. I wanted\n someone to tell me one of the old stories about space, a tale of\n courage that would put fuel on dying dreams.\n\n\n But I wanted, also, to be with you, Laura, to see your smile and the\n flecks of silver in your eyes and the way your nose turned upward ever\n so slightly when you laughed. You see, I loved you already, almost as\n much as I loved the stars.", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"", "\"Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't\n you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?\"\n\n\n Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears\n glittering in your eyes.\n\n\n \"Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened\n on the\nCyclops\n. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was\n flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The\n men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it\n was—\"\n\n\n \"I know, Laura. Don't say it.\"\n\n\n You had to finish. \"It was a monster.\"", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "\"Sure,\" I said to Mickey, \"we can still have a good weekend.\"\nI liked your folks, Laura. There was no star-hunger in them, of course.\n They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things,\n deep-rooted, belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was\n cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional\n video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or\n housework.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sand-monkey in a\n shower, but he tried courageously to be himself.", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face\n flushed.\n\n\n Then you murmured, \"I—I want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me\n to marry a spaceman or a teacher?\"\n\n\n \"Can't a spaceman marry, too?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't you see,\n Ben? You'd be like Charlie. Gone for\nmaybe\ntwo months,\nmaybe\ntwo\n years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty—and I'd have what?\"\n\n\n Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. \"I wouldn't\n have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years,\n then teach.\"", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nOne man's retreat is another's prison ... and\n \nit takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home!\nForty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's\n been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you\n what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the\n stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing\n fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an\n evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura.\n\n\n Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning....\n\n\n It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos,\n were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and\n laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after\n spawning its first-born.", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster." ], [ "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "But he wasn't the Charlie I'd seen a year ago. He'd become gaunt and\n old, and he walked with an unnatural stiffness. He looked so old that\n it was hard to believe he'd once been young.\n\n\n He scratched his mop of steel-gray hair and grinned.\n\n\n \"You made it, boy,\" he chortled, \"and by Jupiter, we'll celebrate\n tonight. Yes, siree, I got twenty-four hours, and we'll celebrate as\n good spacemen should!\"\n\n\n Then Mickey strode up to us. He was his normal, boyish self again,\n walking lightly, his blond, curly-haired skull swaying as if in rhythm\n with some silent melody.\n\n\n And you, Laura, were with him.\n\n\n \"Meet the Brat,\" he said. \"My sister Laura.\"", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "I tried to laugh. \"You're good for another twenty-five years, Charlie.\"\n\n\n He shook his head stiffly, staring at nothing. \"Maybe. Anyway, I'm\n gonna get off the Shuttle this time, make one more trip to Mars. Tell\n you what. There's a little stone cafe on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just\n off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal. When you get to Mars, take a\n look inside. I'll probably be there.\"\n\n\n He coughed again, a deep, rasping cough that filled his eyes with tears.\n\n\n \"Not used to this Earth air,\" he muttered. \"What I need's some Martian\n climate.\"\n\n\n Suddenly that cough frightened me. It didn't seem normal. I wondered,\n too, about his stiff movements and glassy stare. It was as if he were\n drugged.", "We gazed for a few seconds up into the dark sky, and then you said:\n \"Charlie is funny, isn't he? He's nice and I'm glad he's here, but he's\n sort of funny.\"\n\n\n \"He's an old-time spaceman. You didn't need much education in those\n days, just a lot of brawn and a quick mind. It took guts to be a\n spaceman then.\"\n\n\n \"But he wasn't always a spaceman. Didn't he ever have a family?\"\n\n\n I smiled and shook my head. \"If he had, he never mentioned it. Charlie\n doesn't like to be sentimental, at least not on the outside. As far as\n I know, his life began when he took off for the Moon with Everson.\"\n\n\n You stared at me strangely, almost in a sacred kind of way. I knew\n suddenly that you liked me, and my heart began to beat faster.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "I shook the thought away. If Charlie was sick, he wouldn't talk about\n going to Mars. The medics wouldn't let him go even as far as Luna.\n\n\n We watched him leave, you and Mickey and I.\n\n\n \"When will you be back?\" you asked.\n\n\n Charlie's hard face contorted itself into a gargoylish grin. \"Maybe a\n couple of months, maybe a couple of years. You know spacemen.\"\n\n\n Then he waved and strode away, a strange, gray, withered gnome of a man.\n\n\n I wanted him to say something, to tell me the secret that would kill\n the doubt worming through my brain.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "Stardust Charlie, we called him, although I never knew why. He was a\n veteran of Everson's first trip to the Moon nearly twenty-five years\n ago, and he was still at it. He was Chief Jetman now on the\nLunar\n Lady\n, a commercial ore ship on a shuttle between Luna City and White\n Sands.\n\n\n I remembered how, as a kid, I'd pestered him in the Long Island\n Spaceport, tagging after him like a puppy, and how he'd grown to like\n me until he became father, mother, and buddy all in one to me. And I\n remembered, too, how his recommendation had finally made me a cadet.\n\n\n My gaze wandered over the faces, but I couldn't find Charlie's. It\n wasn't surprising. The\nLunar Lady\nwas in White Sands now, but\n liberties, as Charlie said, were as scarce as water on Mars.\nIt doesn't matter\n, I told myself.", "\"Sure,\" I said to Mickey, \"we can still have a good weekend.\"\nI liked your folks, Laura. There was no star-hunger in them, of course.\n They were simple and solid and settled, like green growing things,\n deep-rooted, belonging to Earth. They were content with a home that was\n cool on this warm summer night, with a 'copter and a tri-dimensional\n video, and a handsome automatic home that needed no servants or\n housework.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie was as comfortable as a Martian sand-monkey in a\n shower, but he tried courageously to be himself.", "And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the\n result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so\n accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them; but others, I\n knew, would find them ugly.\n\n\n You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: \"It's a privilege to\n meet you, Charlie. Just think—one of Everson's men, one of the first\n to reach the Moon!\"\n\n\n Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: \"Still going to spend the\n weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're\n planning to see the town tonight.\"", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "I stared almost rudely. You were like a doll lost in the immensity\n of your fluffy pink dress. Your hair was long and transformed into a\n golden froth where sunlight touched it. But your eyes were the eyes\n of a woman, glowing like dark stars and reflecting a softness, a\n gentleness that I'd never seen in eyes before.\n\n\n \"I'm happy to meet you, Ben,\" you said. \"I've heard of no one else for\n the past year.\"\n\n\n A tide of heat crept up from my collar. I stuttered through an\n introduction of Charlie.\n\n\n You and Mickey looked strangely at Charlie, and I realized that old\n Stardust was not a cadet's notion of the ideal spaceman. Charlie\n scorned the skin-tight uniforms of the government service and wore a\n shiny black suit that was a relic of Everson's early-day Moon Patrol.\n His tie was clumsily knotted, and a button on his coat was missing.", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"" ], [ "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that\n I'd never noticed before.\nYou can go into space\n, I thought,\nand try to do as much living in\n ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died\n in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie\n buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like\n Charlie—a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally\n alone, never finding a home.\nOr there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth\n in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with\n a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow\n old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who\n fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous\n dust.\n\"I'm sorry,\" you said. \"I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben.\"", "Then Mickey stiffened. \"I see 'em, Ben! There in the fifth row!\"\n\n\n Usually Mickey was the same whether in a furnace-hot engine room or a\n garden party, smiling, accepting whatever the world offered. But now a\n tenseness and an excitement had gripped even him. I was grateful that\n he was beside me; we'd been a good team during those final months at\n the Academy and I knew we'd be a good team in space. The Universe was\n mighty big, but with two of us to face it together, it would be only\n half as big.", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "And I said, slowly, my voice sounding unfamiliar and far away, \"Sure,\n I'll stay, Mickey. Sure.\"\nForty days of joy, forty nights of fear and indecision. We did all the\n little things, like watching the rockets land at White Sands and flying\n down to the Gulf to swim in cool waters. You tried, unsuccessfully, to\n teach me to dance, and we talked about Everson and Charlie and the Moon\n and the stars. You felt you had to give the stars all the beauty and\n promise of a child's dream, because you knew that was what I wanted.\n\n\n One morning I thought,\nWhy must I make a choice? Why can't I have both\n you and the stars? Would that be asking too much?\nAll day the thought lay in my mind like fire.\n\n\n That evening I asked you to marry me. I said it very simply: \"Laura, I\n want you to be my wife.\"", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "\"Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't\n you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?\"\n\n\n Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears\n glittering in your eyes.\n\n\n \"Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened\n on the\nCyclops\n. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was\n flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The\n men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it\n was—\"\n\n\n \"I know, Laura. Don't say it.\"\n\n\n You had to finish. \"It was a monster.\"", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"", "You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face\n flushed.\n\n\n Then you murmured, \"I—I want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me\n to marry a spaceman or a teacher?\"\n\n\n \"Can't a spaceman marry, too?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't you see,\n Ben? You'd be like Charlie. Gone for\nmaybe\ntwo months,\nmaybe\ntwo\n years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty—and I'd have what?\"\n\n\n Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. \"I wouldn't\n have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years,\n then teach.\"", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "Do you know\nwhy\nhe wanted to reach Mars? Do you know why he didn't\n want to die in the clean, cool air of Earth?\n\n\n It was because he wanted to die nearer home. His home, Laura, was the\n Universe, where the ship was his house, the crew his father, mother,\n brothers, the planets his children.\n\n\n You say that the beauty of the other side of the mountain vanishes\n after you reach it. But how can one ever be\nsure\nuntil the journey is\n made? Could I or Charlie or the thousand before us bear to look upon a\n star and think,\nI might have gone there; I could have been the first\n?\n\n\n We said, too, that the life of a spaceman is lonely. Yet how could one\n be lonely when men like Charlie roam the spaceways?" ], [ "Charlie wanted me to himself that night after graduation. He wanted us\n to celebrate as spacemen should, for he knew that this would be his\n last night on Earth. It might have seemed an ugly kind of celebration\n to you, but he wanted it with all his heart, and we robbed him of it.\n\n\n Because of these things, Laura, I will be gone in the morning. Explain\n the best you can to Mickey and to your parents and Dean Dawson.\n\n\n Right now I've got a date that I'm going to keep—at a dingy stone cafe\n on Mars, the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand Canal.\n\n\n Stardust Charlie will be there; he'll go with me in memory to whatever\n part of the Galaxy I may live to reach. And so will you, Laura.\n\n\n I have two wedding rings with me—his wife's ring and yours.", "I accepted that job teaching.\nAnd now, Laura, it's nearly midnight. You're in your room, sleeping,\n and the house is silent.\n\n\n It's hard to tell you, to make you understand, and that is why I am\n writing this.\n\n\n I looked through Charlie's box again, more carefully this time, reading\n the old letters and studying the photographs. I believe now that\n Charlie sensed my indecision, that he left these things so that they\n could tell me what he could not express in words.\n\n\n And among the things, Laura, I found a ring.\n\n\n A wedding ring.", "In that past he never talked about, there was a woman—his wife.\n Charlie was young once, his eyes full of dreams, and he faced the same\n decision that I am facing. Two paths were before him, but he tried to\n travel both. He later learned what we already know—that there can be\n no compromise. And you know, too, which path he finally chose.\n\n\n Do you know why he had to drug himself to watch me graduate? So he\n could look at me, knowing that I would see the worlds he could never\n live to see. Charlie didn't leave just a few trinkets behind him. He\n left himself, Laura, for he showed me that a boy's dream can also be a\n man's dream.\n\n\n He made his last trip to Luna when he knew he was going to die. Heaven\n knows how he escaped a checkup. Maybe the captain understood and was\n kind—but that doesn't matter now.", "\"I've thought about it a long time. They want me for Cargo Supervisor\n of White Sands Port.\" He raised his hand to stop me. \"I know. It's not\n so exciting. I'll just live a lot longer. I'm sorry, Ben.\"\n\n\n I couldn't answer. It was as if someone had whacked the back of my\n knees with the blast of a jet.\n\n\n \"It doesn't change anything, Ben—right now, I mean. We can still have\n a good weekend.\"\n\n\n Charlie was muttering under his breath, smoldering like a bomb about to\n reach critical mass. I shook my head dazedly at him as we got to the\n 'copter.", "Now I'd stumbled into a cross-roads, beholding a strange new path that\n I'd never noticed before.\nYou can go into space\n, I thought,\nand try to do as much living in\n ten years as normal men do in fifty. You can be like Everson, who died\n in a Moon crash at the age of 36, or like a thousand others who lie\n buried in Martian sand and Venusian dust. Or, if you're lucky, like\n Charlie—a kind of human meteor streaking through space, eternally\n alone, never finding a home.\nOr there's the other path. To stay on this little prison of an Earth\n in cool, comfortable houses. To be one of the solid, rooted people with\n a wife and kids. To be one of the people who live long enough to grow\n old, who awake to the song of birds instead of rocket grumblings, who\n fill their lungs with the clean rich air of Earth instead of poisonous\n dust.\n\"I'm sorry,\" you said. \"I didn't mean to make you sad, Ben.\"", "\"Why don't you both come with us?\" you asked. \"Our folks have their\n own plane, so it would be no problem. And we've got a big guest room.\n Charlie, wouldn't you like a home-cooked meal before going back to the\n Moon?\"\n\n\n Charlie's answer was obscured by a sudden burst of coughing. I knew\n that he'd infinitely prefer to spend his liberty sampling Martian\n fizzes and Plutonian zombies.\n\n\n But this night seemed too sacred for Charlie's kind of celebration.\n\n\n \"We'd really like to come,\" I said.\nOn our way to the 'copter parking field, Dean Dawson passed us. He was\n a tall, willowy man, spectacled, looking the way an academy professor\n should look.\n\n\n \"Ben,\" he called, \"don't forget that offer. Remember you've got two\n months to decide.\"", "Then Mickey stiffened. \"I see 'em, Ben! There in the fifth row!\"\n\n\n Usually Mickey was the same whether in a furnace-hot engine room or a\n garden party, smiling, accepting whatever the world offered. But now a\n tenseness and an excitement had gripped even him. I was grateful that\n he was beside me; we'd been a good team during those final months at\n the Academy and I knew we'd be a good team in space. The Universe was\n mighty big, but with two of us to face it together, it would be only\n half as big.", "Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders\n and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth\n and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,\n for I was thinking:\nHe's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the\n others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the\n first!\nMickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. \"I don't\n see 'em, Ben,\" he whispered. \"Where do you suppose they are?\"\n\n\n I blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\n \"My folks.\"\n\n\n That was something I didn't have to worry about. My parents had died in\n a strato-jet crash when I was four, so I hadn't needed many of those\n \"You are cordially invited\" cards. Just one, which I'd sent to Charlie\n Taggart.", "\"It's all right,\" I said, clenching my fists. \"You made sense—a lot of\n sense.\"\nThe next morning Charlie said good-bye in our room. He rubbed his\n scarred face nervously as he cleared his throat with a series of thin,\n tight coughs.\n\n\n Then he pointed to a brown, faded tin box lying on the bed. \"I'm\n leavin' that for you. It's full of old stuff, souvenirs mostly. Thought\n maybe you'd like to have 'em.\"\n\n\n I scowled, not understanding. \"Why, Charlie? What for?\"\n\n\n He shrugged as if afraid he might be accused of sentimentality. \"Oh,\n it's just that I've been dodgin' meteors now for twenty-five years.\n That's a long time, boy. Ain't one spaceman in a thousand that lucky.\n Some of these days, I won't be so lucky.\"", "I'd missed something. My folks were shadow-people, my impressions of\n them drawn half from ancient photos, half from imagination. For me, it\n had been a cold, automatic kind of life, the life of dormitories and\n routines and rules. I'd been so blinded by the brilliancy of my dreams,\n I hadn't realized I was different.\nMy folks were killed in a rocket crash. If it weren't for rockets, I'd\n have lived the kind of life a kid should live.\nMickey noticed my frown.\n\n\n \"What's the matter, Ben? Still sore? I feel like a heel, but I'm just\n not like you and Charlie, I guess. I—\"\n\n\n \"No, I understand, Mickey. I'm not sore, really.\"\n\n\n \"Listen, then. You haven't accepted any offer yet, have you?\"", "You looked up at Venus, and you were silent for a long while, your face\n flushed.\n\n\n Then you murmured, \"I—I want to marry you, Ben, but are you asking me\n to marry a spaceman or a teacher?\"\n\n\n \"Can't a spaceman marry, too?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, a spaceman can marry, but what would it be like? Don't you see,\n Ben? You'd be like Charlie. Gone for\nmaybe\ntwo months,\nmaybe\ntwo\n years. Then you'd have a twenty-four hour liberty—and I'd have what?\"\n\n\n Somehow I'd expected words like these, but still they hurt. \"I wouldn't\n have to be a spaceman forever. I could try it for a couple of years,\n then teach.\"", "And the left side of his face was streaked with dark scar tissue, the\n result of an atomic blowup on one of the old Moon ships. I was so\n accustomed to the scars, I was seldom aware of them; but others, I\n knew, would find them ugly.\n\n\n You were kind. You shook hands and said, softly: \"It's a privilege to\n meet you, Charlie. Just think—one of Everson's men, one of the first\n to reach the Moon!\"\n\n\n Charlie gulped helplessly, and Mickey said: \"Still going to spend the\n weekend with us, aren't you, Ben?\"\n\n\n I shook my head. \"Charlie has only twenty-four hours liberty. We're\n planning to see the town tonight.\"", "\"\nUsed\nto want?\" I asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n You bit your lip, not answering.\n\n\n \"What did she mean, Mickey?\"\n\n\n Mickey looked down at his feet. \"I didn't want to tell you yet, Ben.\n We've been together a long time, planning to be on a rocket. But—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what does it add up to? You become a spaceman and wear a pretty\n uniform. You wade through the sands of Mars and the dust of Venus. If\n you're lucky, you're good for five, maybe ten years. Then one thing or\n another gets you. They don't insure rocketmen, you know.\"\n\n\n My stomach was full of churning, biting ice. \"What are you trying to\n say, Mickey?\"", "\"No, thanks,\" I answered. \"Better not count on me.\"\n\n\n A moment later Mickey said, frowning, \"What was he talking about, Ben?\n Did he make you an offer?\"\n\n\n I laughed. \"He offered me a job here at the Academy teaching\n astrogation. What a life\nthat\nwould be! Imagine standing in a\n classroom for forty years when I've got the chance to—\"\n\n\n I hesitated, and you supplied the right words: \"When you've got the\n chance to be the first to reach a new planet. That's what most of you\n want, isn't it? That's what Mickey used to want.\"\n\n\n I looked at you as if you were Everson himself, because you seemed to\n understand the hunger that could lie in a man's heart.\n\n\n Then your last words came back and jabbed me: \"That's what Mickey used\n to want.\"", "\"Would you, Ben? Would you be satisfied with just seeing Mars? Wouldn't\n you want to go on to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and on and on?\"\n\n\n Your voice was choked, and even in the semi-darkness I saw tears\n glittering in your eyes.\n\n\n \"Do you think I'd dare have children, Ben? Mickey told me what happened\n on the\nCyclops\n. There was a leak in the atomic engines. The ship was\n flooded with radiation—just for a second. It didn't seem serious. The\n men had no burns. But a year later the captain had a child. And it\n was—\"\n\n\n \"I know, Laura. Don't say it.\"\n\n\n You had to finish. \"It was a monster.\"", "That's what he'd say.\n\n\n And yet I wanted you, Laura. I wanted to be with you, always.\n\n\n \"Oh God,\" I moaned, \"what shall I do?\"\nNext morning the door chimes pealed, and you went to the door and\n brought back the audiogram. It was addressed to me; I wondered who\n could be sending me a message.\n\n\n I pressed the stud on the little gray cylinder, and a rasping,\n automatic voice droned: \"Luna City, Luna, July 27, 1995. Regret to\n inform you of death of Charles Taggart, Chief Jetman....\"\n\n\n Then there was a Latin name which was more polite than the word\n \"lung-rot\" and the metallic phrase, \"This message brought to you by\n courtesy of United Nations Earth-Luna Communication Corps.\"\n\n\n I stood staring at the cylinder.\n\n\n Charles Taggart was dead.", "Charles Taggart was Charlie. Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n My heart thudded crazily against my chest. It couldn't be! Not Charlie!\n The audiogram had lied!\n\n\n I pressed the stud again. \"... regret to inform you of death of\n Charles ...\"\n\n\n I hurled the cylinder at the wall. It thudded, fell, rolled. The broken\n voice droned on.\n\n\n You ran to it, shut it off. \"I'm sorry, Ben, so terribly—\"\n\n\n Without answering, I walked into my room. I knew it was true now. I\n remembered Charlie's coughing, his gaunt features, his drugged gaze.\n The metallic words had told the truth.\n\n\n I sat for a long time on my bed, crying inside, but staring dry-eyed at\n Charlie's faded tin box.", "And then it seemed that all the proud faces were looking at us as if we\n were gods. A shiver went through my body. Though it was daytime, I saw\n the stars in my mind's vision, the great shining balls of silver, each\n like a voice crying out and pleading to be explored, to be touched by\n the sons of Earth.\nThey expect a lot from us. They expect us to make a new kind of\n civilization and a better place out of Earth. They expect all this and\n a hell of a lot more. They think there's nothing we can't do.\nI felt very small and very humble. I was scared. Damned scared.\nAt last it was over, and the proud faces descended upon us in a huge,\n babbling wave.\n\n\n Then I saw him. Good old Stardust Charlie.\n\n\n His wizened little body was shuffling down an aisle, his eyes shining\n like a child's. He'd been sandwiched, evidently, in one of the rear\n rows.", "But he rounded a corner, still grinning and waving, and then he was\n gone.\nThat afternoon Mickey showed me his room. It was more like a boy's\n room than a spaceman's. In it were all the little things that kids\n treasure—pennants, models of Everson's two ships, a tennis trophy,\n books, a home-made video.\n\n\n I began to realize how important a room like this could be to a boy.\n I could imagine, too, the happiness that parents felt as they watched\n their children grow to adulthood.", "That night I lay awake, the fears and doubts too frantic to let me\n sleep.\nYou've got to decide now\n, I told myself.\nYou can't stay here. You've\n got to make a choice.\nThe teaching job was still open. The spot on the\nOdyssey\nwas still\n open—and the big ship, it was rumored, was equipped to make it all the\n way to Pluto.\nYou can take Dean Dawson's job and stay with Laura and have kids and a\n home and live to see what happens in this world sixty years from now.\nOr you can see what's on the other side of the mountain. You can be a\n line in a history book.\nI cursed. I knew what Charlie would say. He'd say, \"Get the hell out\n of there, boy. Don't let a fool woman make a sucker out of you. Get\n out there on the\nOdyssey\nwhere you belong. We got a date on Mars,\n remember? At the\nSpace Rat\n, just off Chandler Field on the Grand\n Canal.\"" ] ]
train	51651	[ "What is the most dangerous aspect of the neutroids and other mutant animals?", "How are citizens organized into different classes in society?", "Which of the following is NOT true of Class C citizens?", "What act suggests that Terry empathizes with the owners of the neutroids he confiscates as part of his job? ", "The barn and kennels are allusions to:", "Which answer best represents a prominent theme of this passage?\n\nOnce a neutroid reached its age-set, it remained at that developmental level until death (sick experiments). It's a 'mental deviant' and he was afraid of those (compared to physical?) Why are females disposed of automatically? (China birth law) Apparently he had done this multiple times, but who knows how many. Why is story told from Norris' POV? Not delmont? If they break the rule, compulsory divorce and sterilization. ", "What is the most likely reason for Mrs. Sarah Glubbes calling her neutroid a baby?", "Which terms best describe the tone of the passage in which Terry incinerates 23 of his long-term barn residents?", "J \"Doggy\" O'Reilley is most likely:" ]	[ [ "Because they are grouped together in isolated areas, it is possible that they could use their adorable appearance and innocent demeanor to hide the fact that they are conspiring to overthrow the society.", "Because they only live up until a certain age, they often act with a level of invincibility that is threatening to society and its systems of social stratification.", "Their cute appearance causes others to underestimate their high predatory instincts and behaviors, and many injuries and deaths result because of this incongruency.", "Their cute appearance makes it easy for humans to get attached to them, and mass levels of attachment could potentially thwart current methods of classifying members of society." ], [ "Through random assignment at birth", "According to their socioeconomic status", "After a lengthy interview with Anthropos upon reaching a specific age-set", "By an analysis of their genes and heredity" ], [ "They are not legally permitted to reproduce and bear human children.", "They are not legally permitted to go against the results of their aptitude tests.", "There is a 100% chance that they will develop and/or die from a significant physical or mental illness.", "It is difficult for them to access news and information, such as a viral outbreak." ], [ "He returns lost neutroids to their owners instead of taking them to the pound and incinerating them.", "He drops charges after they assault him if they agree to cooperate with authorities.", "He ignores discrepancies in serial number checks even though it could cost him his job.", "He thinks about stealing a neutroid for his wife, but ultimately feels bad and returns it to its owner." ], [ "Ethnic experimentation labs", "Torture chambers", "Unethical animal testing facilities ", "Concentration camps" ], [ "If you're going to break a law, be prepared to deal with the consequences.", "It is physically and emotionally dangerous to get too attached to others.", "Government actions made in the name of equality can sometimes cause more harm than good.", "Too much technological advancement can destroy a thriving society." ], [ "She is a Class C citizen and likely has a mental or emotional disorder.", "She became too attached to her neutroid.", "She is trying to distract the authorities from the neutroid black market.", "The neutroid is actually a human child." ], [ "Excited and reinvigorated", "Relieved and composed", "Hopeless and unsettled", "Unphased and unapologetic" ], [ "A Delmont \"flaw\" that passed", "A Class C citizen", "A neutroid", "A federal officer" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 4, 2, 4, 3, 2, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate\n as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if\n things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother\n something small.\n\n\n Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust\n to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial\n mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in\n conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have\n to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a\n matter of adjustment.\nAt noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his\n cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped\n them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already\n brought in the three from yesterday.", "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "\"So it\nwould\ndevelop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female\n if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.\n That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But\n Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final\n inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for\n the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment\n malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't\n catch the female. She went on through; they all\nlook\nfemale.\"\n\n\n \"How did they find out about it now?\"\n\n\n \"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing\n it once before. No telling how many times he\nreally\ndid it.\"", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin", "\"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo\n citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely\nme\n—and charging\n one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a\n pound inspection—\"\n\n\n Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.\n\n\n \"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection\n with the Delmont case.\"\n\n\n Yates stopped laughing. \"Oh. Well, I'll take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick\n up the animals in the morning?\"\n\n\n \"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just\n any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we\n don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers.\"", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "\"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,\n shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his\n heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.\n Glubbes, the alleged intruder,\nhas no baby\n. Just a minute—just a\n minute—here comes the stretcher now.\"\n\n\n Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them\n what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if\n it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing\n in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she\n concealed it well.\n\n\n \"What was all that?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive.\"\n\n\n \"What was it?\"\n\n\n \"Neutroid trouble.\"", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his\n dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping\n for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.\n\n\n \"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I\n imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?\"\n\n\n Norris hesitated. \"Extremely,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah\n Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be\n getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got\n there.\" He hesitated. \"The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's\n dying. Eighteenth order virus.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "\"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a\n single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.\n Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum\n had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's\n determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid\n ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it\n wouldn't be caught until after birth.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't caught at all?\" Anne asked.\n\n\n \"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about\n it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be\n dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone\n flow into its compartment.\"\n\n\n \"Why that?\"", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"" ], [ "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,\n he spoke again. \"Anne honey, look! Think of the\ngood\nthings about the\n job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house\n rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my\n own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a\nfine\njob, honey!\"\n\n\n She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.\n\n\n \"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.\n They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.\n If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common\n labor. That's the\nlaw\n.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?\" she said sweetly.", "He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his\n dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping\n for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.\n\n\n \"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I\n imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?\"\n\n\n Norris hesitated. \"Extremely,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah\n Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be\n getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got\n there.\" He hesitated. \"The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's\n dying. Eighteenth order virus.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"", "Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.\n \"I'm going to have one of my own,\" she said.\n\n\n He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. \"Do you realize\n what—\"\n\n\n \"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in\n both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a\n heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going\n to have a baby.\"\n\n\n \"You know what they'd do to us?\"\n\n\n \"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they\n won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll\n hide it.\"\n\n\n \"I won't let you do such a thing.\"", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"", "\"Well, I've got to get on the job.\" He put on his hat and picked at a\n splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. \"I—I'll\n see you tonight.\" He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious\n that she didn't want to be kissed.\n\n\n He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the\n house. The honeymoon was over, all right.\n\n\n He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The\n suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were\n set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its\n population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country\n had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined\n with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were\n someplace where he could be completely alone.", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn\n several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and\n ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their\n owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were\n frequently shifted from one territory to another.\n\n\n On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing\n number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty\n blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a\n sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.", "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "\"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo\n citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely\nme\n—and charging\n one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a\n pound inspection—\"\n\n\n Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.\n\n\n \"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection\n with the Delmont case.\"\n\n\n Yates stopped laughing. \"Oh. Well, I'll take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick\n up the animals in the morning?\"\n\n\n \"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just\n any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we\n don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers.\"", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "\"\nApple cores!\n\" He turned to face his wife. \"How did apples get in\n there?\"\n\n\n She reddened. \"I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the\n mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen\n cooking apples.\"\n\n\n \"That was a mistake.\"\n\n\n She frowned irritably. \"We can afford it.\"\n\n\n \"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders.\" He\n paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:\n \"They get to love whoever feeds them.\"\n\n\n \"I can't see—\"\n\n\n \"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?\"\n\n\n Anne folded her arms and stared at him. \"Planning to dispose of any\n soon?\" she asked acidly.", "As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the\n curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on\n top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny\n pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile\n thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris\n pulled to a halt.\n\n\n He smiled at it from the window and called, \"What's your name, kitten?\"\n\n\n The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a\n stuttering high-pitched wail, then: \"Kiyi Rorry.\"\n\n\n \"Whose child are you, Rorry?\" he asked. \"Where do you live?\"", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of\nA\n Chimp to Call My Own\n, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a\n popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.\n\n\n He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a\n customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the\n price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's\n death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's\n alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but\n he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.\n\n\n The dog was saying, \"Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me.\"" ], [ "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.\n \"I'm going to have one of my own,\" she said.\n\n\n He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. \"Do you realize\n what—\"\n\n\n \"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in\n both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a\n heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going\n to have a baby.\"\n\n\n \"You know what they'd do to us?\"\n\n\n \"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they\n won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll\n hide it.\"\n\n\n \"I won't let you do such a thing.\"", "He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his\n dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping\n for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.\n\n\n \"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I\n imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?\"\n\n\n Norris hesitated. \"Extremely,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah\n Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be\n getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got\n there.\" He hesitated. \"The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's\n dying. Eighteenth order virus.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,\n he spoke again. \"Anne honey, look! Think of the\ngood\nthings about the\n job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house\n rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my\n own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a\nfine\njob, honey!\"\n\n\n She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.\n\n\n \"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.\n They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.\n If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common\n labor. That's the\nlaw\n.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?\" she said sweetly.", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had\n learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months\n old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.\n And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.\n\n\n \"Put it in the cage, Anne,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She looked up and shook her head.\n\n\n \"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,\n you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once.\"\n\n\n She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.\n\n\n \"Anne—\" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. \"Do\n you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to\n keep in the house. It won't cost us anything.\"", "\"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo\n citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely\nme\n—and charging\n one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a\n pound inspection—\"\n\n\n Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.\n\n\n \"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection\n with the Delmont case.\"\n\n\n Yates stopped laughing. \"Oh. Well, I'll take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick\n up the animals in the morning?\"\n\n\n \"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just\n any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we\n don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers.\"", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "\"Well, I've got to get on the job.\" He put on his hat and picked at a\n splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. \"I—I'll\n see you tonight.\" He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious\n that she didn't want to be kissed.\n\n\n He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the\n house. The honeymoon was over, all right.\n\n\n He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The\n suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were\n set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its\n population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country\n had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined\n with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were\n someplace where he could be completely alone.", "If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn\n several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and\n ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their\n owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were\n frequently shifted from one territory to another.\n\n\n On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing\n number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty\n blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a\n sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"", "As he approached an intersection, he saw a small animal sitting on the\n curb, wrapped in its own bushy tail. Its oversized head was bald on\n top, but the rest of its body was covered with blue-gray fur. Its tiny\n pink tongue was licking daintily at small forepaws with prehensile\n thumbs. It was a cat-Q-5. It glanced curiously at the truck as Norris\n pulled to a halt.\n\n\n He smiled at it from the window and called, \"What's your name, kitten?\"\n\n\n The cat-Q-5 stared at him impassively for a moment, let out a\n stuttering high-pitched wail, then: \"Kiyi Rorry.\"\n\n\n \"Whose child are you, Rorry?\" he asked. \"Where do you live?\"" ], [ "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate\n as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if\n things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother\n something small.\n\n\n Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust\n to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial\n mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in\n conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have\n to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a\n matter of adjustment.\nAt noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his\n cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped\n them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already\n brought in the three from yesterday.", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"", "It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He\n started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but\n O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had\n gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald\n head bobbled in a welcoming nod.\n\n\n \"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—\" He\n stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris\n flashed his badge. His smile waned.\n\n\n \"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown\n on K-99 sales.\"\n\n\n O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. \"Oh, yes. Find 'em all?\"", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had\n learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months\n old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.\n And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.\n\n\n \"Put it in the cage, Anne,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She looked up and shook her head.\n\n\n \"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,\n you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once.\"\n\n\n She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.\n\n\n \"Anne—\" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. \"Do\n you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to\n keep in the house. It won't cost us anything.\"", "After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial\n numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and\n addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire\n list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained\n was to pick up the thirty-five animals.\n\n\n And\nthat\n, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away\n from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to\n begin his rounds.\n\n\n Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the\n porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.\n\n\n \"Doctor Georges came,\" she told him. \"He signed for the—\" She stopped\n to stare at him. \"Darling, your face! What happened?\"", "\"\nApple cores!\n\" He turned to face his wife. \"How did apples get in\n there?\"\n\n\n She reddened. \"I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the\n mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen\n cooking apples.\"\n\n\n \"That was a mistake.\"\n\n\n She frowned irritably. \"We can afford it.\"\n\n\n \"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders.\" He\n paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:\n \"They get to love whoever feeds them.\"\n\n\n \"I can't see—\"\n\n\n \"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?\"\n\n\n Anne folded her arms and stared at him. \"Planning to dispose of any\n soon?\" she asked acidly.", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "\"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,\n shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his\n heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.\n Glubbes, the alleged intruder,\nhas no baby\n. Just a minute—just a\n minute—here comes the stretcher now.\"\n\n\n Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them\n what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if\n it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing\n in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she\n concealed it well.\n\n\n \"What was all that?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive.\"\n\n\n \"What was it?\"\n\n\n \"Neutroid trouble.\"", "\"Honeymoon's off again, eh?\"\n\n\n She turned away. \"I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again.\"\n\n\n He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming\n doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man\n pets, always frightened of strangers.\n\n\n \"What's the Delmont case, Terry?\" Anne asked while he worked.\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got\n your face scratched?\"\n\n\n He nodded sourly. \"Indirectly, yes. It's a long story.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me.\"", "\"Cooperation. I'm mailing you three letters charging three Wylo\n citizens with resisting a Federal official—namely\nme\n—and charging\n one of them with assault. I tried to pick up their neutroids for a\n pound inspection—\"\n\n\n Yates bellowed lusty laughter into the phone.\n\n\n \"It's not funny. I've got to get those neutroids. It's in connection\n with the Delmont case.\"\n\n\n Yates stopped laughing. \"Oh. Well, I'll take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"It's a rush-order, Sheriff. Can you get the warrants tonight and pick\n up the animals in the morning?\"\n\n\n \"Easy on those warrants, boy. Judge Charleman can't be disturbed just\n any time. I can get the newts to you by noon, I guess, provided we\n don't have to get a helicopter posse to chase down the mothers.\"", "Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.\n \"I'm going to have one of my own,\" she said.\n\n\n He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. \"Do you realize\n what—\"\n\n\n \"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in\n both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a\n heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going\n to have a baby.\"\n\n\n \"You know what they'd do to us?\"\n\n\n \"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they\n won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll\n hide it.\"\n\n\n \"I won't let you do such a thing.\"" ], [ "He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she\n padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing\n that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,\n until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then\n everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.\nAnne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered\n into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the\n kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he\n could begin his testing.", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of\nA\n Chimp to Call My Own\n, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a\n popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.\n\n\n He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a\n customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the\n price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's\n death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's\n alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but\n he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.\n\n\n The dog was saying, \"Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me.\"", "\"Well, I've got to get on the job.\" He put on his hat and picked at a\n splinter on the door. He frowned studiously at the splinter. \"I—I'll\n see you tonight.\" He ripped the splinter loose when it became obvious\n that she didn't want to be kissed.\n\n\n He grunted a nervous good-by and stumbled down the hall and out of the\n house. The honeymoon was over, all right.\n\n\n He climbed in the kennel-truck and drove east toward the highway. The\n suburban street wound among the pastel plasticoid cottages that were\n set approximately two to an acre on the lightly wooded land. With its\n population legally fixed at three hundred million, most of the country\n had become one big suburb, dotted with community centers and lined\n with narrow belts of industrial development. Norris wished there were\n someplace where he could be completely alone.", "One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and\n carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the\n long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him\n willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten\n them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.\n The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.\n\n\n Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.\n\n\n He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His\n eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was\n like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest\n just to retch.", "It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street\n of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a\n shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now\n an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the\n escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the\n sidewalk, announcing:\nJ. \"DOGGY\" O'REILLEY\n\n PETS FOR SALE\n\n DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH\n\n MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS\n\n BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY\n\n\n Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm\n and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.\n O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.", "Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,\n he spoke again. \"Anne honey, look! Think of the\ngood\nthings about the\n job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house\n rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my\n own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a\nfine\njob, honey!\"\n\n\n She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.\n\n\n \"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.\n They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.\n If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common\n labor. That's the\nlaw\n.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?\" she said sweetly.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey were such cute synthetic creatures, it\n \nwas impossible not to love them. Of course,\n \nthat was precisely why they were dangerous!\nThere was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt\n mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his\n coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.\n His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her\n cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.\n He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The\n shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as\n she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack\n and miserable.\n\n\n \"Honeymoon's over, huh?\"\n\n\n She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"", "It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He\n started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but\n O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had\n gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald\n head bobbled in a welcoming nod.\n\n\n \"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—\" He\n stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris\n flashed his badge. His smile waned.\n\n\n \"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown\n on K-99 sales.\"\n\n\n O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. \"Oh, yes. Find 'em all?\"", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial\n numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and\n addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire\n list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained\n was to pick up the thirty-five animals.\n\n\n And\nthat\n, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away\n from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to\n begin his rounds.\n\n\n Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the\n porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.\n\n\n \"Doctor Georges came,\" she told him. \"He signed for the—\" She stopped\n to stare at him. \"Darling, your face! What happened?\"", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate\n as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if\n things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother\n something small.\n\n\n Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust\n to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial\n mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in\n conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have\n to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a\n matter of adjustment.\nAt noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his\n cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped\n them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already\n brought in the three from yesterday." ], [ "\"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a\n single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.\n Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum\n had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's\n determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid\n ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it\n wouldn't be caught until after birth.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't caught at all?\" Anne asked.\n\n\n \"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about\n it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be\n dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone\n flow into its compartment.\"\n\n\n \"Why that?\"", "\"So it\nwould\ndevelop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female\n if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.\n That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But\n Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final\n inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for\n the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment\n malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't\n catch the female. She went on through; they all\nlook\nfemale.\"\n\n\n \"How did they find out about it now?\"\n\n\n \"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing\n it once before. No telling how many times he\nreally\ndid it.\"", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,\n shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his\n heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.\n Glubbes, the alleged intruder,\nhas no baby\n. Just a minute—just a\n minute—here comes the stretcher now.\"\n\n\n Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them\n what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if\n it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing\n in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she\n concealed it well.\n\n\n \"What was all that?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive.\"\n\n\n \"What was it?\"\n\n\n \"Neutroid trouble.\"", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.\n \"I'm going to have one of my own,\" she said.\n\n\n He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. \"Do you realize\n what—\"\n\n\n \"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in\n both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a\n heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going\n to have a baby.\"\n\n\n \"You know what they'd do to us?\"\n\n\n \"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they\n won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll\n hide it.\"\n\n\n \"I won't let you do such a thing.\"", "He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his\n dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping\n for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.\n\n\n \"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I\n imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?\"\n\n\n Norris hesitated. \"Extremely,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah\n Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be\n getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got\n there.\" He hesitated. \"The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's\n dying. Eighteenth order virus.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate\n as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if\n things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother\n something small.\n\n\n Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust\n to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial\n mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in\n conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have\n to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a\n matter of adjustment.\nAt noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his\n cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped\n them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already\n brought in the three from yesterday.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,\n he spoke again. \"Anne honey, look! Think of the\ngood\nthings about the\n job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house\n rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my\n own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a\nfine\njob, honey!\"\n\n\n She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.\n\n\n \"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.\n They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.\n If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common\n labor. That's the\nlaw\n.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?\" she said sweetly.", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had\n learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months\n old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.\n And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.\n\n\n \"Put it in the cage, Anne,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She looked up and shook her head.\n\n\n \"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,\n you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once.\"\n\n\n She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.\n\n\n \"Anne—\" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. \"Do\n you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to\n keep in the house. It won't cost us anything.\"", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she\n padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing\n that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,\n until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then\n everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.\nAnne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered\n into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the\n kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he\n could begin his testing.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey were such cute synthetic creatures, it\n \nwas impossible not to love them. Of course,\n \nthat was precisely why they were dangerous!\nThere was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt\n mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his\n coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.\n His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her\n cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.\n He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The\n shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as\n she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack\n and miserable.\n\n\n \"Honeymoon's over, huh?\"\n\n\n She said nothing, but shrugged faintly." ], [ "\"When the doctor assured her that there was no other baby, she fired,\n shattering his salad plate. Glancing off it, the bullet pierced his\n heart. The woman fled. A peculiar feature of the case is that Mrs.\n Glubbes, the alleged intruder,\nhas no baby\n. Just a minute—just a\n minute—here comes the stretcher now.\"\n\n\n Norris turned the set off and went to call the police. He told them\n what he knew and promised to make himself available for questioning if\n it became necessary. When he turned from the phone, Anne was standing\n in the bedroom doorway. She might have been crying a little, but she\n concealed it well.\n\n\n \"What was all that?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Woman killed a man. I happened to know the motive.\"\n\n\n \"What was it?\"\n\n\n \"Neutroid trouble.\"", "\"Well, she's—uh—rather a\npeculiar\nwoman, Inspector. Keeps telling\n me how much trouble she had in childbirth, and how she can't ever\n have another one. It's pathetic. She\nbelieves\nit's her own. Do you\n understand?\"\n\n\n \"I think so,\" Norris replied slowly. \"But what do you want me to do?\n Can't you send the neutroid to a vet?\"\n\n\n \"She insists it's going to a hospital. Worst part is that she's heard\n of the disease. Knows it can be cured with the proper treatment—in\n humans. Of course, no hospital would play along with her fantasy and\n take a neutroid, especially since she couldn't pay for its treatment.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't see—\"", "He was halfway to Wylo City when the radiophone buzzed on his\n dashboard. He pulled into the slow lane and answered quickly, hoping\n for Anne's voice. A polite professional purr came instead.\n\n\n \"Inspector Norris? This is Doctor Georges. We haven't met, but I\n imagine we will. Are you extremely busy at the moment?\"\n\n\n Norris hesitated. \"Extremely,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Well, this won't take long. One of my patients—a Mrs. Sarah\n Glubbes—called a while ago and said her baby was sick. I must be\n getting absent-minded, because I forgot she was class C until I got\n there.\" He hesitated. \"The baby turned out to be a neutroid. It's\n dying. Eighteenth order virus.\"\n\n\n \"So?\"", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "Norris sat breathing quickly. There could scarcely be two Doctor\n Georges in the community, but only this morning....\n\n\n A growling drawl came from the audio. \"This's Chief Miler speaking,\n folks. I just want to say that if any of you know the whereabouts of a\n Mrs. Sarah Glubbes, call me immediately. She's wanted for questioning.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Chief. This is James Duncan again. I'll review the facts\n for you briefly again, ladies and gentlemen. At seven o'clock,\n less than an hour ago, a woman—allegedly Mrs. Glubbes—burst into\n Doctor Georges' dining room while the family was at dinner. She was\n brandishing a pistol and screaming, 'You stole my baby! You gave me the\n wrong baby! Where's my baby?'", "A neutroid filled the cradle in his stead. A neutroid that never ate\n as much, or grew up to be unemployed. A neutroid could be killed if\n things got tough, but could still satisfy a woman's craving to mother\n something small.\n\n\n Norris gave up thinking about it. Eventually he would have to adjust\n to it. He was already adjusted to a world that loved the artificial\n mutants as children. He had been brought up in it. Emotion came in\n conflict with the grim necessities of his job. Somehow he would have\n to love them in the parlor and kill them in the kennel. It was only a\n matter of adjustment.\nAt noon, he brought back another dozen K-99s and installed them in his\n cages. There had been two highly reluctant mothers, but he skipped\n them and left the seizure to the local authorities. Yates had already\n brought in the three from yesterday.", "\"So it\nwould\ndevelop sexuality. A neutroid would be born a female\n if they didn't give it suppressive doses of male hormone prenatally.\n That keeps ovaries from developing and it comes out neuter. But\n Delmont figured a female would be caught and stopped before the final\n inspection. They'd dispose of her without even bothering to examine for\n the other defects. And he could blame the sexuality on an equipment\n malfunction. He thought it was pretty smart. Trouble was they didn't\n catch the female. She went on through; they all\nlook\nfemale.\"\n\n\n \"How did they find out about it now?\"\n\n\n \"He got caught last month, trying it again. And he confessed to doing\n it once before. No telling how many times he\nreally\ndid it.\"", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "Still he felt the night's guilt, like a sticky dew that refused to\n depart with morning. Why should he have to kill the things? The answer\n was obvious. Society manufactured them because killing them was\n permissible. Human babies could not be disposed of when the market\n became glutted. The neutroids offered solace to childless women, kept\n them satisfied with a restricted birth rate. And why a restricted\n birth rate? Because by keeping the population at five billions, the\n Federation could insure a decent living standard for everybody.\n\n\n Where there was giving, Norris thought glumly, there was also taking\n away. Man had always deluded himself by thinking that he \"created,\" but\n he created nothing. He thought that he had created—with his medical\n science and his end to wars—a longer life for the individual. But he\n found that he had only taken the lives of the unborn and added them to\n the years of the aged. Man now had a life expectancy of eighty, except\n that he had damn little chance of being born to enjoy it.", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"", "Norris grinned and drove on. A class-C couple, allowed no children\n of their own, could get quite attached to a cat-Q-5. The felines\n were emotionally safer than the quasi-human chimp-K series called\n \"neutroids.\" When a pet neutroid died, a family was broken with grief;\n but most couples could endure the death of a cat-Q or a dog-F. Class-C\n couples were allowed two lesser units or one neutroid.\n\n\n His grin faded as he wondered which Anne would choose. The Norrises\n were class-C—defective heredity.\nHe found himself in Sherman III Community Center—eight blocks of\n commercial buildings, serving the surrounding suburbs. He stopped at\n the message office to pick up his mail. There was a memo from Chief\n Franklin. He tore it open nervously and read it in the truck. It was\n something he had been expecting for several days.\n\n\n Attention All District Inspectors:\n\n Subject: Deviant Neutroid.", "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "\"Well, Delmont worked a week and spoiled over a hundred ova without a\n single success. They threatened to fire him. I guess he got hysterical.\n Anyway, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum\n had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the central nervous system's\n determinants, and in the glandular makeup. Not a standard neutroid\n ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it\n wouldn't be caught until after birth.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't caught at all?\" Anne asked.\n\n\n \"Funny thing, he was afraid it wouldn't be. He got to worrying about\n it, thought maybe a mental-deviant would pass, and that it might be\n dangerous. So he went back to its incubator and cut off the hormone\n flow into its compartment.\"\n\n\n \"Why that?\"", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "Norris watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One thing he had\n learned: to steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months\n old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set.\n And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.\n\n\n \"Put it in the cage, Anne,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She looked up and shook her head.\n\n\n \"It belongs to somebody else. If it fixes a libido attachment on you,\n you're actually robbing its owner. They can't love many people at once.\"\n\n\n She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.\n\n\n \"Anne—\" Norris hesitated, hating to approach the subject. \"Do\n you—want one—for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you to\n keep in the house. It won't cost us anything.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey were such cute synthetic creatures, it\n \nwas impossible not to love them. Of course,\n \nthat was precisely why they were dangerous!\nThere was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt\n mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his\n coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.\n His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her\n cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.\n He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The\n shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as\n she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack\n and miserable.\n\n\n \"Honeymoon's over, huh?\"\n\n\n She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"" ], [ "One at a time, he awoke twenty-three of the older doll-things and\n carried them to a large glass-walled compartment. These were the\n long-time residents; they knew him well, and they came with him\n willingly—like children after the Piper of Hamlin. When he had gotten\n them in the glass chamber, he sealed the door and turned on the gas.\n The conveyor would automatically carry them on to the incinerator.\n\n\n Now he had enough cages for the Bermuda-K-99s.\n\n\n He hurriedly quit the kennels and went to sit on the back steps. His\n eyes were burning, but the thought of tears made him sicker. It was\n like an assassin crying while he stabbed his victim. It was more honest\n just to retch.", "When he tiptoed back inside, he got as far as the hall. Then he saw\n Anne's small figure framed in the bedroom window, silhouetted against\n the moonlit yard. She had slipped into her negligee and was sitting on\n the narrow windowstool, staring silently out at the dull red tongue of\n exhaust gases from the crematory's chimney.\n\n\n Norris backed away. He went to the parlor and lay down on the couch.\n\n\n After a while he heard her come into the room. She paused in the center\n of the rug, a fragile mist in the darkness. He turned his face away and\n waited for the rasping accusation. But soon she came to sit on the edge\n of the sofa. She said nothing. Her hand crept out and touched his cheek\n lightly. He felt her cool finger-tips trace a soft line up his temple.\n\n\n \"It's all right, Terry,\" she whispered.", "\"You knew I worked for the F.B.A.,\" he said. \"You knew I'd have charge\n of a district pound. You knew it before we got married.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know you killed them,\" she said venomously.\n\n\n \"I won't have to kill many. Besides, they're only animals.\"\n\n\n \"\nIntelligent\nanimals!\"\n\n\n \"Intelligent as a human imbecile, maybe.\"\n\n\n \"A small child is an imbecile. Would you kill a small child?\"\n\n\n \"You're taking intelligence as the only criterion of humanity,\" he\n protested hopelessly, knowing that a logical defense was useless\n against sentimentality. \"Baby—\"\n\n\n \"Don't call me baby! Call\nthem\nbaby!\"", "\"Come on,\" he grunted. \"Let's unload some neutroids, before I forget\n all about work.\"\nThey went out to the kennels together. The cages were inside a\n sprawling concrete barn, which was divided into three large rooms—one\n for the fragile neuter humanoid creatures, and another for the lesser\n mutants, such as cat-Qs, dog-Fs, dwarf bears, and foot-high lambs that\n never matured into sheep. The third room contained a small gas chamber\n with a conveyor belt leading from it to a crematory-incinerator.\nNorris kept the third locked lest his wife see its furnishings.\n\n\n The doll-like neutroids began their mindless chatter as soon as their\n keepers entered the building. Dozens of blazing blond heads began\n dancing about their cages. Their bodies thwacked against the wire mesh\n as they leaped about their compartments with monkey grace.", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she\n padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing\n that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,\n until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then\n everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.\nAnne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered\n into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the\n kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he\n could begin his testing.", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "\"Honeymoon's off again, eh?\"\n\n\n She turned away. \"I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again.\"\n\n\n He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming\n doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man\n pets, always frightened of strangers.\n\n\n \"What's the Delmont case, Terry?\" Anne asked while he worked.\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got\n your face scratched?\"\n\n\n He nodded sourly. \"Indirectly, yes. It's a long story.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me.\"", "After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial\n numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and\n addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire\n list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained\n was to pick up the thirty-five animals.\n\n\n And\nthat\n, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away\n from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to\n begin his rounds.\n\n\n Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the\n porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.\n\n\n \"Doctor Georges came,\" she told him. \"He signed for the—\" She stopped\n to stare at him. \"Darling, your face! What happened?\"", "Slowly she shook her head, and her pale eyes went moody and luminous.\n \"I'm going to have one of my own,\" she said.\n\n\n He stood in the back of the truck, staring down at her. \"Do you realize\n what—\"\n\n\n \"I know what I'm saying. We're class-C on account of heart-trouble in\n both our families. Well, I don't care, Terry. I'm not going to waste a\n heart over one of these pathetic little artificial animals. We're going\n to have a baby.\"\n\n\n \"You know what they'd do to us?\"\n\n\n \"If they catch us, yes—compulsory divorce, sterilization. But they\n won't catch us. I'll have it at home, Terry. Not even a doctor. We'll\n hide it.\"\n\n\n \"I won't let you do such a thing.\"", "\"That'll be all right. And listen, Yates—fix it so the charges will\n be dropped if they cooperate. Don't shake those warrants around unless\n they just won't listen to reason. But get those neutroids.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, boy. Gotcha.\"\n\n\n Norris gave him the names and addresses of the three unwilling mothers.\n As soon as he hung up, Anne touched his shoulders and said, \"Sit\n still.\" She began smoothing a chilly ointment over his burning cheek.\n\n\n \"Hard day?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Not too hard. Those were just three out of fifteen. I got the other\n twelve. They're in the truck.\"\n\n\n \"That's good,\" she said. \"You've got only twelve empty cages.\"", "Norris backed a few steps toward the door. Against his better judgment,\n he spoke again. \"Anne honey, look! Think of the\ngood\nthings about the\n job. Sure, everything has its ugly angles. But think—we get this house\n rent-free; I've got my own district with no bosses around; I make my\n own hours; you'll meet lots of people that stop in at the pound. It's a\nfine\njob, honey!\"\n\n\n She sipped her coffee and appeared to be listening, so he went on.\n\n\n \"And what can I do? You know how the Federation handles employment.\n They looked over my aptitude tests and sent me to Bio-Administration.\n If I don't want to follow my aptitudes, the only choice is common\n labor. That's the\nlaw\n.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose you have an aptitude for killing babies?\" she said sweetly.", "She faced him angrily. \"Oh, this whole rotten\nworld\n!\" she choked.\n Suddenly she turned and fled out of the building. She was sobbing.\nNorris climbed slowly down from the truck and wandered on into the\n house. She was not in the kitchen nor the living room. The bedroom door\n was locked. He shrugged and went to sit on the sofa. The television\n set was on, and a newscast was coming from a local station.\n\n\n \"... we were unable to get shots of the body,\" the announcer was\n saying. \"But here is a view of the Georges residence. I'll switch you\n to our mobile unit in Sherman II, James Duncan reporting.\"", "He neglected to tell her that he had stopped at twelve for just this\n reason. \"Guess I better get them unloaded,\" he said, standing up.\n\n\n \"Can I help you?\"\n\n\n He stared at her for a moment, saying nothing. She smiled a little and\n looked aside. \"Terry, I'm sorry—about this morning. I—I know you've\n got a job that has to be—\" Her lip quivered slightly.\n\n\n Norris grinned, caught her shoulders, and pulled her close.\n\n\n \"Honeymoon's on again, huh?\" she whispered against his neck.", "Their human appearance was broken by only two distinct features: short\n beaverlike tails decorated with fluffy curls of fur, and an erect\n thatch of scalp-hair that grew up into a bright candleflame. Otherwise,\n they appeared completely human, with baby-pink skin, quick little\n smiles, and cherubic faces. They were sexually neuter and never grew\n beyond a predetermined age-set which varied for each series. Age-sets\n were available from one to ten years human equivalent. Once a neutroid\n reached its age-set, it remained at the set's child-development level\n until death.\n\n\n \"They must be getting to know you pretty well,\" Anne said, glancing\n around at the cages.\n\n\n Norris was wearing a slight frown as he inspected the room. \"They've\n never gotten this excited before.\"\n\n\n He walked along a row of cages, then stopped by a K-76 to stare.", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number.\"\n\n\n Doctor Georges laughed faintly. \"I won't, Norris. Thanks a million.\" He\n hung up quickly.\n\n\n Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.\n But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later\n have to be killed.\n\n\n He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not\n angry. When he finished talking, she said, \"All right, Terry,\" and hung\n up.\nBy noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale\n house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had\n entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five\n pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey were such cute synthetic creatures, it\n \nwas impossible not to love them. Of course,\n \nthat was precisely why they were dangerous!\nThere was no use hanging around after breakfast. His wife was in a hurt\n mood, and he could neither endure the hurt nor remove it. He put on his\n coat in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hat in his hands.\n His wife was still at the table, absently fingering the handle of her\n cup and staring fixedly out the window at the kennels behind the house.\n He moved quietly up behind her and touched her silk-clad shoulder. The\n shoulder shivered away from him, and her dark hair swung shiningly as\n she shuddered. He drew his hand back and his bewildered face went slack\n and miserable.\n\n\n \"Honeymoon's over, huh?\"\n\n\n She said nothing, but shrugged faintly.", "\"\nApple cores!\n\" He turned to face his wife. \"How did apples get in\n there?\"\n\n\n She reddened. \"I felt sorry for them, eating that goo from the\n mechanical feeder. I drove down to Sherman III and bought six dozen\n cooking apples.\"\n\n\n \"That was a mistake.\"\n\n\n She frowned irritably. \"We can afford it.\"\n\n\n \"That's not the point. There's a reason for the mechanical feeders.\" He\n paused, wondering how he could tell her the truth. He blundered on:\n \"They get to love whoever feeds them.\"\n\n\n \"I can't see—\"\n\n\n \"How would you feel about disposing of something that loved you?\"\n\n\n Anne folded her arms and stared at him. \"Planning to dispose of any\n soon?\" she asked acidly." ], [ "It was on a dingy sidestreet, reminiscent of past centuries, a street\n of small bars and bowling alleys and cigar stores. There was even a\n shop with three gold balls above the entrance, but the place was now\n an antique store. A light mist was falling when he stepped off the\n escalator and stood in front of the pet shop. A sign hung out over the\n sidewalk, announcing:\nJ. \"DOGGY\" O'REILLEY\n\n PETS FOR SALE\n\n DUMB BLONDES AND GOLDFISH\n\n MUTANTS FOR THE CHILDLESS\n\n BUY A BUNDLE OF JOY\n\n\n Norris frowned at the sign and wandered inside. The place was warm\n and gloomy. He wrinkled his nose at the strong musk of animal odors.\n O'Reilley's was not a shining example of cleanliness.", "Somewhere a puppy was yapping, and a parrot croaked the lyrics of\nA\n Chimp to Call My Own\n, which Norris recognized as the theme song of a\n popular soap-opera about a lady evolvotron operator.\n\n\n He paused briefly by a tank of silk-draped goldfish. The shop had a\n customer. An elderly lady was haggling with a wizened manager over the\n price of a half grown second-hand dog-F. She was shaking her last dog's\n death certificate under his nose and demanding a guarantee of the dog's\n alleged F-5 intelligence. The old man offered to swear on a Bible, but\n he demurred when it came to swearing on a ledger.\n\n\n The dog was saying, \"Don' sell me, Dada. Don' sell me.\"", "It seemed in order, although the expiration date was approaching. He\n started toward a bank of neutroid cages along the opposite wall, but\n O'Reilley was mincing across the floor to meet him. The customer had\n gone. The little manager wore an elfin professional smile, and his bald\n head bobbled in a welcoming nod.\n\n\n \"Good day, sir, good day! May I show you a dwarf kangaroo, or a—\" He\n stopped and adjusted his spectacles. He blinked and peered as Norris\n flashed his badge. His smile waned.\n\n\n \"I'm Agent Norris, Mr. O'Reilley. Called you yesterday for that rundown\n on K-99 sales.\"\n\n\n O'Reilley looked suddenly nervous. \"Oh, yes. Find 'em all?\"", "Norris shook his head. \"No. That's why I stopped by. There's some\n mistake on—\" he glanced at his list—\"on K-99-LJZ-351. Let's check it\n again.\"\n\n\n O'Reilley seemed to cringe. \"No mistake. I gave you the buyer's name.\"\n\n\n \"She has a different number.\"\n\n\n \"Can I help it if she traded with somebody?\"\n\n\n \"She didn't. She bought it here. I saw the receipt.\"\n\n\n \"Then she traded with one of my other customers!\" snapped the old man.\n\n\n \"Two of your customers have the same name—Adelia Schultz? Not likely.\n Let's see your duplicate receipt book.\"\n\n\n O'Reilley's wrinkled face set itself into a stubborn mask. \"Doubt if\n it's still around.\"", "Norris frowned. \"Look, pop, I've had a rough day. I\ncould\nstart\n naming some things around here that need fixing—sanitary violations\n and such. Not to mention that sign—'dumb blondes.' They outlawed that\n one when they executed that shyster doctor for shooting K-108s full\n of growth hormones, trying to raise himself a harem to sell. Besides,\n you're required to keep sales records until they've been micro-filmed.\n There hasn't been a microfilming since July.\"\n\n\n The wrinkled face twitched with frustrated anger. O'Reilley shuffled\n to the counter while Norris followed. He got a fat binder from under\n the register and started toward a wooden stairway.\n\n\n \"Where you going?\" Norris called.\n\n\n \"Get my old glasses,\" the manager grumbled. \"Can't see through these\n new things.\"", "\"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Don't let me catch you falsifying a serial number.\"\n\n\n Doctor Georges laughed faintly. \"I won't, Norris. Thanks a million.\" He\n hung up quickly.\n\n\n Norris immediately regretted his consent. It bordered on being illegal.\n But he saw it as a quick way to get rid of an animal that might later\n have to be killed.\n\n\n He called Anne. Her voice was dull. She seemed depressed, but not\n angry. When he finished talking, she said, \"All right, Terry,\" and hung\n up.\nBy noon, he had finished checking the shipping lists at the wholesale\n house in Wylo City. Only thirty-five of July's Bermuda-K-99s had\n entered his territory, and they were about equally divided among five\n pet shops, three of which were in Wylo City.", "Norris smiled sardonically to himself. The non-human pets were smarter\n than the neutroids. A K-108 could speak a dozen words, and a K-99\n never got farther than \"mamma,\" \"pappa,\" and \"cookie.\" Anthropos was\n afraid to make the quasi-humans too intelligent, lest sentimentalists\n proclaim them really human.\n\n\n He wandered on toward the back of the building, pausing briefly by\n the cash register to inspect O'Reilley's license, which hung in a\n dusty frame on the wall behind the counter. \"James Fallon\n O'Reilley ... authorized dealer in mutant animals ... all non-predatory\n mammals including chimpanzee-K series ... license expires June 1, 2235.\"", "If Delmont's falsification had been widespread, he might have to turn\n several of the thirty-five over to central lab for dissection and\n ultimate destruction. That would bring the murderous wrath of their\n owners down upon him. He began to understand why bio-inspectors were\n frequently shifted from one territory to another.\n\n\n On the way home, he stopped in Sherman II to check on the missing\n number. It was the largest of the Sherman communities, covering fifty\n blocks of commercial buildings. He parked in the outskirts and took a\n sidewalk escalator toward O'Reilley's address.", "Norris withered. His voice went desperate. \"They assigned me to it\n because I\nliked\nbabies. And because I have a B.S. in biology and an\n aptitude for dealing with people. Can't you understand? Destroying\n unclaimed units is the smallest part of it. Honey, before the\n evolvotron, before Anthropos went into the mutant-animal business,\n people used to elect dogcatchers. Think of it that way—I'm just a\n dogcatcher.\"\n\n\n Her cool green eyes turned slowly to meet his gaze. Her face was\n delicately cut from cold marble. She was a small woman, slender and\n fragile, but her quiet contempt made her loom.\n\n\n He backed closer to the door.", "Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from\n the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned at his wife. \"This little\n fellow, for instance. It might be a potential she. It might also be a\n potential murderer.\nAll\nthese kiddos are from the machines in the\n section where Delmont worked.\"\n\n\n Anne snorted and caught the baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and\n tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the\n snare. \"Kkr-r-reee,\" it cooed nervously. \"Kkr-r-reee!\"\n\n\n \"You tell him you're no murderer,\" Anne purred to it.", "\"Honeymoon's off again, eh?\"\n\n\n She turned away. \"I'm sorry, Terry. I'll try not to mention it again.\"\n\n\n He began unloading the truck, pulling the frightened and squirming\n doll-things forth one at a time with a snare-pole. They were one-man\n pets, always frightened of strangers.\n\n\n \"What's the Delmont case, Terry?\" Anne asked while he worked.\n\n\n \"Huh?\"\n\n\n \"I heard you mention it on the phone. Anything to do with why you got\n your face scratched?\"\n\n\n He nodded sourly. \"Indirectly, yes. It's a long story.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me.\"", "After lunch, he called each of the retail dealers, read them the serial\n numbers, and asked them to check the sales records for names and\n addresses of individual buyers. By three o'clock, he had the entire\n list filled out, and the task began to look easier. All that remained\n was to pick up the thirty-five animals.\n\n\n And\nthat\n, he thought, was like trying to take a year-old baby away\n from its doting mother. He sighed and drove to the Wylo suburbs to\n begin his rounds.\n\n\n Anne met him at the door when he came home at six. He stood on the\n porch for a moment, smiling at her weakly. The smile was not returned.\n\n\n \"Doctor Georges came,\" she told him. \"He signed for the—\" She stopped\n to stare at him. \"Darling, your face! What happened?\"", "\"I thought perhaps you could help me fake a substitution. It's a K-48\n series, five-year-old, three-year set. Do you have one in the pound\n that's not claimed?\"\n\n\n Norris thought for a moment. \"I think I have\none\n. You're welcome to\n it, Doctor, but you can't fake a serial number. She'll know it. And\n even though they look exactly alike, the new one won't recognize her.\n It'll be spooky.\"\n\n\n There was a long pause, followed by a sigh. \"I'll try it anyway. Can I\n come get the animal now?\"\n\n\n \"I'm on the highway—\"\n\n\n \"Please, Norris! This is urgent. That woman will lose her mind\n completely if—\"\n\n\n \"All right, I'll call my wife and tell her to open the pound for you.\n Pick out the K-48 and sign for it. And listen—\"", "Norris frowned at the last sentence. His district covered about two\n hundred square miles. Its replacement-quota of new neutroids was around\n three hundred animals a month. He tried to estimate how many of July's\n influx had been K-99s from Bermuda Factory. Forty, at least. Could he\n do it in a week? And there were only eleven empty neutroid cages in his\n kennel. The other forty-nine were occupied by the previous inspector's\n \"unclaimed\" inventory—awaiting destruction.\n\n\n He wadded the memo in his pocket, then nosed the truck onto the highway\n and headed toward Wylo City and the district wholesale offices of\n Anthropos, Inc. They should be able to give him a list of all July's\n Bermuda K-99 serial numbers that had entered his territory, together\n with the retailers to whom the animals had been sold. A week's deadline\n for finding and testing forty neutroids would put him in a tight\n squeeze.", "\"They are. I told her she had the wrong neutroid, but she got mad. Went\n and got the sales receipt. It checked with her newt, and it was from\n O'Reilley's pet shop—right place, wrong number. I just don't get it.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing to worry about, is it Terry?\"\n\n\n He looked at her peculiarly. \"Ever think what might happen if someone\n started a black market in neutroids?\"\n\n\n They finished the meal in silence. After lunch he went out again to\n gather up the rest of the group. By four o'clock, he had gotten all\n that were to be had without the threat of a warrant. The screams and\n pleas and tears of the owners left him gloomily despising himself.", "\"You meet up with a lot of unpleasantness in this business, don't you?\"\n\n\n \"Lot of unpleasant emotions tangled up in it,\" he admitted.\n\n\n \"I know. Well, supper's been keeping hot for two hours. Shall we eat?\"\nThey went to bed at midnight, but it was after one when he became\n certain that his wife was asleep. He lay in darkness for a time,\n listening to her even breathing. Then he cautiously eased himself out\n of bed and tiptoed quietly through the door, carrying his shoes and\n trousers. He put them on in the kitchen and stole silently out to the\n kennels. A half moon hung low in a misty sky, and the wind was chilly\n out of the north.\n\n\n He went into the neutroid room and flicked a switch. A few sleepy\n chatters greeted the light.", "\"Leave the book here and\nI'll\ncheck it,\" Norris offered.\n\n\n But O'Reilley was already limping quickly up the stairs. He seemed not\n to hear. He shut the door behind him, and Norris heard the lock click.\n The bio-agent waited. Again the thought of a black market troubled him.\n Unauthorized neutroids could mean lots of trouble.", "Gingerly he touch the livid welts down the side of his cheek. \"Just\n scratched a little,\" he muttered. He pushed past her and went to the\n phone in the hall. He sat eying it distastefully for a moment, not\n liking what he had to do. Anne came to stand beside him and examine the\n scratches.\n\n\n Finally he lifted the phone and dialed the Wylo exchange. A grating\n mechanical voice answered, \"Locator center. Your party, please.\"\n\n\n \"Sheriff Yates,\" Norris grunted.\n\n\n The robot operator, which had on tape the working habits of each Wylo\n City citizen, began calling numbers. It found the off-duty sheriff on\n its third try, in a Wylo pool hall.\n\n\n \"I'm getting so I hate that infernal gadget,\" Yates grumbled. \"I think\n it's got me psyched. What do you want, Norris?\"", "He kept his face averted. Her fingers traced a last stroke. Then she\n padded quietly back to the bedroom. He lay awake until dawn, knowing\n that it would never be all right, neither the creating nor the killing,\n until he—and the whole world—completely lost sanity. And then\n everything would be all right, only it still wouldn't make sense.\nAnne was asleep when he left the house. The night mist had gathered\n into clouds that made a gloomy morning of it. He drove on out in the\n kennel-truck, meaning to get the rest of the Bermuda-K-99s so that he\n could begin his testing.", "You will immediately begin a systematic and thorough survey of all\n animals whose serial numbers fall in the Bermuda-K-99 series for\n birth dates during July 2234. This is in connection with the Delmont\n Negligency Case. Seize all animals in this category, impound, and run\n proper sections of normalcy tests. Watch for mental and glandular\n deviation. Delmont has confessed to passing only one non-standard\n unit, but there may be others. He disclaims memory of deviant's serial\n number. This could be a ruse to bring a stop to investigations when\n one animal is found. Be thorough.\n\n\n If allowed to reach age-set or adulthood, such a deviant could be\n dangerous to its owner or to others. Hold all seized K-99s who show\n the slightest abnormality in the normalcy tests. Forward to central\n lab. Return standard units to their owners. Accomplish entire survey\n project within seven days.\nC. Franklin" ] ]
train	27110	[ "Why does Loy Chuk want to bring the mummy back to life?", "How did Ned become a mummy?", "Why did Loy Chuk's people live underground?", "How does Loy Chuk communicate with Ned?", "How does Loy Chuk bring the mummy to life?", "Why can't Loy Chuk use time travel to send Ned back to Earth before his death?", "Why does Loy Chuk build an artificial environment for Ned?", "How did Loy Chuk's team find Ned at the bottom of the Pit?" ]	[ [ "Loy Chuk wants to experiment on the man.", "Loy Chuk wants to study the man.", "Loy Chuk thinks, if he can find a female specimen, he can restart the human race.", "Loy Chuk just wants to prove it can be done." ], [ "Loy Chuk's workers wrapped Ned's body in strips of cloth to preserve it in transport.", "The earth became a desert wasteland. All the moisture was leached from the corpse.", "A combination of the alkali and mud his body had been soaked in. Also, the years of dryness after the world became a desert.", "The body had been devoid of moisture for a million years." ], [ "Subterranean passages protect against desert sand storms.", "Subterranean passages protect against larger predators.", "Loy Chuk comes from a rodent species. Rodents usually live in underground burrows.", "The temperature above ground at night is very cold." ], [ "Loy Chuk communicates with Ned through telepathy.", "Loy Chuk has a device that translates his speech into English.", "Loy Chuk has a device that lets him speak English.", "Loy Chuk has a device that converts his thoughts into English." ], [ "While rehydrating the body, Loy Chuk sent electricity into the body using a metal helmet.", "After rehydrating the body, Loy Chuk sent electricity into the body using a metal helmet.", "While rehydrating the body, Loy Chuk used electrodes to send energy throughout the body.", "After rehydrating the body, Loy Chuk used electrodes to send energy throughout the body." ], [ "The government of Kar-Rah turned down Loy Chuk's request to use time travel.", "There is no such thing as time travel.", "No one has figured out time travel.", "Humans took the secrets of time travel with them when they left Earth." ], [ "He needs to keep Ned calm. If Ned believes himself to back in his own time, he will remain calm.", "He realizes Ned is mentally unstable from the trauma of being brought back to life. He doesn't want Ned to commit suicide.", "He needs a habitat for Ned until they can figure out time travel.", "He needs a habitat for Ned, so he can study Ned in a natural setting." ], [ "The workers noticed red debris.", "The workers noticed a flaky rust formation.", "The workers noticed a glint of metal.", "The workers found him during an excavation." ] ]	[ 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "The mummy was taken to Loy\n Chuk's laboratory, a short distance\n below the surface. Here at\n once, the scientist began his\n work. The body of the ancient\n man was put in a large vat.\n Fluids submerged it, slowly\n soaking from that hardened flesh\n the alkali that had preserved it\n for so long. The fluid was\n changed often, until woody muscles\n and other tissues became\n pliable once more.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "was simple—alkali. A mineral\n saturation that had held time\n and change in stasis. A perfect\n preservative for organic tissue,\n aided probably during most of\n those passing eras by desert dryness.\n The Dakotas had turned\n arid very swiftly. This body was\n not a mere fossil. It was a\n mummy.\n\"Kaalleee!\" Man, that meant.\n Not the star-conquering demi-gods,\n but the ancestral stock\n that had built the first\n machines on Earth, and in the\n early Twenty-first Century, the\n first interplanetary rockets. No\n wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers\n were happy in their", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "Ned Vince made a last effort\n to control himself. His knuckles\n tightened on the edge of the vat.\n \"I don't know what you've been\n talking about,\" he grated wildly.\n \"But I want to get out of here!\n I want to go back where I came\n from! Do you understand—whoever,\n or whatever you are?\"\n\n\n Loy Chuk pressed more keys.\n \"But you can't go back to the\n Twentieth Century,\" said the\n box. \"Nor is there any better\n place for you to be now, than\n Kar-Rah. You are the only man\n left on Earth. Those men that\n exist in other star systems are\n not really your kind anymore,\n though their forefathers originated\n on this planet. They have\n gone far beyond you in evolution.\n To them you would be only a\n senseless curiosity. You are\n much better off with my people—our\n minds are much more like\n yours. We will take care of you,\n and make you comfortable....\"", "A wave of intolerable homesickness\n came over him as he\n sensed the distances of time that\n had passed—those inconceivable\n eons, separating himself from\n his friends, from Betty, from almost\n everything that was familiar.\n He started to run, away\n from those glittering rodent\n eyes. He sensed death in that\n cold sea-bottom, but what of it?\n What reason did he have left to\n live? He'd be only a museum\n piece here, a thing to be caged\n and studied....", "For Ned Vince, timeless eternity\n ended like a gradual fading\n mist. When he could see clearly\n again, he experienced that inevitable\n shock of vast change\n around him. Though it had been\n dehydrated, his brain had been\n kept perfectly intact through the\n ages, and now it was restored.\n So his memories were as vivid as\n yesterday." ], [ "The mummy was taken to Loy\n Chuk's laboratory, a short distance\n below the surface. Here at\n once, the scientist began his\n work. The body of the ancient\n man was put in a large vat.\n Fluids submerged it, slowly\n soaking from that hardened flesh\n the alkali that had preserved it\n for so long. The fluid was\n changed often, until woody muscles\n and other tissues became\n pliable once more.", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "For Ned Vince, timeless eternity\n ended like a gradual fading\n mist. When he could see clearly\n again, he experienced that inevitable\n shock of vast change\n around him. Though it had been\n dehydrated, his brain had been\n kept perfectly intact through the\n ages, and now it was restored.\n So his memories were as vivid as\n yesterday.", "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "Ned Vince was still dimly conscious\n when that black, quiet\n pool geysered around him in a\n mighty splash. He had only a\n dazing welt on his forehead, and\n a gag of terror in his throat.\n\n\n Movement was slower now, as\n he began to sink, trapped inside\n his wrecked car. Nothing that he\n could imagine could mean doom\n more certainly than this. The Pit\n was a tremendously deep pocket\n in the ground, spring-fed. The\n edges of that almost bottomless\n pool were caked with a rim of\n white—for the water, on which\n dead birds so often floated, was\n surcharged with alkali. As that\n heavy, natronous liquid rushed\n up through the openings and\n cracks beneath his feet, Ned\n Vince knew that his friends and\n his family would never see his\n body again, lost beyond recovery\n in this abyss.", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "was simple—alkali. A mineral\n saturation that had held time\n and change in stasis. A perfect\n preservative for organic tissue,\n aided probably during most of\n those passing eras by desert dryness.\n The Dakotas had turned\n arid very swiftly. This body was\n not a mere fossil. It was a\n mummy.\n\"Kaalleee!\" Man, that meant.\n Not the star-conquering demi-gods,\n but the ancestral stock\n that had built the first\n machines on Earth, and in the\n early Twenty-first Century, the\n first interplanetary rockets. No\n wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers\n were happy in their", "The nervous terror of the unknown\n was on him. Feeble and\n dizzy after his weird resurrection,\n which he could not understand,\n remembering as he did\n that moment of sinking to certain\n death in the pool at Pit\n Bend, he caught the edge of the\n transparent vat, and pulled himself\n to a sitting posture. There\n was a muffled murmur around\n him, as of some vast, un-Earthly\n metropolis.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Ned Vince....\"", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "Yet, through that crystalline\n vat in which he lay, he could see\n a broad, low room, in which he\n could barely have stood erect. He\n saw instruments and equipment\n whose weird shapes suggested\n alienness, and knowledge beyond\n the era he had known! The walls\n were lavender and phosphorescent.\n Fossil bone-fragments were\n mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur\n bones, some of them\n seemed, from their size. But\n there was a complete skeleton of\n a dog, too, and the skeleton of a\n man, and a second man-skeleton\n that was not quite human. Its\n neck-vertebrae were very thick\n and solid, its shoulders were\n wide, and its skull was gigantic.\n\n\n All this weirdness had a violent\n effect on Ned Vince—a sudden,\n nostalgic panic. Something\n was fearfully wrong!", "\"Why, Ned,\" she chuckled.\n \"You look as though you've been\n dreaming, and just woke up!\"\n\n\n He grimaced ruefully as she\n approached. With a kind of fierce\n gratitude, he took her in his\n arms. Yes, she was just like\n always.\n\n\n \"I guess I\nwas\ndreaming,\n Betty,\" he whispered, feeling\n that mighty sense of relief. \"I\n must have fallen asleep at the\n bench, here, and had a nightmare.\n I thought I had an accident\n at Pit Bend—and that a\n lot of worse things happened....\n But it wasn't true ...\"\n\n\n Ned Vince's mind, over which\n there was still an elusive fog that\n he did not try to shake off, accepted\n apparent facts simply.", "The words themselves, and the\n way they were assembled, were\n old, familiar friends. But the\n tone was wrong. It was high,\n shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical.\n Ned's gaze searched for the\n source of the voice—located the\n black box just outside of his\n crystal vat. From that box the\n voice seemed to have originated.\n Before it crouched a small,\n brownish animal with a bulging\n head. The animal's tiny-fingered\n paws—hands they were, really—were\n touching rows of keys.\n\n\n To Ned Vince, it was all utterly\n insane and incomprehensible.\n A rodent, looking like a prairie dog,\n a little; but plainly possessing\n a high order of intelligence.\n And a voice whose soothingly\n familiar words were more repugnant\n somehow, simply because\n they could never belong in a\n place as eerie as this.", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "But Ned Vince wasn't listening,\n now. \"You are the only\n man left on Earth.\" That had\n been enough for him to hear. He\n didn't more than half believe it.\n His mind was too confused for\n conviction about anything. Everything\n he saw and felt and\n heard might be some kind of\n nightmare. But then it might all\n be real instead, and that was\n abysmal horror. Ned was no\n coward—death and danger of\n any ordinary Earthly kind, he\n could have faced bravely. But the\n loneliness here, and the utter\n strangeness, were hideous like\n being stranded alone on another\n world!", "Dazzled, and befuddled by his\n own rash speed, Ned Vince had\n only swift young reflexes to rely\n on to avoid a fearful, telescoping\n collision. He flicked his wheel\n smoothly to the right; but the\n County Highway Commission\n hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened\n gravel at the Bend.\nAn incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures.\nNed could scarcely have chosen\n a worse place to start sliding and\n spinning. His car hit the white-painted\n wooden rail sideways,\n crashed through, tumbled down\n a steep slope, struck a huge boulder,\n bounced up a little, and\n arced outward, falling as gracefully\n as a swan-diver toward the\n inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet\n beneath...." ], [ "Beyond the eastern rim of the\n continent, the plain dipped downward\n steeply. The white of dried\n salt was on the hills, but there\n was a little green growth here,\n too. The dead sea-bottom of the\n vanished Atlantic was not as\n dead as the highlands.\n\n\n Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah,\n the city of the rodents,\n came into view—a crystalline\n maze of low, bubble-like structures,\n glinting in the red sunshine.\n But this was only its surface\n aspect. Loy Chuk's people\n had built their homes mostly underground,\n since the beginning\n of their foggy evolution. Besides,\n in this latter day, the\n nights were very cold, the shelter\n of subterranean passages and\n rooms was welcome.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "His heart was pounding heavily,\n and his eyes were wide. He\n looked across this eerie room.\n There was a ramp there at the\n other side, leading upward instead\n of a stairway. Fierce impulse\n to escape this nameless\n lair, to try to learn the facts for\n himself, possessed him. He\n bounded out of the vat, and\n with head down, dashed for the\n ramp.\nHe had to go most of the way\n on his hands and knees, for the\n up-slanting passage was low. Excited\n animal chucklings around\n him, and the occasional touch of\n a furry body, hurried his feverish\n scrambling. But he emerged\n at last at the surface.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "He crouched there on his\n haunches, at the dry bottom of\n the Pit. The breeze rumpled his\n long, brown fur. He wasn't very\n different in appearance from his\n ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps,\n as he squatted there in that antique\n stance of his kind. His tail\n was short and furred, his undersides\n creamy. White whiskers\n spread around his inquisitive,\n pink-tipped snout.\n\n\n But his cranium bulged up and\n forward between shrewd, beady\n eyes, betraying the slow heritage\n of time, of survival of the fittest,\n of evolution. He could think and\n dream and invent, and the civilization\n of his kind was already\n far beyond that of the ancient\n Twentieth Century.", "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "The mummy was taken to Loy\n Chuk's laboratory, a short distance\n below the surface. Here at\n once, the scientist began his\n work. The body of the ancient\n man was put in a large vat.\n Fluids submerged it, slowly\n soaking from that hardened flesh\n the alkali that had preserved it\n for so long. The fluid was\n changed often, until woody muscles\n and other tissues became\n pliable once more.", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "was simple—alkali. A mineral\n saturation that had held time\n and change in stasis. A perfect\n preservative for organic tissue,\n aided probably during most of\n those passing eras by desert dryness.\n The Dakotas had turned\n arid very swiftly. This body was\n not a mere fossil. It was a\n mummy.\n\"Kaalleee!\" Man, that meant.\n Not the star-conquering demi-gods,\n but the ancestral stock\n that had built the first\n machines on Earth, and in the\n early Twenty-first Century, the\n first interplanetary rockets. No\n wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers\n were happy in their" ], [ "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "The words themselves, and the\n way they were assembled, were\n old, familiar friends. But the\n tone was wrong. It was high,\n shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical.\n Ned's gaze searched for the\n source of the voice—located the\n black box just outside of his\n crystal vat. From that box the\n voice seemed to have originated.\n Before it crouched a small,\n brownish animal with a bulging\n head. The animal's tiny-fingered\n paws—hands they were, really—were\n touching rows of keys.\n\n\n To Ned Vince, it was all utterly\n insane and incomprehensible.\n A rodent, looking like a prairie dog,\n a little; but plainly possessing\n a high order of intelligence.\n And a voice whose soothingly\n familiar words were more repugnant\n somehow, simply because\n they could never belong in a\n place as eerie as this.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Loy jabbed buttons on the\n black box. \"Yes, Ned Vince,\"\n said the sonic apparatus. \"Time-travel.\n Perhaps that is the only\n thing to do—to send you back\n to your own period of history.\n For I see that you will never be\n yourself, here. It will be hard to\n accomplish, but we'll try. Now\n I shall put you under an anesthetic....\"\n\n\n Ned felt better immediately,\n for there was real hope now,\n where there had been none before.\n Maybe he'd be back in his\n home-town of Harwich again.\n Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop,\n there. And the trees greening\n out in Spring. Maybe he'd\n be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley,\n soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny\n hypo-needle bit into his arm....", "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "But Ned Vince wasn't listening,\n now. \"You are the only\n man left on Earth.\" That had\n been enough for him to hear. He\n didn't more than half believe it.\n His mind was too confused for\n conviction about anything. Everything\n he saw and felt and\n heard might be some kind of\n nightmare. But then it might all\n be real instead, and that was\n abysmal horror. Ned was no\n coward—death and danger of\n any ordinary Earthly kind, he\n could have faced bravely. But the\n loneliness here, and the utter\n strangeness, were hideous like\n being stranded alone on another\n world!", "Ned Vince made a last effort\n to control himself. His knuckles\n tightened on the edge of the vat.\n \"I don't know what you've been\n talking about,\" he grated wildly.\n \"But I want to get out of here!\n I want to go back where I came\n from! Do you understand—whoever,\n or whatever you are?\"\n\n\n Loy Chuk pressed more keys.\n \"But you can't go back to the\n Twentieth Century,\" said the\n box. \"Nor is there any better\n place for you to be now, than\n Kar-Rah. You are the only man\n left on Earth. Those men that\n exist in other star systems are\n not really your kind anymore,\n though their forefathers originated\n on this planet. They have\n gone far beyond you in evolution.\n To them you would be only a\n senseless curiosity. You are\n much better off with my people—our\n minds are much more like\n yours. We will take care of you,\n and make you comfortable....\"", "\"Why, Ned,\" she chuckled.\n \"You look as though you've been\n dreaming, and just woke up!\"\n\n\n He grimaced ruefully as she\n approached. With a kind of fierce\n gratitude, he took her in his\n arms. Yes, she was just like\n always.\n\n\n \"I guess I\nwas\ndreaming,\n Betty,\" he whispered, feeling\n that mighty sense of relief. \"I\n must have fallen asleep at the\n bench, here, and had a nightmare.\n I thought I had an accident\n at Pit Bend—and that a\n lot of worse things happened....\n But it wasn't true ...\"\n\n\n Ned Vince's mind, over which\n there was still an elusive fog that\n he did not try to shake off, accepted\n apparent facts simply.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success." ], [ "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "The mummy was taken to Loy\n Chuk's laboratory, a short distance\n below the surface. Here at\n once, the scientist began his\n work. The body of the ancient\n man was put in a large vat.\n Fluids submerged it, slowly\n soaking from that hardened flesh\n the alkali that had preserved it\n for so long. The fluid was\n changed often, until woody muscles\n and other tissues became\n pliable once more.", "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "was simple—alkali. A mineral\n saturation that had held time\n and change in stasis. A perfect\n preservative for organic tissue,\n aided probably during most of\n those passing eras by desert dryness.\n The Dakotas had turned\n arid very swiftly. This body was\n not a mere fossil. It was a\n mummy.\n\"Kaalleee!\" Man, that meant.\n Not the star-conquering demi-gods,\n but the ancestral stock\n that had built the first\n machines on Earth, and in the\n early Twenty-first Century, the\n first interplanetary rockets. No\n wonder Loy Chuk and his co-workers\n were happy in their", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "His heart was pounding heavily,\n and his eyes were wide. He\n looked across this eerie room.\n There was a ramp there at the\n other side, leading upward instead\n of a stairway. Fierce impulse\n to escape this nameless\n lair, to try to learn the facts for\n himself, possessed him. He\n bounded out of the vat, and\n with head down, dashed for the\n ramp.\nHe had to go most of the way\n on his hands and knees, for the\n up-slanting passage was low. Excited\n animal chucklings around\n him, and the occasional touch of\n a furry body, hurried his feverish\n scrambling. But he emerged\n at last at the surface.", "For Ned Vince, timeless eternity\n ended like a gradual fading\n mist. When he could see clearly\n again, he experienced that inevitable\n shock of vast change\n around him. Though it had been\n dehydrated, his brain had been\n kept perfectly intact through the\n ages, and now it was restored.\n So his memories were as vivid as\n yesterday.", "The ripples that had ruffled\n the surface waters in the Pit,\n quieted again to glassy smoothness.\n The eternal stars shone\n calmly. The geologic Dakota\n hills, which might have seen the\n dinosaurs, still bulked along the\n highway. Time, the Brother of\n Death, and the Father of\n Change, seemed to wait....\n\"Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik,\n tik!... Kaalleee!...\"\n\n\n The excited cry, which no human\n throat could quite have duplicated\n accurately, arose thinly\n from the depths of a powder-dry\n gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable\n antiquity. The noon-day\n Sun was red and huge. The\n air was tenuous, dehydrated,\n chill.\n\n\n \"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik,\n tik!...\"" ], [ "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "Loy jabbed buttons on the\n black box. \"Yes, Ned Vince,\"\n said the sonic apparatus. \"Time-travel.\n Perhaps that is the only\n thing to do—to send you back\n to your own period of history.\n For I see that you will never be\n yourself, here. It will be hard to\n accomplish, but we'll try. Now\n I shall put you under an anesthetic....\"\n\n\n Ned felt better immediately,\n for there was real hope now,\n where there had been none before.\n Maybe he'd be back in his\n home-town of Harwich again.\n Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop,\n there. And the trees greening\n out in Spring. Maybe he'd\n be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley,\n soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny\n hypo-needle bit into his arm....", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "Ned Vince made a last effort\n to control himself. His knuckles\n tightened on the edge of the vat.\n \"I don't know what you've been\n talking about,\" he grated wildly.\n \"But I want to get out of here!\n I want to go back where I came\n from! Do you understand—whoever,\n or whatever you are?\"\n\n\n Loy Chuk pressed more keys.\n \"But you can't go back to the\n Twentieth Century,\" said the\n box. \"Nor is there any better\n place for you to be now, than\n Kar-Rah. You are the only man\n left on Earth. Those men that\n exist in other star systems are\n not really your kind anymore,\n though their forefathers originated\n on this planet. They have\n gone far beyond you in evolution.\n To them you would be only a\n senseless curiosity. You are\n much better off with my people—our\n minds are much more like\n yours. We will take care of you,\n and make you comfortable....\"", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "But Ned Vince wasn't listening,\n now. \"You are the only\n man left on Earth.\" That had\n been enough for him to hear. He\n didn't more than half believe it.\n His mind was too confused for\n conviction about anything. Everything\n he saw and felt and\n heard might be some kind of\n nightmare. But then it might all\n be real instead, and that was\n abysmal horror. Ned was no\n coward—death and danger of\n any ordinary Earthly kind, he\n could have faced bravely. But the\n loneliness here, and the utter\n strangeness, were hideous like\n being stranded alone on another\n world!", "For Ned Vince, timeless eternity\n ended like a gradual fading\n mist. When he could see clearly\n again, he experienced that inevitable\n shock of vast change\n around him. Though it had been\n dehydrated, his brain had been\n kept perfectly intact through the\n ages, and now it was restored.\n So his memories were as vivid as\n yesterday.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "\"The Kaalleee believes himself\n home,\" Loy was thinking. \"He\n will survive and be happy. But\n there was no other way. Time is\n an Eternal Wall. Our archeological\n researches among the cities\n of the supermen show the truth.\n Even they, who once ruled Earth,\n never escaped from the present\n by so much as an instant....\"\nTHE END\nPRINTED IN U. S. A.\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nAmazing Stories\nApril 1956 and\n was first published in\nAmazing Stories\nNovember 1942.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "A horde of small, grey-furred\n beings and their machines, toiled\n for many days.\nNed Vince's mind swam\n gradually out of the blur that\n had enveloped it. He was wandering\n aimlessly about in a familiar\n room. The girders of the\n roof above were of red-painted\n steel. His tool-benches were\n there, greasy and littered with\n metal filings, just as they had\n always been. He had a tractor to\n repair, and a seed-drill. Outside\n of the machine-shop, the old,\n familiar yellow sun was shining.\n Across the street was the small\n brown house, where he lived.\n\n\n With a sudden startlement, he\n saw Betty Moore in the doorway.\n She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous\n smile curved her lips.\n As though she had succeeded in\n creeping up on him, for a surprise." ], [ "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "He did not know anything\n about the invisible radiations\n beating down upon him, soothing\n and dimming his brain, so that\n it would never question or doubt,\n or observe too closely the incongruous\n circumstances that must\n often appear. The lack of traffic\n in the street without, for instance—and\n the lack of people\n besides himself and Betty.\n\n\n He didn't know that this machine-shop\n was built from his\n own memories of the original.\n He didn't know that this Betty\n was of the same origin—a miraculous\n fabrication of metal\n and energy-units and soft plastic.\n The trees outside were only\n lantern-slide illusions.\n\n\n It was all built inside a great,\n opaque dome. But there were\n hidden television systems, too.\n Thus Loy Chuk's kind could\n study this ancient man—this\n Kaalleee. Thus, their motives\n were mostly selfish.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Ned Vince made a last effort\n to control himself. His knuckles\n tightened on the edge of the vat.\n \"I don't know what you've been\n talking about,\" he grated wildly.\n \"But I want to get out of here!\n I want to go back where I came\n from! Do you understand—whoever,\n or whatever you are?\"\n\n\n Loy Chuk pressed more keys.\n \"But you can't go back to the\n Twentieth Century,\" said the\n box. \"Nor is there any better\n place for you to be now, than\n Kar-Rah. You are the only man\n left on Earth. Those men that\n exist in other star systems are\n not really your kind anymore,\n though their forefathers originated\n on this planet. They have\n gone far beyond you in evolution.\n To them you would be only a\n senseless curiosity. You are\n much better off with my people—our\n minds are much more like\n yours. We will take care of you,\n and make you comfortable....\"", "The words themselves, and the\n way they were assembled, were\n old, familiar friends. But the\n tone was wrong. It was high,\n shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical.\n Ned's gaze searched for the\n source of the voice—located the\n black box just outside of his\n crystal vat. From that box the\n voice seemed to have originated.\n Before it crouched a small,\n brownish animal with a bulging\n head. The animal's tiny-fingered\n paws—hands they were, really—were\n touching rows of keys.\n\n\n To Ned Vince, it was all utterly\n insane and incomprehensible.\n A rodent, looking like a prairie dog,\n a little; but plainly possessing\n a high order of intelligence.\n And a voice whose soothingly\n familiar words were more repugnant\n somehow, simply because\n they could never belong in a\n place as eerie as this.", "Loy jabbed buttons on the\n black box. \"Yes, Ned Vince,\"\n said the sonic apparatus. \"Time-travel.\n Perhaps that is the only\n thing to do—to send you back\n to your own period of history.\n For I see that you will never be\n yourself, here. It will be hard to\n accomplish, but we'll try. Now\n I shall put you under an anesthetic....\"\n\n\n Ned felt better immediately,\n for there was real hope now,\n where there had been none before.\n Maybe he'd be back in his\n home-town of Harwich again.\n Maybe he'd see the old machine-shop,\n there. And the trees greening\n out in Spring. Maybe he'd\n be seeing Betty Moore in Hurley,\n soon.... Ned relaxed, as a tiny\n hypo-needle bit into his arm....", "But Ned Vince wasn't listening,\n now. \"You are the only\n man left on Earth.\" That had\n been enough for him to hear. He\n didn't more than half believe it.\n His mind was too confused for\n conviction about anything. Everything\n he saw and felt and\n heard might be some kind of\n nightmare. But then it might all\n be real instead, and that was\n abysmal horror. Ned was no\n coward—death and danger of\n any ordinary Earthly kind, he\n could have faced bravely. But the\n loneliness here, and the utter\n strangeness, were hideous like\n being stranded alone on another\n world!", "Ned Vince was still dimly conscious\n when that black, quiet\n pool geysered around him in a\n mighty splash. He had only a\n dazing welt on his forehead, and\n a gag of terror in his throat.\n\n\n Movement was slower now, as\n he began to sink, trapped inside\n his wrecked car. Nothing that he\n could imagine could mean doom\n more certainly than this. The Pit\n was a tremendously deep pocket\n in the ground, spring-fed. The\n edges of that almost bottomless\n pool were caked with a rim of\n white—for the water, on which\n dead birds so often floated, was\n surcharged with alkali. As that\n heavy, natronous liquid rushed\n up through the openings and\n cracks beneath his feet, Ned\n Vince knew that his friends and\n his family would never see his\n body again, lost beyond recovery\n in this abyss.", "He stood there panting in that\n frigid, rarefied air. It was night.\n The Moon was a gigantic, pock-marked\n bulk. The constellations\n were unrecognizable. The rodent\n city was a glowing expanse of\n shallow, crystalline domes, set\n among odd, scrub trees and\n bushes. The crags loomed on all\n sides, all their jaggedness lost\n after a million years of erosion\n under an ocean that was gone.\n In that ghastly moonlight, the\n ground glistened with dry salt.\n\n\n \"Well, I guess it's all true,\n huh?\" Ned Vince muttered in a\n flat tone.\n\n\n Behind him he heard an excited,\n squeaky chattering. Rodents\n in pursuit. Looking back,\n he saw the pinpoint gleams of\n countless little eyes. Yes, he\n might as well be an exile on another\n planet—so changed had the\n Earth become.", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "A horde of small, grey-furred\n beings and their machines, toiled\n for many days.\nNed Vince's mind swam\n gradually out of the blur that\n had enveloped it. He was wandering\n aimlessly about in a familiar\n room. The girders of the\n roof above were of red-painted\n steel. His tool-benches were\n there, greasy and littered with\n metal filings, just as they had\n always been. He had a tractor to\n repair, and a seed-drill. Outside\n of the machine-shop, the old,\n familiar yellow sun was shining.\n Across the street was the small\n brown house, where he lived.\n\n\n With a sudden startlement, he\n saw Betty Moore in the doorway.\n She wore a blue dress, and a mischievous\n smile curved her lips.\n As though she had succeeded in\n creeping up on him, for a surprise.", "Yet, through that crystalline\n vat in which he lay, he could see\n a broad, low room, in which he\n could barely have stood erect. He\n saw instruments and equipment\n whose weird shapes suggested\n alienness, and knowledge beyond\n the era he had known! The walls\n were lavender and phosphorescent.\n Fossil bone-fragments were\n mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur\n bones, some of them\n seemed, from their size. But\n there was a complete skeleton of\n a dog, too, and the skeleton of a\n man, and a second man-skeleton\n that was not quite human. Its\n neck-vertebrae were very thick\n and solid, its shoulders were\n wide, and its skull was gigantic.\n\n\n All this weirdness had a violent\n effect on Ned Vince—a sudden,\n nostalgic panic. Something\n was fearfully wrong!" ], [ "Loy Chuk pressed more keys,\n and the box reproduced his answer:\n \"No, Ned, not nuts. Not a\n bit of it! There are just a lot of\n things that you've got to get\n used to, that's all. You drowned\n about a million years ago. I discovered\n your body. I brought you\n back to life. We have science\n that can do that. I'm Loy\n Chuk....\"\nIt took only a moment for the\n box to tell the full story in clear,\n bold, friendly terms. Thus Loy\n sought, with calm, human logic,\n to make his charge feel at home.\n Probably, though, he was a fool,\n to suppose that he could succeed,\n thus.", "Prison or a madhouse would\n be far better. He tried to get\n hold of his courage. But what\n was there to inspire it? Nothing!\n He laughed harshly as he\n ran, welcoming that bitter, killing\n cold. Nostalgia had him in\n its clutch, and there was no answer\n in his hell-world, lost beyond\n the barrier of the years....\nLoy Chuk and his followers\n presently came upon Ned Vince's\n unconscious form, a mile from\n the city of Kar-Rah. In a flying\n machine they took him back, and\n applied stimulants. He came to,\n in the same laboratory room as\n before. But he was firmly\n strapped to a low platform this\n time, so that he could not escape\n again. There he lay, helpless,\n until presently an idea occurred\n to him. It gave him a few crumbs\n of hope.\n\n\n \"Hey, somebody!\" he called.", "Ned Vince was still dimly conscious\n when that black, quiet\n pool geysered around him in a\n mighty splash. He had only a\n dazing welt on his forehead, and\n a gag of terror in his throat.\n\n\n Movement was slower now, as\n he began to sink, trapped inside\n his wrecked car. Nothing that he\n could imagine could mean doom\n more certainly than this. The Pit\n was a tremendously deep pocket\n in the ground, spring-fed. The\n edges of that almost bottomless\n pool were caked with a rim of\n white—for the water, on which\n dead birds so often floated, was\n surcharged with alkali. As that\n heavy, natronous liquid rushed\n up through the openings and\n cracks beneath his feet, Ned\n Vince knew that his friends and\n his family would never see his\n body again, lost beyond recovery\n in this abyss.", "Ned Vince did not know how\n Loy Chuk had probed his brain,\n with the aid of a pair of helmets,\n and the black box apparatus. He\n did not know that in the latter,\n his language, taken from his\n own revitalized mind, was recorded,\n and that Loy Chuk had\n only to press certain buttons to\n make the instrument express his\n thoughts in common, long-dead\n English. Loy, whose vocal organs\n were not human, would have had\n great difficulty speaking English\n words, anyway.", "As soon as Ned Vince passed\n into unconsciousness, Loy Chuk\n went to work once more, using\n that pair of brain-helmets again,\n exploring carefully the man's\n mind. After hours of research,\n he proceeded to prepare his\n plans. The government of Kar-Rah\n was a scientific oligarchy,\n of which Loy was a prime member.\n It would be easy to get the\n help he needed.", "Loy Chuk and his fellow workers\n were gathered, tense and\n gleeful, around the things their\n digging had exposed to the daylight.\n There was a gob of junk—scarcely\n more than an irregular\n formation of flaky rust. But imbedded\n in it was a huddled form,\n brown and hard as old wood. The\n dry mud that had encased it\n like an airtight coffin, had by\n now been chipped away by the\n tiny investigators; but soiled\n clothing still clung to it, after\n perhaps a million years. Metal\n had gone into decay—yes. But\n not this body. The answer to this", "Loy, though, was not observing,\n now. He had wandered far\n out into cold, sad sea-bottom, to\n ponder. He squeaked and chatted\n to himself, contemplating the\n magnificent, inexorable march of\n the ages. He remembered the ancient\n ruins, left by the final supermen.", "Ned's dark hair was wildly\n awry. His gaunt, young face\n held befuddled terror. He gasped\n in the thin atmosphere. \"I've\n gone nuts,\" he pronounced with\n a curious calm. \"Stark—starin'—nuts....\"\nLoy's box, with its recorded\n English words and its sonic detectors,\n could translate for its\n master, too. As the man spoke,\n Loy read the illuminated symbols\n in his own language, flashed\n on a frosted crystal plate before\n him. Thus he knew what Ned\n Vince was saying.", "Loy Chuk was a scientist. In\n common with all real scientists,\n regardless of the species from\n which they spring, he loved the\n subjects of his researches. He\n wanted this ancient man to live\n and to be happy. Or this creature\n would be of scant value for\n study.\n\n\n So Loy considered carefully\n what Ned Vince had suggested.\n Time-travel. Almost a legend. An\n assault upon an intangible wall\n that had baffled far keener wits\n than Loy's. But he was bent,\n now, on the well-being of this\n anachronism he had so miraculously\n resurrected—this human,\n this Kaalleee....", "\"Why, Ned,\" she chuckled.\n \"You look as though you've been\n dreaming, and just woke up!\"\n\n\n He grimaced ruefully as she\n approached. With a kind of fierce\n gratitude, he took her in his\n arms. Yes, she was just like\n always.\n\n\n \"I guess I\nwas\ndreaming,\n Betty,\" he whispered, feeling\n that mighty sense of relief. \"I\n must have fallen asleep at the\n bench, here, and had a nightmare.\n I thought I had an accident\n at Pit Bend—and that a\n lot of worse things happened....\n But it wasn't true ...\"\n\n\n Ned Vince's mind, over which\n there was still an elusive fog that\n he did not try to shake off, accepted\n apparent facts simply.", "\"You'd better get some rest,\n Ned Vince,\" came the answer\n from the black box. It was Loy\n Chuk speaking again.\n\n\n \"But listen!\" Ned protested.\n \"You know a lot more than we\n did in the Twentieth Century.\n And—well—there's that thing\n called time-travel, that I used to\n read about. Maybe you know how\n to make it work! Maybe you\n could send me back to my own\n time after all!\"\n\n\n Little Loy Chuk was in a\n black, discouraged mood, himself.\n He could understand the\n utter, sick dejection of this\n giant from the past, lost from\n his own kind. Probably insanity\n looming. In far less extreme circumstances\n than this, death from\n homesickness had come.", "But Loy silenced this fresh,\n eager chattering with a command.\n Work was always more\n substantial than cheering.\nWith infinite care—small,\n sharp hand-tools were used, now—the\n mummy of Ned Vince was\n disengaged from the worthless\n rust of his primitive automobile.\n With infinite care it was crated\n in a metal case, and hauled into\n the flying machine.\n\n\n Flashing flame, the latter\n arose, bearing the entire hundred\n members of the expedition.\n The craft shot eastward at bullet-like\n speed. The spreading\n continental plateau of North\n America seemed to crawl backward,\n beneath. A tremendous\n sand desert, marked with low,\n washed-down mountains, and the\n vague, angular, geometric\n mounds of human cities that\n were gone forever.", "At last Loy Chuk gave a soft,\n chirping signal. The chant of\n triumph ended, while instruments\n flicked in his tiny hands.\n The final instrument he used to\n test the mummy, looked like a\n miniature stereoscope, with complicated\n details. He held it over\n his eyes. On the tiny screen\n within, through the agency of\n focused X-rays, he saw magnified\n images of the internal organs\n of this ancient human\n corpse.", "Dazzled, and befuddled by his\n own rash speed, Ned Vince had\n only swift young reflexes to rely\n on to avoid a fearful, telescoping\n collision. He flicked his wheel\n smoothly to the right; but the\n County Highway Commission\n hadn't yet tarred the traffic-loosened\n gravel at the Bend.\nAn incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures.\nNed could scarcely have chosen\n a worse place to start sliding and\n spinning. His car hit the white-painted\n wooden rail sideways,\n crashed through, tumbled down\n a steep slope, struck a huge boulder,\n bounced up a little, and\n arced outward, falling as gracefully\n as a swan-diver toward the\n inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet\n beneath....", "The ripples that had ruffled\n the surface waters in the Pit,\n quieted again to glassy smoothness.\n The eternal stars shone\n calmly. The geologic Dakota\n hills, which might have seen the\n dinosaurs, still bulked along the\n highway. Time, the Brother of\n Death, and the Father of\n Change, seemed to wait....\n\"Kaalleee! Tik!... Tik, tik,\n tik!... Kaalleee!...\"\n\n\n The excited cry, which no human\n throat could quite have duplicated\n accurately, arose thinly\n from the depths of a powder-dry\n gulch, water-scarred from an inconceivable\n antiquity. The noon-day\n Sun was red and huge. The\n air was tenuous, dehydrated,\n chill.\n\n\n \"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik,\n tik!...\"", "\"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!...\"\n The sounds were not human.\n They were more like the chatter\n and wail of small desert animals.\n\n\n But there was a seeming paradox\n here in the depths of that\n gulch, too. The glint of metal,\n sharp and burnished. The flat,\n streamlined bulk of a flying machine,\n shiny and new. The bell-like\n muzzle of a strange excavator-apparatus,\n which seemed to\n depend on a blast of atoms to\n clear away rock and soil. Thus\n the gulch had been cleared of the\n accumulated rubbish of antiquity.\n Man, it seemed, had a successor,\n as ruler of the Earth.\n\n\n Loy Chuk had flown his geological\n expedition out from the\n far lowlands to the east, out\n from the city of Kar-Rah. And\n he was very happy now—flushed\n with a vast and unlooked-for\n success.", "The nervous terror of the unknown\n was on him. Feeble and\n dizzy after his weird resurrection,\n which he could not understand,\n remembering as he did\n that moment of sinking to certain\n death in the pool at Pit\n Bend, he caught the edge of the\n transparent vat, and pulled himself\n to a sitting posture. There\n was a muffled murmur around\n him, as of some vast, un-Earthly\n metropolis.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Ned Vince....\"", "His heart was pounding heavily,\n and his eyes were wide. He\n looked across this eerie room.\n There was a ramp there at the\n other side, leading upward instead\n of a stairway. Fierce impulse\n to escape this nameless\n lair, to try to learn the facts for\n himself, possessed him. He\n bounded out of the vat, and\n with head down, dashed for the\n ramp.\nHe had to go most of the way\n on his hands and knees, for the\n up-slanting passage was low. Excited\n animal chucklings around\n him, and the occasional touch of\n a furry body, hurried his feverish\n scrambling. But he emerged\n at last at the surface.", "What his probing gaze revealed\n to him, made his pleasure\n even greater than before. In\n twittering, chattering sounds, he\n communicated his further knowledge\n to his henchmen. Though\n devoid of moisture, the mummy\n was perfectly preserved, even to\n its brain cells! Medical and biological\n sciences were far advanced\n among Loy Chuk's kind.\n Perhaps, by the application of\n principles long known to them,\n this long-dead body could be\n made to live again! It might\n move, speak, remember its past!\n What a marvelous subject for\n study it would make, back there\n in the museums of Kar-Rah!\n\n\n \"Tik, tik, tik!...\"", "Then the more delicate processes\n began. Still submerged in\n liquid, the corpse was submitted\n to a flow of restorative energy,\n passing between complicated\n electrodes. The cells of antique\n flesh and brain gradually took on\n a chemical composition nearer to\n that of the life that they had\n once known.\nAt last the final liquid was\n drained away, and the mummy\n lay there, a mummy no more, but\n a pale, silent figure in its tatters\n of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd,\n metal-fabric helmet on its head,\n and a second, much smaller helmet\n on his own. Connected with\n this arrangement, was a black\n box of many uses. For hours he\n worked with his apparatus,\n studying, and guiding the recording\n instruments. The time\n passed swiftly.\n\n\n At last, eager and ready for\n whatever might happen now,\n Loy Chuk pushed another switch.\n With a cold, rosy flare, energy\n blazed around that moveless\n form." ] ]
train	51597	[ "Which of these is the best description of the narrator? ", "Which of these is true about the importance of alge to the Martians?", "What is not true about the surgeon's job?", "What does the narrator seem to think makes a good cook on a spacer?", "Which is the best description of the relationship between the Doc and the captain?", "Which is the best description of the relationship between the Doc and Bailey?", "Which is the best description of the impact of ketchup being a personal effect?", "Which of these best describes the captain?", "What likely happens after the story is over?", "Which of these best describes Bailey's personality?" ]	[ [ "A doctor who is also a food critic", "An angsty crew member who is always present in the mess hall", "A mutinous doctor who wants to run the ship himself", "A surgeon who happens to know some things about the history of food" ], [ "It is the only thing they can eat", "All of the spaceships are named after different species of alge", "Most of the economy is geared around growing and collecting alge", "The nickname for their species is inspired by the reliance on alge" ], [ "He takes care of the mental health and morale of the crew ", "He has to know when to offer alcohol as the appropriate remedy for a situation", "He is a sounding-board for those who need to complain", "He's the person to file grievances with when there are interpersonal issues" ], [ "Someone who can get food out as fast and as consistently as possible", "They can bring people together in conversations about food", "They are willing to be creative in addition to an attention to detail", "They are able to make meals to help the crewmates lose weight" ], [ "They are old friends and the Doc is happy to let poor behavior slide", "The Doc respects the captain's position but say something if he thinks he goes too far", "The Doc never puts up with the captain, which makes their relationship very tense", "The Doc is the official mediator between the captian and the rest of the crew" ], [ "They are friendly but butt heads a little bit with respect to others on the ship", "The Doc expects to be waited on by Bailey", "They don't interact at all, it's a very superficial relationship", "They are old friends and like to go for a drink together" ], [ "It showed how dedicated the captain was to his ploy to get the cook to be more creative", "It made the rest of the crew angry that they did not have condiments of their own", "It took away from the weight allowances of the rest of the crew, showing how selfish the captain is", "It showed how little the captain thought of the cook's abilities, if he expected to use all of the ketchup he brought" ], [ "He is a tempermental man who wants everyone to stay out of his way", "He has good intentions but always has a bad effect on those around him", "He is a sly but fair man who pushes his crew to do their best", "He is a pushy person who gets on people's bad sides but thinks he has good intentions" ], [ "The Doc has to treat the crew for food poisoning because they are not used to real meat", "Bailey is renowned for his culinary breakthrough, and his future restaurant is a success", "The crew goes down in history, but not for the culinary feat", "Bailey decides not to open a restaurant so he can continue cooking on ships " ], [ "He is timid and unable to stand up for himself with the captain", "He is a reasonable person with a lot of skill who does not appreciate being pushed", "He is determined and dedicated, wanting to show the captain what he can do", "He appreciates the external motivation from the crew to always improve his cooking" ] ]	[ 4, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 4, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "\"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with\n our food,\" the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of\n distaste. \"It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I\n never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils\n the meal.\"", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "\"Watch your noun,\" Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. \"Your adjectives are\n insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, you've gone too far,\" I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was\n scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.\n\n\n \"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's\n Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain,\" Winkelmann said.\n\n\n \"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you,\" I said. \"The other officers\n and the men have been more than satisfied with his work.\"", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "\"This, Belly-Robber!\" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and\n ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed\n the cap. \"Ketchup,\" he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's\n masterpiece. \"The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks.\"\n Lifting a hunk of the \"steak,\" streaming ketchup, to his mouth,\n Winkelmann chewed. \"Just the thing,\" he smiled.\n\n\n \"Damn you!\" Bailey shouted.\n\n\n Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.\n\n\n \"... Sir,\" Bailey added.", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.\nEach man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects\n besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As\n his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this\n ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of\n books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help\n him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a\n fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of\n spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,\n and a dozen others.", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.\n It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, \"Bailey,\n Robert,\" on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate\n shipmate \"Belly-Robber.\" It was Winkelmann who discussed\nhaut\n cuisine\nand the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our\n algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was\n Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any\n other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when" ], [ "The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the\n smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a\n hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite\n wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of\n oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the\n end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the\n glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling\n politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a\n breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of\n squeamishness.\nThough I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife", "Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in\n history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis\n to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with\n cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the\n hundred-and-first chapter of\nMoby Dick\n, a book spooled in the\n amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that\n no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more\n than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of\n Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a\n man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.", "his algaeal staff-of-life to become contaminated with a fast-growing\nSaccharomycodes\nyeast. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at\n Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into\n the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent\n bite he ate to a superior grade of\nsake\n. And for a third footnote to\n the ancient observation, \"God sends food, and the Devil sends cooks,\"\n Marsmen will recall what happened aboard my ship the\nCharles Partlow\n Sale\n.", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo\n compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the\nC. P. Sale\nno reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to\n work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons\n of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West\n and back. Recycling was the answer. The molecule of carbohydrate, fat,\n protein or mineral that didn't feed the crew fed the algae. And the\n algae fed us.\n\n\n All waste was used to fertilize our liquid fields. Even the stubble\n from our 2,680 shaves and the clippings from our 666 haircuts en route\n and back would be fed into the Chlorella tanks. Human hair is rich in\n essential amino acids.", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go\n into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in\n brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an\nersatz\nhot\n turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella\n turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy\n a grainy and delicious \"cornbread,\" and had extracted from his algae\n a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot \"bread\" with a\n genuinely dairy smell. \"Splendid, Bailey,\" I said.", "Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of\n the table and tenderly lifted a small \"steak\" onto each of our plates.\n \"Try it,\" he urged the Captain.\nCaptain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The\n color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell\n of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. \"Not\n too bad, Belly-Robber,\" he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed\n his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A\n kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a\n more reasonable man. \"But it still needs something ... something,\"\n Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.\n \"Aha! I have it!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Sir?\" Bailey asked.", "The\nSale\nblasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due\n in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking\n the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the\n human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir\n seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted\n in the\nmaria\nto squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had\n aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's\n Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,\n the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was\n Robert Bailey.", "\"That's better,\" Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said\n meditatively, \"Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have\n sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a\n bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber.\"\n\n\n \"But, Sir....\" Bailey began.\n\n\n \"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat\n to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic\n slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of\n this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in\n no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you\n understand, Belly-Robber?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,\n slave-driving....\"", "Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste\n of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by\n Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano\n and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,\n textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the\n slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.\n For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of\n the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,", "\"Only good food,\" Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised\n algae. He tapped his head with a finger. \"This—the brain that guides\n the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,\n Belly-Robber?\"\n\n\n Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. \"Yes, sir. But I really\n don't know what I can do to please you.\"\n\n\n \"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban\nHausfrau\nwith the\n vapors,\" Winkelmann said. \"I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums\n or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will\n keep my belly content and my brain alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British\n term Dumb Insolence.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "The product of Bailey's cerebrations was on the mess table at noon the\n next day. We were each served an individual head of lettuce, dressed\n with something very like vinegar and oil, spiced with tiny leaves of\n burnet. How Bailey had constructed those synthetic lettuces I can only\n guess: the hours spent preparing a green Chlorella paste, rolling and\n drying and shaping each artificial leaf, the fitting together of nine\n heads like crisp, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The\npièce de\n résistance\nwas again a \"hamburger steak;\" but this time the algaeal\n mass that made it up was buried in a rich, meaty gravy that was only\n faintly green. The essence-of-steak used in these Chlorella cutlets had\n been sprinkled with a lavish hand. Garlic was richly in evidence. \"It's\n so tender,\" the radioman joked, \"that I can hardly believe it's really\n steak.\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said.", "Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating\n tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,\n dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to\n see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of\n water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.\n This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a\n statement of the least fuel a man can run on.", "In the days when salt-sea sailors were charting islands and spearing\n seals, for example, the fo'c's'le hands called themselves Lobscousers,\n celebrating the liquid hash then prominent in the marine menu. The\n Limey sailor got the name of the anti-scorbutic citrus squeezed into\n his diet, a fruit known to us mariners of a more sophisticated age\n only as garnish for our groundside gin-and-tonic. And today we Marsmen\n are called Slimeheads, honoring in our title the\nChlorella\nand\nScenedesmus\nalgae that, by filling up the spaces within, open the\n road to the larger Space without.", "I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric\n warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of\n us with the small \"steaks.\" Each contained about a pound of dried\n Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched\n in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron\n skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut\n a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are\n limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the\n galley door. I gestured for him to join me. \"You've done it, Bailey,\"\n I said. \"Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is\n actually\ngood\n.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Doc,\" Bailey said.", "The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning\n offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a\n spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.\n Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.\nAjax\nfiasco, for example, in which a\n galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's\n shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from\n the\nAjax\nin deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think\n of the\nBenjo Maru\nincident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed" ], [ "\"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with\n our food,\" the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of\n distaste. \"It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I\n never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils\n the meal.\"", "The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the\n smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a\n hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite\n wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of\n oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the\n end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the\n glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling\n politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a\n breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of\n squeamishness.\nThough I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said.", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "The\nSale\nblasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due\n in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking\n the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the\n human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir\n seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted\n in the\nmaria\nto squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had\n aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's\n Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,\n the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was\n Robert Bailey.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go\n into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in\n brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an\nersatz\nhot\n turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella\n turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy\n a grainy and delicious \"cornbread,\" and had extracted from his algae\n a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot \"bread\" with a\n genuinely dairy smell. \"Splendid, Bailey,\" I said.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid.", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought." ], [ "Cooking aboard a spacer is a job combining the more frustrating\n tensions of biochemistry, applied mycology, high-speed farming,\n dietetics and sewage engineering. It's the Cook's responsibility to\n see that each man aboard gets each day no less than five pounds of\n water, two pounds of oxygen, and one-and-a-half pounds of dry food.\n This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. It's a\n statement of the least fuel a man can run on.", "\"Only good food,\" Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised\n algae. He tapped his head with a finger. \"This—the brain that guides\n the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,\n Belly-Robber?\"\n\n\n Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. \"Yes, sir. But I really\n don't know what I can do to please you.\"\n\n\n \"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban\nHausfrau\nwith the\n vapors,\" Winkelmann said. \"I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums\n or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will\n keep my belly content and my brain alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British\n term Dumb Insolence.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "The Ship's Cook, the man who accomplishes the daily miracle of turning\n offal into eatables, is in many ways the most vital man aboard a\n spacer. He can make morale or foment a mutiny. His power is paramount.\n Slimeheads remember the H. M. S.\nAjax\nfiasco, for example, in which a\n galleyman leveled his Chlorella tanks with heavy water from the ship's\n shielding. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from\n the\nAjax\nin deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. We think\n of the\nBenjo Maru\nincident, too, caused by a Ship's Cook who allowed", "Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.\nEach man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects\n besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As\n his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this\n ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of\n books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help\n him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a\n fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of\n spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,\n and a dozen others.", "I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go\n into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in\n brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an\nersatz\nhot\n turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella\n turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy\n a grainy and delicious \"cornbread,\" and had extracted from his algae\n a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot \"bread\" with a\n genuinely dairy smell. \"Splendid, Bailey,\" I said.", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the\n smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a\n hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite\n wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of\n oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the\n end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the\n glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling\n politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a\n breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of\n squeamishness.\nThough I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "GOURMET\nBy ALLEN KIM LANG\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine April 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThis was the endless problem of all\n \nspaceship cooks: He had to feed the men\n \ntomorrow on what they had eaten today!\nUnable to get out to the ballgame and a long way off from the girls,\n men on ships think about, talk about, bitch about their food. It's\n true that Woman remains a topic of thoughtful study, but discussion\n can never replace practice in an art. Food, on the other hand, is a\n challenge shipmen face three times a day, so central to their thoughts\n that a history of sea-faring can be read from a commissary list.", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid.", "I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric\n warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of\n us with the small \"steaks.\" Each contained about a pound of dried\n Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched\n in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron\n skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut\n a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are\n limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the\n galley door. I gestured for him to join me. \"You've done it, Bailey,\"\n I said. \"Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is\n actually\ngood\n.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Doc,\" Bailey said.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "\"Crew morale on the ship....\" I began.\n\n\n \"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova,\" Captain Winkelmann repeated.\nBailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical\n path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate\n the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned\n by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at\n mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. \"Convey my\n compliments to the Chef, please,\" the Captain would instruct one of\n the crew, \"and ask him to step down here a moment.\" And the Cook would\n cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius\n acidly called in question again.", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"" ], [ "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.\n It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, \"Bailey,\n Robert,\" on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate\n shipmate \"Belly-Robber.\" It was Winkelmann who discussed\nhaut\n cuisine\nand the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our\n algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was\n Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any\n other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid.", "\"Crew morale on the ship....\" I began.\n\n\n \"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova,\" Captain Winkelmann repeated.\nBailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical\n path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate\n the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned\n by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at\n mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. \"Convey my\n compliments to the Chef, please,\" the Captain would instruct one of\n the crew, \"and ask him to step down here a moment.\" And the Cook would\n cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius\n acidly called in question again.", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "\"Then he's beat the Captain at his game,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks,\" the crewman\n said.", "\"That's better,\" Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said\n meditatively, \"Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have\n sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a\n bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber.\"\n\n\n \"But, Sir....\" Bailey began.\n\n\n \"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat\n to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic\n slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of\n this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in\n no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you\n understand, Belly-Robber?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,\n slave-driving....\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "\"Watch your noun,\" Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. \"Your adjectives are\n insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, you've gone too far,\" I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was\n scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.\n\n\n \"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's\n Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain,\" Winkelmann said.\n\n\n \"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you,\" I said. \"The other officers\n and the men have been more than satisfied with his work.\"", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought." ], [ "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It\n was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. \"This\n is what I have to work with,\" he said. He tossed the stuff back into\n its bin. \"In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,\n we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never make Winkelmann happy,\" I said. \"Even the simultaneous\n death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up\n the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye\n from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook\n waved my gift aside. \"Not now, Doc,\" he said. \"I'm thinking about\n tomorrow's menu.\"", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go\n into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in\n brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an\nersatz\nhot\n turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella\n turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy\n a grainy and delicious \"cornbread,\" and had extracted from his algae\n a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot \"bread\" with a\n genuinely dairy smell. \"Splendid, Bailey,\" I said.", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "\"This, Belly-Robber!\" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and\n ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed\n the cap. \"Ketchup,\" he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's\n masterpiece. \"The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks.\"\n Lifting a hunk of the \"steak,\" streaming ketchup, to his mouth,\n Winkelmann chewed. \"Just the thing,\" he smiled.\n\n\n \"Damn you!\" Bailey shouted.\n\n\n Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.\n\n\n \"... Sir,\" Bailey added.", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said.", "The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.\n It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, \"Bailey,\n Robert,\" on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate\n shipmate \"Belly-Robber.\" It was Winkelmann who discussed\nhaut\n cuisine\nand the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our\n algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was\n Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any\n other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.", "Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd\n had much practice. \"I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,\"\n he said. \"I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the\n texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" Winkelmann growled. \"You intend that your latest mess\n should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Sir,\" Bailey said. \"Well, I squeezed the\n steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special\n seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal\n oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.\nVoila!\nI had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine\n meat.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable, Bailey,\" I said.", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"Only good food,\" Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised\n algae. He tapped his head with a finger. \"This—the brain that guides\n the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,\n Belly-Robber?\"\n\n\n Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. \"Yes, sir. But I really\n don't know what I can do to please you.\"\n\n\n \"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban\nHausfrau\nwith the\n vapors,\" Winkelmann said. \"I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums\n or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will\n keep my belly content and my brain alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British\n term Dumb Insolence.", "I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric\n warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of\n us with the small \"steaks.\" Each contained about a pound of dried\n Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched\n in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron\n skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut\n a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are\n limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the\n galley door. I gestured for him to join me. \"You've done it, Bailey,\"\n I said. \"Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is\n actually\ngood\n.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Doc,\" Bailey said." ], [ "\"That's better,\" Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said\n meditatively, \"Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have\n sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a\n bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber.\"\n\n\n \"But, Sir....\" Bailey began.\n\n\n \"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat\n to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic\n slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of\n this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in\n no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you\n understand, Belly-Robber?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,\n slave-driving....\"", "\"This, Belly-Robber!\" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and\n ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed\n the cap. \"Ketchup,\" he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's\n masterpiece. \"The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks.\"\n Lifting a hunk of the \"steak,\" streaming ketchup, to his mouth,\n Winkelmann chewed. \"Just the thing,\" he smiled.\n\n\n \"Damn you!\" Bailey shouted.\n\n\n Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.\n\n\n \"... Sir,\" Bailey added.", "\"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with\n our food,\" the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of\n distaste. \"It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I\n never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils\n the meal.\"", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "\"Then he's beat the Captain at his game,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks,\" the crewman\n said.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.\nEach man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects\n besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As\n his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this\n ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of\n books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help\n him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a\n fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of\n spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice,\n and a dozen others.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "\"Watch your noun,\" Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. \"Your adjectives are\n insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, you've gone too far,\" I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was\n scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.\n\n\n \"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's\n Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain,\" Winkelmann said.\n\n\n \"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you,\" I said. \"The other officers\n and the men have been more than satisfied with his work.\"", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in\n history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis\n to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with\n cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the\n hundred-and-first chapter of\nMoby Dick\n, a book spooled in the\n amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that\n no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more\n than a week from groundfall. A catalogue of sides of beef and heads of\n Leyden cheese and ankers of good Geneva would prove heavy reading for a\n man condemned to snack on the Chlorella-spawn of cis-Martian space.", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of\n the table and tenderly lifted a small \"steak\" onto each of our plates.\n \"Try it,\" he urged the Captain.\nCaptain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The\n color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell\n of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. \"Not\n too bad, Belly-Robber,\" he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed\n his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A\n kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a\n more reasonable man. \"But it still needs something ... something,\"\n Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.\n \"Aha! I have it!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Sir?\" Bailey asked.", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said.", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid." ], [ "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.\n It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, \"Bailey,\n Robert,\" on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate\n shipmate \"Belly-Robber.\" It was Winkelmann who discussed\nhaut\n cuisine\nand the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our\n algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was\n Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any\n other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.", "\"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with\n our food,\" the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of\n distaste. \"It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I\n never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils\n the meal.\"", "\"Then he's beat the Captain at his game,\" I said.\n\n\n \"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks,\" the crewman\n said.", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "If the Cook hadn't problems enough with the chemical and psychic duties\n of his office, Winkelmann supplied the want. Captain Willy Winkelmann\n was the sort of man who, if he had to go into space at all, had best do\n so alone. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have\n done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. His heart\n was a chip of helium ice, his voice dripped sarcastic acid. The planet\n Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as\n Willy Winkelmann. Cheek-by-jowl every day in a nacelle the size of a\n Pullman car, our Captain quickly established himself as a major social\n hemorrhoid.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "\"Watch your noun,\" Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. \"Your adjectives are\n insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous.\"\n\n\n \"Captain, you've gone too far,\" I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was\n scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.\n\n\n \"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's\n Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain,\" Winkelmann said.\n\n\n \"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you,\" I said. \"The other officers\n and the men have been more than satisfied with his work.\"", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"That's better,\" Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said\n meditatively, \"Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have\n sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a\n bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber.\"\n\n\n \"But, Sir....\" Bailey began.\n\n\n \"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat\n to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic\n slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of\n this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in\n no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you\n understand, Belly-Robber?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed,\n slave-driving....\"", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of\n the table and tenderly lifted a small \"steak\" onto each of our plates.\n \"Try it,\" he urged the Captain.\nCaptain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The\n color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell\n of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. \"Not\n too bad, Belly-Robber,\" he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed\n his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A\n kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a\n more reasonable man. \"But it still needs something ... something,\"\n Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella.\n \"Aha! I have it!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Sir?\" Bailey asked." ], [ "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said.", "Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards\n interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien\n to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd\n exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance\n to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram.\n To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come\n aboard their ship mother-naked.\n\n\n But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects\n baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon\n mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet\n on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.\n\n\n \"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today,\n Belly-Robber?\" he asked the Cook.", "\"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with\n our food,\" the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of\n distaste. \"It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I\n never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils\n the meal.\"", "\"This, Belly-Robber!\" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and\n ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed\n the cap. \"Ketchup,\" he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's\n masterpiece. \"The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks.\"\n Lifting a hunk of the \"steak,\" streaming ketchup, to his mouth,\n Winkelmann chewed. \"Just the thing,\" he smiled.\n\n\n \"Damn you!\" Bailey shouted.\n\n\n Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.\n\n\n \"... Sir,\" Bailey added.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "The algae—dried by the Cook, bleached with methyl alcohol to kill the\n smell and make the residue more digestible, disguised and seasoned in a\n hundred ways—served as a sort of meat-and-potatoes that never quite\n wore out. Our air and water were equally immortal. Each molecule of\n oxygen would be conversant with the alveoli of every man aboard by the\n end of our trip. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the\n glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Groundling\n politicians are right enough when they say that we spacers are a\n breed apart. We're the one race of men who can't afford the luxury of\n squeamishness.\nThough I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric\n warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of\n us with the small \"steaks.\" Each contained about a pound of dried\n Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched\n in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron\n skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut\n a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are\n limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the\n galley door. I gestured for him to join me. \"You've done it, Bailey,\"\n I said. \"Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is\n actually\ngood\n.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Doc,\" Bailey said.", "in space. My employment is more in the nature of TS-card-puncher\n extraordinary. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer,\n guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder.\n Generally the man aboard who'd serve as the most popular murder-victim\n is the Cook. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain.", "Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It\n was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. \"This\n is what I have to work with,\" he said. He tossed the stuff back into\n its bin. \"In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,\n we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never make Winkelmann happy,\" I said. \"Even the simultaneous\n death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up\n the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye\n from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook\n waved my gift aside. \"Not now, Doc,\" he said. \"I'm thinking about\n tomorrow's menu.\"", "\"you had best cycle this mess through the tanks again. There is a pun\n in my home country:\nMensch ist was er isst.\nIt means, you are what\n you eat. I think you are impertinent to suggest I should become this\nSchweinerei\nyou are feeding me.\" Captain Winkelmann blotted his chin\n with his napkin, heaved his bulk up from the table, and climbed up the\n ladder from the dining-cubby.\n\"Doc, do you like Winkelmann?\" the Cook asked me.", "The\nSale\nblasted off from Brady Station in the middle of August, due\n in at Piano West in early May. In no special hurry, we were taking\n the low-energy route to Mars, a pathway about as long in time as the\n human period of gestation. Our cargo consisted mostly of Tien-Shen fir\n seedlings and some tons of an arctic grass-seed—these to be planted\n in the\nmaria\nto squeeze out the native blue bugberry vines. We had\n aboard the Registry minimum of six men and three officers. Ship's\n Surgeon was myself, Paul Vilanova. Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann,\n the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. Ship's Cook was\n Robert Bailey." ], [ "\"I hate him,\" Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He\n reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be\n an apt confederate of\nvis medicatrix naturae\n, the healing power of\n nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it\n off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.\n\n\n For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in\n horribleness, a pottage or boiled\nChlorella vulgaris\nthat looked\n and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey,\n red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as\n though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the\n disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, \"Belly-Robber, you're\n improving a little at last.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded and smiled. \"Thank you, Sir,\" he said.", "I smiled and took another bite. \"You may not realize it, Bailey; but\n this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph;\n you couldn't have done it without him.\"\n\n\n \"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?\"\n Bailey asked.\n\n\n \"He was driving you to do the impossible,\" I said; \"and you did it. Our\n Captain may be a hard man, Bailey; but he did know how to coax maximum\n performance out of his Ship's Cook.\"\n\n\n Bailey stood up. \"Do you like Captain Winkelmann, Doctor?\" he asked.", "Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I\n followed him. \"Captain,\" I said, \"you're driving Bailey too hard.\n You're asking him to make bricks without straw.\"\n\n\n Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. \"You think, Doctor,\n that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged\n man?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all,\" I said.", "\"You've taken more pressure than most men would,\" I said. \"Nothing to\n be ashamed of.\"\n\n\n \"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel\n and sauerkraut and\nBackhahndl nach suddeutscher Art\nout of an algae\n tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out\n molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And\n he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet\n of the Friends of Escoffier!\"\n\n\n \"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey,\" I said. \"You've worked your\n fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not\n appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year\n from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that\n restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman.\"", "Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted\n of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were\n vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for\n the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served\n the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley\n oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.\nThere being only three seats in the\nSale's\nmess compartment, we ate\n our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to\n supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell\n to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier,\n of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss\n of canned beer being church-keyed. \"He's done it, Doc!\" one of the\n first-shift diners said. \"It actually tastes of food!\"", "\"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw,\"\n Winkelmann said. \"Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the\n Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of\n Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the\n mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him\n uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment,\n to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn\n somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks.\"\n\n\n \"You're driving him too hard, Sir,\" I said. \"He'll crack.\"\n\n\n \"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we\n ground at Brady Station,\" Captain Winkelmann said. \"So much money buys\n many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova.\"", "I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were\n now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of\n irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was\n a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann\n theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain\n had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I\n thought.", "I thought about his question a moment. Winkelmann was good at his job.\n He persuaded his men by foul means, true; but it was all for the good\n of the ship and his crew. \"Do I like Captain Winkelmann?\" I asked,\n spearing another piece of my artificial steak. \"Bailey, I'm afraid I'll\n have to admit that I do.\"\n\n\n Bailey smiled and lifted a second steak from the warming-pan onto my\n plate. \"Then have another piece,\" he said.", "Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd\n had much practice. \"I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir,\"\n he said. \"I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the\n texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?\"\n\n\n \"I understand,\" Winkelmann growled. \"You intend that your latest mess\n should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Sir,\" Bailey said. \"Well, I squeezed the\n steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special\n seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal\n oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out.\nVoila!\nI had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine\n meat.\"\n\n\n \"Remarkable, Bailey,\" I said.", "The Captain's particular patsy was, of course, young Bailey the Cook.\n It was Winkelmann who saw humorous possibilities in the entry, \"Bailey,\n Robert,\" on Ship's Articles. He at once renamed our unfortunate\n shipmate \"Belly-Robber.\" It was Winkelmann who discussed\nhaut\n cuisine\nand the properties of the nobler wines while we munched our\n algaeburgers and sipped coffee that tasted of utility water. And it was\n Captain Willy Winkelmann who never referred to the ship's head by any\n other name than The Kitchen Cabinet.", "\"Not much,\" I said. \"I suspect that the finest gift our Captain can\n give his mother is to be absent from her on Mother's Day. But we've got\n to live with him. He's a good man at driving a ship.\"\n\n\n \"I wish he'd leave off driving this Cook,\" Bailey said. \"The fat swine!\"\n\n\n \"His plumpness is an unwitting tribute to your cooking, Bailey,\" I\n said. \"He eats well. We all do. I've dined aboard a lot of spacers in\n my time, and I'll testify that you set a table second to none.\"", "Bailey tried to feed us by groundside standards. He hid the taste\n of synthetic methionine—an essential amino acid not synthesized by\n Chlorella—by seasoning our algaeal repasts with pinches of oregano\n and thyme. He tinted the pale-green dollops of pressed Chlorella pink,\n textured the mass to the consistency of hamburger and toasted the\n slabs to a delicate brown in a forlorn attempt to make mock-meat.\n For dessert, he served a fudge compounded from the dextrose-paste of\n the carbohydrate recycler. The crew thanked him. The Captain did not.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" he said, his tone icy as winter wind off the North Sea,", "I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go\n into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in\n brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an\nersatz\nhot\n turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella\n turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy\n a grainy and delicious \"cornbread,\" and had extracted from his algae\n a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot \"bread\" with a\n genuinely dairy smell. \"Splendid, Bailey,\" I said.", "Bailey stared across the dining-cubby toward Winkelmann, silently\n imploring the Captain's ratification of his masterpiece. The big\n man's pink cheeks bulged and jumped with his chewing. He swallowed.\n \"Belly-Robber,\" Winkelmann said, \"I had almost rather you served me\n this pond-scum raw than have it all mucked-up with synthetic onions and\n cycler-salt.\"\n\"You seem able enough to choke down Bailey's chow, Captain,\" I said. I\n gazed at Winkelmann's form, bulbous from a lifetime of surfeit feeding.\n\n\n \"Yes, I eat it,\" the Captain said, taking and talking through another\n bite. \"But I eat only as a man in the desert will eat worms and\n grasshoppers, to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?\" Bailey pleaded.", "\"This, Belly-Robber!\" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and\n ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed\n the cap. \"Ketchup,\" he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's\n masterpiece. \"The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks.\"\n Lifting a hunk of the \"steak,\" streaming ketchup, to his mouth,\n Winkelmann chewed. \"Just the thing,\" he smiled.\n\n\n \"Damn you!\" Bailey shouted.\n\n\n Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.\n\n\n \"... Sir,\" Bailey added.", "The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of\n Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their\n Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark\n on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last\n few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many\n memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had\n lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed,\n seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside,\n and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our\n Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice\n that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when", "\"Only good food,\" Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised\n algae. He tapped his head with a finger. \"This—the brain that guides\n the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me,\n Belly-Robber?\"\n\n\n Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. \"Yes, sir. But I really\n don't know what I can do to please you.\"\n\n\n \"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban\nHausfrau\nwith the\n vapors,\" Winkelmann said. \"I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums\n or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will\n keep my belly content and my brain alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British\n term Dumb Insolence.", "Bailey took a handful of dried Chlorella from a bin and fingered it. It\n was green, smelled of swamp, and looked appetizing as a bedsore. \"This\n is what I have to work with,\" he said. He tossed the stuff back into\n its bin. \"In Ohio, which is my home country, in the presence of ladies,\n we'd call such garbage Horse-Leavings.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never make Winkelmann happy,\" I said. \"Even the simultaneous\n death of all other human beings could hardly make him smile. Keep up\n the good work, though, and you'll keep our Captain fat.\"\n\n\n Bailey nodded from his one-man cloud of gloom. I got a bottle of rye\n from Medical Stores and offered him a therapeutic draught. The Cook\n waved my gift aside. \"Not now, Doc,\" he said. \"I'm thinking about\n tomorrow's menu.\"", "\"We are not amused,\" said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second\n helping of the pseudo-turkey. \"You are improving, Belly-Robber, but\n only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require\n a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere\n edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will\n have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics\n student. That will be all, Bailey.\"", "\"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds,\" Winkelmann said.\n \"Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber,\" he added.\nBailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him\n to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my\n bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal\n bulkhead. \"You'll have that drink now,\" I said.\n\n\n \"No, dammit!\" he shouted.\n\n\n \"Orders,\" I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. \"This is\n therapy, Bailey,\" I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat\n like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.\n\n\n After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. \"Sorry, Doc,\" he said." ] ]
train	26843	[ "Why wasn't the narrator's compartment clean during blastoff?", "How does Pat feel about the narrator?", "How long was the author away from earth on this trip?", "What portion of the journey was spent in cryosleep?", "Why do Lloyd and Jones shoot at the narrator?", "How do the Martians reproduce?", "How did Martians get aboard the ship?", "Why can't the crew radio the Earth for help?" ]	[ [ "The crew ransacked the narrator's room. They were not happy to have a journalist forced upon them for this journey.", "The narrator forgot to secure his belongings when they boarded the ship. The gyroscopic spin knocked unsecured items all around the room.", "The force of the inertial gravities knocked unsecured items all around the room. The narrator did not secure his belongings when he boarded the ship.", "The gyroscopic spin caused the narrator to vomit." ], [ "Pat thinks the narrator is an idiot. He cannot believe the space agency allowed the journalist to tag along.", "Pat is highly annoyed to have an untrained passenger like the narrator aborad for this long, scientific journey.", "Pat thinks the narrator is simple-minded and tells him as much.", "Pat hates the narrator. Pat tells him to go to hell." ], [ "18 months", "17 months", "19 months", "16 months" ], [ "4 months", "They did not use cryosleep.", "6 months", "8 months" ], [ "After almost 9 months trapped on the ship together, the entire crew wanted to kill the narrator.", "Lloyd and Jones were hallucinating and thought the narrator was an enemy combatant.", "Lloyd and Jones were trying to scare the narrator. ", "There was an alien lifeform following the narrator." ], [ "The Martians are made of sugar. Once the body dissolves in the water a new body forms, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.", "The Martians reproduce the same way humans do.", "The red scales the Martians leave behind are like eggs. New Martians hatch out of the scales.", "The Martians are covered in red scales. The scales are shed. The discarded scales grow into new aliens." ], [ "Kroger brought two sugar crystals aboard.", "Lloyd brought two sugar crystals aboard.", "Pat brought two sugar crystals aboard.", "Jones brought two sugar crystals aboard." ], [ "Kroger broke the radio.", "Jones broke the radio.", "Lloyd broke the radio.", "Pat broke the radio." ] ]	[ 4, 2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.", "Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"", "I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.", "I can't say I was too impressed\n with that 16 x 19 view of outer\n space. It's been done much better\n in the movies. There's just no awesomeness\n to it, no sense of depth or\n immensity. It's as impressive as a\n piece of velvet with salt sprinkled\n on it.\n\n\n Lloyd and I made a chessboard\n out of a carton. Right now we're using\n buttons for men. He's one of\n these fast players who don't stop\n and think out their moves. And so\n far I haven't won a game.\n\n\n It looks like a long trip.\nOctober 4, 1960\nI won\n a game. Lloyd mistook my\n queen-button for my bishop-button\n and left his king in jeopardy, and\n I checkmated him next move. He\n said chess was a waste of time\n and he had important work to do\n and he went away.", "Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right.", "They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.", "I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961", "Kroger says watch out.\nWe\nare\n made of carbohydrates, too. I'd\n rather not have known.\nMarch 4, 1962\nEarth fills\n the screen in the\n control room. Pat says if we're\n lucky, he might be able to use the\n bit of fuel we have left to set us\n in a descending spiral into one of\n the oceans. The rocket is tighter\n than a submarine, he insists, and\n it will float till we're rescued, if\n the plates don't crack under the impact.", "No lichen so far. Kroger says\n maybe in the canals, if there are\n any canals. Lloyd wants to play\n chess again.\n\n\n Jones won the beard contest. Pat\n gave him a cigar he'd smuggled on\n board (no smoking was allowed on\n the ship), and Jones threw it away.\n He doesn't smoke.\nJune 20, 1961\nGot lost today.\n Pat told me\n not to go too far from camp, so,\n when I took a stroll, I made sure\n every so often that I could still see\n the rocket behind me. Walked for\n maybe an hour; then the oxygen\n gauge got past the halfway mark,\n so I started back toward the rocket.\n After maybe ten steps, the rocket\n disappeared. One minute it was\n standing there, tall and silvery, the\n next instant it was gone.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "So I went on the first trip to\n Mars. And I kept a diary. This is\n it. And it is honest. Honest it is.\nOctober 1, 1960\nThey picked\n the launching\n date from the March, 1959, New\n York\nTimes\n, which stated that this\n was the most likely time for launching.\n Trip time is supposed to take\n 260 days (that's one way), so\n we're aimed toward where Mars\n will be (had\nbetter\nbe, or else).\n\n\n There are five of us on board. A\n pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist.\n And, of course, me. I've\n met all but the pilot (he's very\n busy today), and they seem friendly\n enough.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.", "Well, we're down.\n We have\n to wear gas masks with oxygen\n hook-ups. Kroger says the air is\n breathable, but thin, and it has too\n much dust in it to be any fun to\n inhale. He's all for going out and\n looking for lichen, but Pat says he's\n got to set up camp, then get instructions\n from Earth. So we just have\n to wait. The air is very cold, but the\n Sun is hot as hell when it hits you.\n The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe\n more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger\n says it's the dust. The sand underfoot\n is kind of rose-colored, and not\n really gritty. The particles are" ], [ "Pat said maybe we can swim to\n safety. Kroger told Pat he was\n crazy, that the little island we're on\n here underground is bordered by a\n fast river that goes into the planet.\n We'd end up drowned in some grotto\n in the heart of the planet, says\n Kroger.\n\n\n \"What the hell,\" says Pat, \"it's\n better than starving.\"", "Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right.", "All at once, something gleamed\n in their hands, and they started\n shooting at me with their rifles.\n That's when I heard the noise behind\n me. I was too scared to turn\n around, but finally Jones and Lloyd\n came running over, and I got up\n enough nerve to look. There was\n nothing there, but on the sand,\n paralleling mine, were footprints.\n At least I think they were footprints.\n Twice as long as mine, and\n three times as wide, but kind of\n featureless because the sand's loose\n and dry. They doubled back on\n themselves, spaced considerably\n farther apart.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" I asked Lloyd\n when he got to me.\n\n\n \"Damned if I know,\" he said. \"It\n was red and scaly, and I think it\n had a tail. It was two heads taller\n than you.\" He shuddered. \"Ran off\n when we fired.\"\n\n\n \"Where,\" said Jones, \"are Pat and\n Kroger?\"", "The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"", "\"Nonsense,\" said Louie, sipping\n carefully at a paper cup of scalding\n coffee. \"It'll be just like the\n public going along vicariously.\n They'll\nidentify\nwith you.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said, wiping the\n dampness from my palms on the\n knees of my trousers as I sat there,\n \"how'll I go about it? A story? An\n article? A\nyou-are-there\ntype of report?\n What?\"\n\n\n Louie shrugged. \"So keep a\n diary. It'll be more intimate, like.\"\n\n\n \"But what if nothing happens?\"\n I insisted hopelessly.\n\n\n Louie smiled. \"So you fake it.\"\n\n\n I got up from the chair in his office\n and stepped to the door.\n \"That's dishonest,\" I pointed out.\n\n\n \"Creative is the word,\" Louie\n said.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961", "They took away our rifles and\n brought us right to Kroger and Pat,\n without our even asking. Jones is\n mad at the way they got the rifles so\n easily. When we came upon them\n (a group of maybe ten, huddling\n behind a boulder in ambush), he\n fired, but the shots either bounced\n off their scales or stuck in their\n thick hides. Anyway, they took the\n rifles away and threw them into the\n stream, and picked us all up and\n took us into a hole in the cliff wall.\n The hole went on practically forever,\n but it didn't get dark. Kroger\n tells me that there are phosphorescent\n bacteria living in the mold on\n the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave\n smell, but it's richer in oxygen\n than even at the stream.", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "Kroger shrugged. \"We'll have to\n chance taking any that seem to\n slope upward. In any event, we can\n always follow it back and start\n again.\"\n\n\n \"I dunno,\" said Jones. \"Remember\n those\nteeth\nof theirs. They must\n be for biting something more substantial\n than moss, Kroger.\"\n\n\n \"We'll risk it,\" said Pat. \"It's better\n to go down fighting than to die\n of starvation.\"", "Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.", "Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "They're having pork for dinner\n today. Not me.\nOctober 2, 1960\nFeeling much\n better today.\n Kroger gave me a box of Dramamine\n pills. He says they'll help my\n stomach. So far, so good.\n\n\n Lloyd came by, also. \"You play\n chess?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"A little,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"How about a game sometime?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" I said. \"Do you have a\n board?\"\n\n\n He didn't.\n\n\n Lloyd went away then, but the\n interview wasn't wasted. I learned\n that he\nis\ntall and\ndoes\nhave a\n freckled face. Maybe we can build\n a chessboard. With my paper and\n his ballpoint pen and ruler, it should\n be easy. Don't know what we'll use\n for pieces, though.", "The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.", "\"Simple,\" he said, as though he\n were addressing me by name.\n \"They have a twofold reason to fear\n water. One: by complete solvency\n in that medium, they lose all energy\n and die. Two: even partial sprinkling\n alters the shape of the scales,\n and they are unable to use sunpower\n to form more sugar, and still die,\n if a bit slower.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said, taking it down verbatim.\n \"So now what do we do?\"\n\n\n \"We remove our boots,\" said\n Kroger, sitting on the ground and\n doing so, \"and then we cross this\n stream, fill the boots with water,\n and\nspray\nour way to freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Which tunnel do we take?\"\n asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the\n thought of escape.", "We're going to look for Kroger\n and Pat today. Jones says we'd better\n before another windstorm blows\n away the jeep tracks. Fortunately,\n the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we\n always have the smears to follow,\n unless they get covered up, too.\n We're taking extra oxygen, shells,\n and rifles. Food, too, of course.\n And we're locking up the ship.\nIt's later\n , now. We found the\n jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of\n those big tracks nearby. We're taking\n the jeep to follow the aliens'\n tracks. There's some moss around\n here, on reddish brown rocks that\n stick up through the sand, just on\n the shady side, though. Kroger\n must be happy to have found his\n lichen.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize." ], [ "I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.", "Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?", "So I went on the first trip to\n Mars. And I kept a diary. This is\n it. And it is honest. Honest it is.\nOctober 1, 1960\nThey picked\n the launching\n date from the March, 1959, New\n York\nTimes\n, which stated that this\n was the most likely time for launching.\n Trip time is supposed to take\n 260 days (that's one way), so\n we're aimed toward where Mars\n will be (had\nbetter\nbe, or else).\n\n\n There are five of us on board. A\n pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist.\n And, of course, me. I've\n met all but the pilot (he's very\n busy today), and they seem friendly\n enough.", "I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961", "Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "I can't say I was too impressed\n with that 16 x 19 view of outer\n space. It's been done much better\n in the movies. There's just no awesomeness\n to it, no sense of depth or\n immensity. It's as impressive as a\n piece of velvet with salt sprinkled\n on it.\n\n\n Lloyd and I made a chessboard\n out of a carton. Right now we're using\n buttons for men. He's one of\n these fast players who don't stop\n and think out their moves. And so\n far I haven't won a game.\n\n\n It looks like a long trip.\nOctober 4, 1960\nI won\n a game. Lloyd mistook my\n queen-button for my bishop-button\n and left his king in jeopardy, and\n I checkmated him next move. He\n said chess was a waste of time\n and he had important work to do\n and he went away.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "The hell it is.\nJune 24, 1961, for sure\nThe Martians\n have coal\n mines.\nThat's\nwhat they use those\n teeth for. We passed through one\n and surprised a lot of them chewing\n gritty hunks of anthracite out\n of the walls. They came running at\n us, whistling with those tubelike\n tongues, and drooling dry coal dust,\n but Pat swung one of his boots in\n an arc that splashed all over the\n ground in front of them, and they\n turned tail (literally) and clattered\n off down another tunnel,\n sounding like a locomotive whistle\n gone berserk.\n\n\n We made the surface in another\n hour, back in the canal, and were\n lucky enough to find our own trail\n to follow toward the place above\n which the jeep still waited.", "THE DOPE\n\n on Mars\nBy JACK SHARKEY\nSomebody had to get the human\n angle on this trip ... but what\n was humane about sending me?\nIllustrated by WOOD\nMy\n agent was the one who\n got me the job of going\n along to write up the first\n trip to Mars. He was always getting\n me things like that—appearances\n on TV shows, or mentions in writers'\n magazines. If he didn't sell\n much of my stuff, at least he sold\nme\n.\n\n\n \"It'll be the biggest break a\n writer ever got,\" he told me, two\n days before blastoff. \"Oh, sure\n there'll be scientific reports on the\n trip, but the public doesn't want\n them; they want the\nhuman\nslant\n on things.\"\n\n\n \"But, Louie,\" I said weakly, \"I'll\n probably be locked up for the\n whole trip. If there are fights or accidents,\n they won't tell\nme\nabout\n them.\"", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "No lichen so far. Kroger says\n maybe in the canals, if there are\n any canals. Lloyd wants to play\n chess again.\n\n\n Jones won the beard contest. Pat\n gave him a cigar he'd smuggled on\n board (no smoking was allowed on\n the ship), and Jones threw it away.\n He doesn't smoke.\nJune 20, 1961\nGot lost today.\n Pat told me\n not to go too far from camp, so,\n when I took a stroll, I made sure\n every so often that I could still see\n the rocket behind me. Walked for\n maybe an hour; then the oxygen\n gauge got past the halfway mark,\n so I started back toward the rocket.\n After maybe ten steps, the rocket\n disappeared. One minute it was\n standing there, tall and silvery, the\n next instant it was gone.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right." ], [ "They didn't take as long as I\n thought they would, except for\nVanity Fair\n. It must have been a\n riot when it first came out. I mean,\n all those sly digs at the aristocracy,\n with copious interpolations by Mr.\n Thackeray in case you didn't get\n it when he'd pulled a particularly\n good gag. Some fun.\n\n\n And only 78 days to go.\nJune 1, 1961\nOnly 17 days\n to go. I saw Mars\n on the screen today. It seems to be\n descending from overhead, but Pat\n says that that's the \"torque\" doing\n it. Actually, it's we who are coming\n in sideways.\n\n\n We've all grown beards, too. Pat\n said it was against regulations, but\n what the hell. We have a contest.\n Longest whiskers on landing gets a\n prize.", "I showed it to Kroger. He says\n it may prove to be environmentally\n accurate, but that I should stick to\n prose.\nOctober 5, 1960\nLearned Jones'\n first name.\n He wrote something in the ship's\n log, and I saw his signature. His\n name is Fleance, like in \"Macbeth.\"\n He prefers to be called Jones. Pat\n uses his first name as a gag. Some\n fun.\n\n\n And only 255 days to go.\nApril 1, 1961\nI've skipped\n over the last 177\n days or so, because there's nothing\n much new. I brought some books\n with me on the trip, books that I'd\n always meant to read and never\n had the time. So now I know all\n about\nVanity Fair\n,\nPride and Prejudice\n,\nWar and Peace\n,\nGone with\n the Wind\n, and\nBabbitt\n.", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?", "Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.", "So I went on the first trip to\n Mars. And I kept a diary. This is\n it. And it is honest. Honest it is.\nOctober 1, 1960\nThey picked\n the launching\n date from the March, 1959, New\n York\nTimes\n, which stated that this\n was the most likely time for launching.\n Trip time is supposed to take\n 260 days (that's one way), so\n we're aimed toward where Mars\n will be (had\nbetter\nbe, or else).\n\n\n There are five of us on board. A\n pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist.\n And, of course, me. I've\n met all but the pilot (he's very\n busy today), and they seem friendly\n enough.", "Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.", "Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961", "It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.", "We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.", "The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"", "Kroger says watch out.\nWe\nare\n made of carbohydrates, too. I'd\n rather not have known.\nMarch 4, 1962\nEarth fills\n the screen in the\n control room. Pat says if we're\n lucky, he might be able to use the\n bit of fuel we have left to set us\n in a descending spiral into one of\n the oceans. The rocket is tighter\n than a submarine, he insists, and\n it will float till we're rescued, if\n the plates don't crack under the impact.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience." ], [ "All at once, something gleamed\n in their hands, and they started\n shooting at me with their rifles.\n That's when I heard the noise behind\n me. I was too scared to turn\n around, but finally Jones and Lloyd\n came running over, and I got up\n enough nerve to look. There was\n nothing there, but on the sand,\n paralleling mine, were footprints.\n At least I think they were footprints.\n Twice as long as mine, and\n three times as wide, but kind of\n featureless because the sand's loose\n and dry. They doubled back on\n themselves, spaced considerably\n farther apart.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" I asked Lloyd\n when he got to me.\n\n\n \"Damned if I know,\" he said. \"It\n was red and scaly, and I think it\n had a tail. It was two heads taller\n than you.\" He shuddered. \"Ran off\n when we fired.\"\n\n\n \"Where,\" said Jones, \"are Pat and\n Kroger?\"", "The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "They took away our rifles and\n brought us right to Kroger and Pat,\n without our even asking. Jones is\n mad at the way they got the rifles so\n easily. When we came upon them\n (a group of maybe ten, huddling\n behind a boulder in ambush), he\n fired, but the shots either bounced\n off their scales or stuck in their\n thick hides. Anyway, they took the\n rifles away and threw them into the\n stream, and picked us all up and\n took us into a hole in the cliff wall.\n The hole went on practically forever,\n but it didn't get dark. Kroger\n tells me that there are phosphorescent\n bacteria living in the mold on\n the walls. The air has a fresh-dug-grave\n smell, but it's richer in oxygen\n than even at the stream.", "The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"", "I didn't know. I hadn't seen\n them, nor the jeep, on my trip back.\n So we followed the wheel tracks for\n a while, and they veered off from\n my trail and followed another, very\n much like the one that had been\n paralleling mine when Jones and\n Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly\n thing.\n\n\n \"We'd better get them on the\n radio,\" said Jones, turning back\n toward the ship.\n\n\n There wasn't anything on the\n radio but static.\n\n\n Pat and Kroger haven't come\n back yet, either.\nJune 21, 1961\nWe're not\n alone here. More of\n the scaly things have come toward\n the camp, but a few rifle shots send\n them away. They hop like kangaroos\n when they're startled. Their\n attitudes aren't menacing, but their\n appearance is. And Jones says,\n \"Who knows what's 'menacing' in\n an alien?\"", "The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.", "Going down was Jones' idea,\n not mine.\nJune 22, 1961\nWell, we're\n at the bottom, and\n there's water here, a shallow stream\n about thirty feet wide that runs\n along the center of the canal (we've\n decided we're in a canal). No sign\n of Pat or Kroger yet, but the sand\n here is hard-packed and damp, and\n there are normal-size footprints\n mingled with the alien ones, sharp\n and clear. The aliens seem to have\n six or seven toes. It varies from\n print to print. And they're barefoot,\n too, or else they have the damnedest-looking\n shoes in creation.", "Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "Kroger shrugged. \"We'll have to\n chance taking any that seem to\n slope upward. In any event, we can\n always follow it back and start\n again.\"\n\n\n \"I dunno,\" said Jones. \"Remember\n those\nteeth\nof theirs. They must\n be for biting something more substantial\n than moss, Kroger.\"\n\n\n \"We'll risk it,\" said Pat. \"It's better\n to go down fighting than to die\n of starvation.\"", "\"Simple,\" he said, as though he\n were addressing me by name.\n \"They have a twofold reason to fear\n water. One: by complete solvency\n in that medium, they lose all energy\n and die. Two: even partial sprinkling\n alters the shape of the scales,\n and they are unable to use sunpower\n to form more sugar, and still die,\n if a bit slower.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said, taking it down verbatim.\n \"So now what do we do?\"\n\n\n \"We remove our boots,\" said\n Kroger, sitting on the ground and\n doing so, \"and then we cross this\n stream, fill the boots with water,\n and\nspray\nour way to freedom.\"\n\n\n \"Which tunnel do we take?\"\n asked Pat, his eyes aglow at the\n thought of escape.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.", "We're going to look for Kroger\n and Pat today. Jones says we'd better\n before another windstorm blows\n away the jeep tracks. Fortunately,\n the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we\n always have the smears to follow,\n unless they get covered up, too.\n We're taking extra oxygen, shells,\n and rifles. Food, too, of course.\n And we're locking up the ship.\nIt's later\n , now. We found the\n jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of\n those big tracks nearby. We're taking\n the jeep to follow the aliens'\n tracks. There's some moss around\n here, on reddish brown rocks that\n stick up through the sand, just on\n the shady side, though. Kroger\n must be happy to have found his\n lichen.", "Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians.", "Jones (I still haven't learned his\n first name) has been up with the\n pilot all day. He passed my room\n on the way to the galley (the\n kitchen) for a cup of dark brown\n coffee (they like it thick) and told\n me that we were almost past the\n Moon. I asked to look, but he said\n not yet; the instrument panel is\n Top Secret. They'd have to cover\n it so I could look out the viewing\n screen, and they still need it for\n steering or something.\n\n\n I still haven't met the pilot.\nOctober 3, 1960\nWell, I've\n met the pilot. He is\n kind of squat, with a vulturish neck\n and close-set jet-black eyes that\n make him look rather mean, but he\n was pleasant enough, and said I\n could call him Pat. I still don't\n know Jones' first name, though Pat\n spoke to him, and it sounded like\n Flants. That can't be right.", "It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.", "Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?" ], [ "The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.", "We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.", "We all agreed to try it. Not that\n we thought it had a good chance of\n working, but none of us had a better\n idea.\nI guess\n you know the rest of\n the story, about how that destroyer\n spotted us and got us and\n my diary aboard, and towed the\n rocket to San Francisco. News of\n the \"captured Martian\" leaked out,\n and we all became nine-day wonders\n until the dismantling of the\n rocket.\n\n\n Kroger says he must have dissolved\n in the water, and wonders\n what\nthat\nwould do. There are\n about a thousand of those crystal-scales\n on a Martian.\n\n\n So last week we found out, when\n those red-scaled things began clambering\n out of the sea on every coastal\n region on Earth. Kroger tried\n to explain to me about salinity osmosis\n and hydrostatic pressure and\n crystalline life, but in no time at all\n he lost me.", "The Martians are made of sugar.\nLater, same day\n . Kroger\n said that the Martian metabolism\n must be like Terran (Earth-type)\n metabolism, only with no pancreas\n to make insulin. They store their\n energy on the\noutside\nof their\n bodies, in the form of scales. He's\n watched them more closely and\n seen that they have long rubbery\n tubes for tongues, and that they\n now and then suck up water from\n the stream while they're watching\n us, being careful not to get their lips\n (all sugar, of course) wet. He\n guesses that their \"blood\" must be\n almost pure water, and that it\n washes away (from the inside, of\n course) the sugar they need for\n energy.", "The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.", "Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.", "Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians.", "The hell it is.\nJune 24, 1961, for sure\nThe Martians\n have coal\n mines.\nThat's\nwhat they use those\n teeth for. We passed through one\n and surprised a lot of them chewing\n gritty hunks of anthracite out\n of the walls. They came running at\n us, whistling with those tubelike\n tongues, and drooling dry coal dust,\n but Pat swung one of his boots in\n an arc that splashed all over the\n ground in front of them, and they\n turned tail (literally) and clattered\n off down another tunnel,\n sounding like a locomotive whistle\n gone berserk.\n\n\n We made the surface in another\n hour, back in the canal, and were\n lucky enough to find our own trail\n to follow toward the place above\n which the jeep still waited.", "The hell it is.\nMarch 3, 1962\nEarth in sight\n . The other\n Martian is still with us. He's where\n we can't get at him without blow-torches,\n but he can't get at the carbon\n in the AFAR system, either,\n which is a help. However, his tail\n is prehensile, and now and then it\n snakes out through an air duct and\n yanks food right off the table from\n under our noses.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.", "It is not.\nJune 24, 1961, probably\nI'm hungry\n . So is everybody\n else. Right now I could eat a dinner\n raw, in a centrifuge, and keep it\n down. A Martian threw a stone at\n Jones today, and Jones threw one\n back at him and broke off a couple\n of scales. The Martian whistled\n furiously and went away. When the\n crowd thinned out, same as it did\n yesterday (must be some sort of\n sleeping cycle here), Kroger talked\n Lloyd into swimming across the\n river and getting the red scales.\n Lloyd started at the upstream part\n of the current, and was about a hundred\n yards below this underground\n island before he made the far side.\n Sure is a swift current.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "I didn't know. I hadn't seen\n them, nor the jeep, on my trip back.\n So we followed the wheel tracks for\n a while, and they veered off from\n my trail and followed another, very\n much like the one that had been\n paralleling mine when Jones and\n Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly\n thing.\n\n\n \"We'd better get them on the\n radio,\" said Jones, turning back\n toward the ship.\n\n\n There wasn't anything on the\n radio but static.\n\n\n Pat and Kroger haven't come\n back yet, either.\nJune 21, 1961\nWe're not\n alone here. More of\n the scaly things have come toward\n the camp, but a few rifle shots send\n them away. They hop like kangaroos\n when they're startled. Their\n attitudes aren't menacing, but their\n appearance is. And Jones says,\n \"Who knows what's 'menacing' in\n an alien?\"", "Well, we're down.\n We have\n to wear gas masks with oxygen\n hook-ups. Kroger says the air is\n breathable, but thin, and it has too\n much dust in it to be any fun to\n inhale. He's all for going out and\n looking for lichen, but Pat says he's\n got to set up camp, then get instructions\n from Earth. So we just have\n to wait. The air is very cold, but the\n Sun is hot as hell when it hits you.\n The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe\n more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger\n says it's the dust. The sand underfoot\n is kind of rose-colored, and not\n really gritty. The particles are", "All at once, something gleamed\n in their hands, and they started\n shooting at me with their rifles.\n That's when I heard the noise behind\n me. I was too scared to turn\n around, but finally Jones and Lloyd\n came running over, and I got up\n enough nerve to look. There was\n nothing there, but on the sand,\n paralleling mine, were footprints.\n At least I think they were footprints.\n Twice as long as mine, and\n three times as wide, but kind of\n featureless because the sand's loose\n and dry. They doubled back on\n themselves, spaced considerably\n farther apart.\n\n\n \"What was it?\" I asked Lloyd\n when he got to me.\n\n\n \"Damned if I know,\" he said. \"It\n was red and scaly, and I think it\n had a tail. It was two heads taller\n than you.\" He shuddered. \"Ran off\n when we fired.\"\n\n\n \"Where,\" said Jones, \"are Pat and\n Kroger?\"", "We're going to look for Kroger\n and Pat today. Jones says we'd better\n before another windstorm blows\n away the jeep tracks. Fortunately,\n the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we\n always have the smears to follow,\n unless they get covered up, too.\n We're taking extra oxygen, shells,\n and rifles. Food, too, of course.\n And we're locking up the ship.\nIt's later\n , now. We found the\n jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of\n those big tracks nearby. We're taking\n the jeep to follow the aliens'\n tracks. There's some moss around\n here, on reddish brown rocks that\n stick up through the sand, just on\n the shady side, though. Kroger\n must be happy to have found his\n lichen." ], [ "The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.", "The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.", "We all agreed to try it. Not that\n we thought it had a good chance of\n working, but none of us had a better\n idea.\nI guess\n you know the rest of\n the story, about how that destroyer\n spotted us and got us and\n my diary aboard, and towed the\n rocket to San Francisco. News of\n the \"captured Martian\" leaked out,\n and we all became nine-day wonders\n until the dismantling of the\n rocket.\n\n\n Kroger says he must have dissolved\n in the water, and wonders\n what\nthat\nwould do. There are\n about a thousand of those crystal-scales\n on a Martian.\n\n\n So last week we found out, when\n those red-scaled things began clambering\n out of the sea on every coastal\n region on Earth. Kroger tried\n to explain to me about salinity osmosis\n and hydrostatic pressure and\n crystalline life, but in no time at all\n he lost me.", "We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.", "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians.", "Kroger tried talking to the guard\n once, but he (or it) made a whistling\n kind of sound and flashed a\n mouthful of teeth. Kroger says the\n teeth are in multiple rows, like a\n tiger shark's. I'd rather he hadn't\n told me.\nJune 23, 1961, I think\nWe're either\n in a docket or a\n zoo. I can't tell which. There's a\n rather square platform surrounded\n on all four sides by running water,\n maybe twenty feet across, and\n we're on it. Martians keep coming\n to the far edge of the water and\n looking at us and whistling at each\n other. A little Martian came near\n the edge of the water and a larger\n Martian whistled like crazy and\n dragged it away.\n\n\n \"Water must be dangerous to\n them,\" said Kroger.\n\n\n \"We shoulda brought water pistols,\"\n Jones muttered.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.", "The hell it is.\nJune 24, 1961, for sure\nThe Martians\n have coal\n mines.\nThat's\nwhat they use those\n teeth for. We passed through one\n and surprised a lot of them chewing\n gritty hunks of anthracite out\n of the walls. They came running at\n us, whistling with those tubelike\n tongues, and drooling dry coal dust,\n but Pat swung one of his boots in\n an arc that splashed all over the\n ground in front of them, and they\n turned tail (literally) and clattered\n off down another tunnel,\n sounding like a locomotive whistle\n gone berserk.\n\n\n We made the surface in another\n hour, back in the canal, and were\n lucky enough to find our own trail\n to follow toward the place above\n which the jeep still waited.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "The hell it is.\nMarch 3, 1962\nEarth in sight\n . The other\n Martian is still with us. He's where\n we can't get at him without blow-torches,\n but he can't get at the carbon\n in the AFAR system, either,\n which is a help. However, his tail\n is prehensile, and now and then it\n snakes out through an air duct and\n yanks food right off the table from\n under our noses.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "We're going to look for Kroger\n and Pat today. Jones says we'd better\n before another windstorm blows\n away the jeep tracks. Fortunately,\n the jeep has a leaky oil pan, so we\n always have the smears to follow,\n unless they get covered up, too.\n We're taking extra oxygen, shells,\n and rifles. Food, too, of course.\n And we're locking up the ship.\nIt's later\n , now. We found the\n jeep, but no Kroger or Pat. Lots of\n those big tracks nearby. We're taking\n the jeep to follow the aliens'\n tracks. There's some moss around\n here, on reddish brown rocks that\n stick up through the sand, just on\n the shady side, though. Kroger\n must be happy to have found his\n lichen.", "I didn't know. I hadn't seen\n them, nor the jeep, on my trip back.\n So we followed the wheel tracks for\n a while, and they veered off from\n my trail and followed another, very\n much like the one that had been\n paralleling mine when Jones and\n Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly\n thing.\n\n\n \"We'd better get them on the\n radio,\" said Jones, turning back\n toward the ship.\n\n\n There wasn't anything on the\n radio but static.\n\n\n Pat and Kroger haven't come\n back yet, either.\nJune 21, 1961\nWe're not\n alone here. More of\n the scaly things have come toward\n the camp, but a few rifle shots send\n them away. They hop like kangaroos\n when they're startled. Their\n attitudes aren't menacing, but their\n appearance is. And Jones says,\n \"Who knows what's 'menacing' in\n an alien?\"", "I asked Pat what the prize was\n and he told me to go to hell.\nJune 18, 1961\nMars has\n the whole screen\n filled. Looks like Death Valley. No\n sign of canals, but Pat says that's\n because of the dust storm down below.\n It's nice to have a \"down below\"\n again. We're going to land, so\n I have to go to my bunk. It's all\n foam rubber, nylon braid supports\n and magnesium tubing. Might as\n well be cement for all the good it\n did me at takeoff. Earth seems awfully\n far away.\nJune 19, 1961" ], [ "Turned on my radio pack and\n got hold of Pat. Told him what happened,\n and he told Kroger. Kroger\n said I had been following a mirage,\n to step back a bit. I did, and I could\n see the ship again. Kroger said to\n try and walk toward where the ship\n seemed to be, even when it wasn't\n in view, and meantime they'd come\n out after me in the jeep, following\n my footprints.\n\n\n Started walking back, and the\n ship vanished again. It reappeared,\n disappeared, but I kept going. Finally\n saw the real ship, and Lloyd\n and Jones waving their arms at me.\n They were shouting through their\n masks, but I couldn't hear them.\n The air is too thin to carry sound\n well.", "\"Because,\" said Pat, \"if we tell\n them now, by the time we get back\n we'll be yesterday's news. This way\n we may be lucky and get a parade.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe even money,\" said\n Kroger, whose mind wasn't always\n on science.\n\n\n \"But they'll ask why we didn't\n radio the info, sir,\" said Jones uneasily.\n\n\n \"The radio,\" said Pat, nodding to\n Lloyd, \"was unfortunately broken\n shortly after landing.\"\n\n\n Lloyd blinked, then nodded\n back and walked around the\n rocket. I heard a crunching sound\n and the shattering of glass, not unlike\n the noise made when one\n drives a rifle butt through a radio.", "Guess I'll take a nap.\nJune 26, 1961\nHell's bells\n . Kroger says\n there are two baby Martians loose\n on board ship. Pat told him he\n was nuts, but there are certain\n signs he's right. Like the missing\n charcoal in the air-filtration-and-reclaiming\n (AFAR) system. And\n the water gauges are going down.\n But the clincher is those two sugar\n crystals Lloyd had grabbed up\n when we were in that zoo. They're\n gone.\n\n\n Pat has declared a state of emergency.\n Quick thinking, that's Pat.\n Lloyd, before he remembered and\n turned scarlet, suggested we radio\n Earth for instructions. We can't.\n\n\n Here we are, somewhere in a\n void headed for Earth, with enough\n air and water left for maybe three\n days—if the Martians don't take\n any more.", "I went to the galley for coffee\n and had a talk about moss with\n Kroger. He said there was a good\n chance of lichen on Mars, and I\n misunderstood and said, \"A good\n chance of liking\nwhat\non Mars?\"\n and Kroger finished his coffee and\n went up front.\n\n\n When I got back to my compartment,\n Lloyd had taken away the\n chessboard and all his buttons. He\n told me later he needed it to back\n up a star map.\n\n\n Pat slept mostly all day in his\n compartment, and Jones sat and\n watched the screen revolve. There\n wasn't much to do, so I wrote a\n poem, sort of.\n\nMary, Mary, quite contrary,\n \nHow does your garden grow?\n \nWith Martian rime, Venusian slime,\n \nAnd a radioactive hoe.", "Also, I am one of the first five\n men in the history of the world to\n see the opposite side of the Moon,\n with a bluish blurred crescent beyond\n it that Pat said was the Earth.\n The back of the Moon isn't much\n different from the front. As to the\n space in front of the ship, well, it's\n all black with white dots in it, and\n none of the dots move, except in a\n circle that Pat says is a \"torque\"\n result from the gyroscopic spin\n we're in. Actually, he explained to\n me, the screen is supposed to keep\n the image of space locked into\n place no matter how much we spin.\n But there's some kind of a \"drag.\"\n I told him I hoped it didn't mean\n we'd land on Mars upside down. He\n just stared at me.", "Meantime, we have to catch\n those Martians.\nJune 29, 1961\nWorse and worse\n . Lloyd\n caught one of the Martians in the\n firing chamber. We had to flood\n the chamber with acid to subdue\n the creature, which carbonized\n nicely. So now we have plenty of\n air and water again, but besides\n having another Martian still on\n the loose, we now don't have\n enough acid left in the fuel tanks\n to make a landing.\n\n\n Pat says at least our vector will\n carry us to Earth and we can die\n on our home planet, which is better\n than perishing in space.", "Kroger is thrilled that he is\n learning something, maybe, about\n Martian reproductive processes.\n When he told Pat, Pat put it to a\n vote whether or not to jettison\n Kroger through the airlock. However,\n it was decided that responsibility\n was pretty well divided.\n Lloyd had gotten the crystals,\n Kroger had only studied them, and\n Jones had brought them aboard.\n\n\n So Kroger stays, but meanwhile\n the air is getting worse. Pat suggested\n Kroger put us all into a state\n of suspended animation till landing\n time, eight months away. Kroger\n said, \"How?\"\nJune 27, 1961\nAir is foul\n and I'm very\n thirsty. Kroger says that at least—when\n the Martians get bigger—they'll\n have to show themselves.\n Pat says what do we do\nthen\n? We\n can't afford the water we need to\n melt them down. Besides, the\n melted crystals might\nall\nturn into\n little Martians.", "Kroger says the Martians must\n be intelligent, otherwise they\n couldn't have guessed at the carbohydrates\n present in the bread after\n a lifelong diet of anthracite. Pat\n says let's jettison Kroger.\n\n\n This time the vote went against\n Kroger, but he got a last-minute reprieve\n by suggesting the crystals\n be pulverized and mixed with sulphuric\n acid. He says this'll produce\n carbon.\n\n\n I certainly hope so.\n\n\n So does Kroger.\nBrief reprieve\n for us. The\n acid-sugar combination not only\n produces carbon but water vapor,\n and the gauge has gone up a notch.\n That means that we have a quart\n of water in the tanks for drinking.\n However, the air's a bit better,\n and we voted to let Kroger stay inside\n the rocket.", "We're in a small cave that is just\n off a bigger cave where lots of tunnels\n come together. I can't remember\n which one we came in through,\n and neither can anyone else. Jones\n asked me what the hell I kept writing\n in the diary for, did I want to\n make it a gift to Martian archeologists?\n But I said where there's life\n there's hope, and now he won't talk\n to me. I congratulated Kroger on\n the lichen I'd seen, but he just said\n a short and unscientific word and\n went to sleep.\n\n\n There's a Martian guarding the\n entrance to our cave. I don't know\n what they intend to do with us.\n Feed us, I hope. So far, they've just\n left us here, and we're out of rations.", "Well, it's time for takeoff.\nThis time\n it wasn't so bad. I\n thought I was getting my space-legs,\n but Pat says there's less gravity on\n Mars, so escape velocity didn't\n have to be so fast, hence a smoother\n (relatively) trip on our shock-absorbing\n bunks.\n\n\n Lloyd wants to play chess again.\n I'll be careful not to win this time.\n However, if I don't win, maybe this\n time\nI'll\nbe the one to quit.\n\n\n Kroger is busy in his cramped\n lab space trying to classify the little\n moss he was able to gather, and\n Jones and Pat are up front watching\n the white specks revolve on that\n black velvet again.", "I didn't know. I hadn't seen\n them, nor the jeep, on my trip back.\n So we followed the wheel tracks for\n a while, and they veered off from\n my trail and followed another, very\n much like the one that had been\n paralleling mine when Jones and\n Lloyd had taken a shot at the scaly\n thing.\n\n\n \"We'd better get them on the\n radio,\" said Jones, turning back\n toward the ship.\n\n\n There wasn't anything on the\n radio but static.\n\n\n Pat and Kroger haven't come\n back yet, either.\nJune 21, 1961\nWe're not\n alone here. More of\n the scaly things have come toward\n the camp, but a few rifle shots send\n them away. They hop like kangaroos\n when they're startled. Their\n attitudes aren't menacing, but their\n appearance is. And Jones says,\n \"Who knows what's 'menacing' in\n an alien?\"", "Kroger says watch out.\nWe\nare\n made of carbohydrates, too. I'd\n rather not have known.\nMarch 4, 1962\nEarth fills\n the screen in the\n control room. Pat says if we're\n lucky, he might be able to use the\n bit of fuel we have left to set us\n in a descending spiral into one of\n the oceans. The rocket is tighter\n than a submarine, he insists, and\n it will float till we're rescued, if\n the plates don't crack under the impact.", "Dwight Kroger, the biochemist,\n is rather old to take the \"rigors of\n the journey,\" as he puts it, but the\n government had a choice between\n sending a green scientist who could\n stand the trip or an accomplished\n man who would probably not survive,\n so they picked Kroger. We've\n blasted off, though, and he's still\n with us. He looks a damn sight better\n than I feel. He's kind of balding,\n and very iron-gray-haired and\n skinny, but his skin is tan as an Indian's,\n and right now he's telling\n jokes in the washroom with the co-pilot.\n\n\n Jones (that's the co-pilot; I\n didn't quite catch his first name) is\n scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and\n gives the general appearance of belonging\n under the spreading chestnut\n tree, not in a metal bullet flinging\n itself out into airless space.\n Come to think of it, who\ndoes\nbelong\n where we are?", "Jones got the rifles out of the\n stream (the Martians had probably\n thought they were beyond recovery\n there) and we found the jeep. It\n was nearly buried in sand, but we\n got it cleaned off and running, and\n got back to the ship quickly. First\n thing we did on arriving was to\n break out the stores and have a\n celebration feast just outside the\n door of the ship.\n\n\n It was pork again, and I got sick.\nJune 25, 1961\nWe're going back\n . Pat says\n that a week is all we were allowed\n to stay and that it's urgent to return\n and tell what we've learned\n about Mars (we know there are\n Martians, and they're made of\n sugar).\n\n\n \"Why,\" I said, \"can't we just tell\n it on the radio?\"", "Well, we're down.\n We have\n to wear gas masks with oxygen\n hook-ups. Kroger says the air is\n breathable, but thin, and it has too\n much dust in it to be any fun to\n inhale. He's all for going out and\n looking for lichen, but Pat says he's\n got to set up camp, then get instructions\n from Earth. So we just have\n to wait. The air is very cold, but the\n Sun is hot as hell when it hits you.\n The sky is a blinding pink, or maybe\n more of a pale fuchsia. Kroger\n says it's the dust. The sand underfoot\n is kind of rose-colored, and not\n really gritty. The particles are", "Kroger tells me that the pilot's\n name is Patrick Desmond, but that\n I can call him Pat when I get to\n know him better. So far, he's still\n Captain Desmond to me. I haven't\n the vaguest idea what he looks like.\n He was already on board when I\n got here, with my typewriter and\n ream of paper, so we didn't meet.\n\n\n My compartment is small but\n clean. I mean clean now. It wasn't\n during blastoff. The inertial gravities\n didn't bother me so much as\n the gyroscopic spin they put on the\n ship so we have a sort of artificial\n gravity to hold us against the\n curved floor. It's that constant\n whirly feeling that gets me. I get\n sick on merry-go-rounds, too.", "Jones says he'll go down spitting.\n\n\n Pat says why not dismantle interior\n of rocket to find out where\n they're holing up? Fine idea.\n\n\n How do you dismantle riveted\n metal plates?\nJune 28, 1961\nThe AFAR system\n is no more\n and the water gauges are still dropping.\n Kroger suggests baking bread,\n then slicing it, then toasting it till\n it turns to carbon, and we can use\n the carbon in the AFAR system.\n\n\n We'll have to try it, I guess.\nThe Martians\n ate the bread.\n Jones came forward to tell us the\n loaves were cooling, and when he\n got back they were gone. However,\n he did find a few of the red crystals\n on the galley deck (floor). They're\n good-sized crystals, too. Which\n means so are the Martians.", "The constant shower of sand\n near the cliff walls is annoying, but\n it's sandless (shower-wise) near\n the stream, so we're following the\n footprints along the bank. Also, the\n air's better down here. Still thin,\n but not so bad as on the surface.\n We're going without masks to save\n oxygen for the return trip (Jones\n assures me there'll\nbe\na return\n trip), and the air's only a little bit\n sandy, but handkerchiefs over nose\n and mouth solve this.\n\n\n We look like desperadoes, what\n with the rifles and covered faces. I\n said as much to Lloyd and he told\n me to shut up. Moss all over the\n cliff walls. Swell luck for Kroger.\nWe've found\n Kroger and Pat,\n with the help of the aliens. Or maybe\n I should call them the Martians.\n Either way, it's better than what\n Jones calls them.", "The point is, bullets won't stop\n these things, and wherever a crystal\n falls, a new Martian springs up\n in a few weeks. It looks like the\n five of us have abetted an invasion\n from Mars.\n\n\n Needless to say, we're no longer\n heroes.\n\n\n I haven't heard from Pat or\n Lloyd for a week. Jones was picked\n up attacking a candy factory yesterday,\n and Kroger and I were allowed\n to sign on for the flight to\n Venus scheduled within the next\n few days—because of our experience.", "The navigator's name is Lloyd\n Streeter, but I haven't seen his face\n yet. He has a little cubicle behind\n the pilot's compartment, with all\n kinds of maps and rulers and things.\n He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall\n (they call it the bulkhead,\n for some reason or other)\n table, scratching away with a ballpoint\n pen on the maps, and now\n and then calling numbers over a\n microphone to the pilot. His hair\n is red and curly, and he looks as\n though he'd be tall if he ever gets\n to stand up. There are freckles on\n the backs of his hands, so I think\n he's probably got them on his face,\n too. So far, all he's said is, \"Scram,\n I'm busy.\"" ] ]
train	99901	[ "Which statement best describes the purpose of this text?", "Which term best describes the approach Cave supports with regard to AI development?", "According to Cave, what must happen before different disciplines converge to guide AI development?", "According to Cave, what issue does AI development share with climate change threats?", "Cave acknowledges all of the potential concerns regarding AI EXCEPT:", "Cave suggests all of the following ways for preventing a loss of control over AI EXCEPT: ", "What does the author view as the purpose of AI", "To what does Cave attribute general human skepticism of AI?", "GP most likely stands for?" ]	[ [ "To propose potential pathways that AI could take to eliminate social and environmental problems in the near future", "To explain how industries are approaching collaboration and making decisions in AI with regard to social responses", "To demonstrate how humans are taking advantages of AI-related opportunities while dodging the risks", "To make an argument in support of more checks and balances within the institution of AI development" ], [ "multifaceted", "reductionist", "isolationist", "divergent" ], [ "government support", "signing a treatise", "creating shared policies", "establishing dialogue" ], [ "Western industries rely too much on certain materials and technology to abandon use of AI and things like fossil fuels", "Those in charge of climate change threats and AI don't experience societal costs sustained from negative outcomes", "They inevitably contribute to a widening income disparity among the wealthy and those living in poverty", "At a certain point, AI and responses to climate change will eradicate job positions that many humans currently fill" ], [ "contribution to a more apathetic society", "mass casualties from AI-related accidents", "tendency for use toward escapism", "public reaction toward human job losses" ], [ "developing an automatic shutdown option for AI that goes awry", "maintaining a system of accountable design ", "engaging in interdisciplinary conversations", "anticipating problems that may arise from technology" ], [ "To eliminate natural selection", "To achieve ultimate convenience", "To amplify social improvement", "To mitigate climate threats" ], [ "fear of domestication", "evolutionary biases", "media portrayals", "loss of autonomy" ], [ "generic pharmaceutical", "ghost publisher", "geriatric patient", "general practitioner" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 4, 2, 2, 1, 3, 2, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "But at the same time, we're competitive and murderous. We have a strong sense of in-group versus out-group, which is responsible for both a great deal of cooperation, within the in-group, but also terrible crimes. Murder, rape, pillage, genocide; and they're pointed at the out-group.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things.", "It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt.", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "As to utopian, yes, that's interesting. I certainly mentioned a couple of things. One thing that I hope is that this new technological revolution enables us to undo some of the damage of the last one. That's a very utopian thought and not terribly realistic, but we use fossil fuels so incredibly efficiently. The idea that driverless cars that are shared, basically a kind of shared service located off a Brownfield site does away with 95 per cent of all cars, freeing up a huge amount of space in the city to be greener, many fewer cars need to be produced, they would be on the road much less, there'd be fewer traffic jams." ], [ "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things." ], [ "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative." ], [ "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things." ], [ "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things." ], [ "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. I think we can shape the way in which technology develops. We have various tools. In any given country, we have regulations. There's a possibility of international regulation. \n\n Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework. It's coming from a certain place. And it is shaped by all of those things.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example." ], [ "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.", "It's just one example, but the idea that we can live much more resource-efficiently, because we are living more intelligently through using these tools. And therefore can undo some of the damage of the last Industrial Revolution. That's my main utopian hope, I guess.\nVintage toy robot image by josefkubes/Shutterstock\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products." ], [ "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "And it's taken a very long time for the academic community to accept that there could be such a thing as non-human intelligence at all. We know that crows, for example, who have had a completely different evolutionary history, or octopuses, who have an even more different evolutionary history, might have a kind of intelligence that's very different to ours. That in some ways rivals our own, and so forth. \n\n But luckily, we have got to that point in recent years of accepting that we are not the only form of intelligence. But now, AI is challenging that from a different direction. Just as we are accepting that the natural world offers this enormous range of different intelligences, we are at the same time inventing new intelligences that are radically different to humans.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots.", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.", "I think, nonetheless, there are things we can do. We can try to imagine how things might go very badly wrong, and then work hard to develop systems that will stop that from happening. We can also try collectively to imagine how things could go very right. The kind of society that we actually want to live in that uses this technology. And I'm sure that will be skewed in all sorts of ways, and we might imagine things that seem wonderful and actually have terrible by-products.", "And I think the more we understand a technology's relationship with those things, and the more we then consciously try to shape those things, the more we are going to influence the technology. So, for example, developing a culture of responsible innovation. For example, a kind of Hippocratic oath for AI developers. These things are within the realms of what is feasible, and I think will help to shape the future.\nOne of the problems with intervention, generally, is that we cannot control the course of events. We can attempt to, but we don't know how things are going to evolve. The reality is, societies are much too complex for us to be able to shape them in any very specific way, as plenty of ideologies and political movements have found to their cost. There are often unforeseen consequences that can derail a project." ], [ "I think one worry that we haven't talked about is that we've become extremely dependent upon this technology. And that we essentially become deskilled. There's an extent to which the history of civilisation is the history of the domestication of the human species sort of by ourselves, and also by our technology, to some extent. And AI certainly allows for that to reach a whole new level. \n\n Just think about GPs with diagnostic tools. Even now, my GP consults the computer fairly regularly. But as diagnostic tools get better, what are they going to be doing other than just typing something into the computer and reading out what comes back? At which point, you might as well do away with the GP. But then, who does know about medicine?", "But at the same time, we're competitive and murderous. We have a strong sense of in-group versus out-group, which is responsible for both a great deal of cooperation, within the in-group, but also terrible crimes. Murder, rape, pillage, genocide; and they're pointed at the out-group.", "So I think there is anxiety in the tech industry that there could be a serious reaction against this technology at any point. And so my impression is that there is a feeling within these companies that these ethical and social implications need to be taken very seriously, now. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided.\nMy personal experience working with these tech companies is that they are concerned for their businesses and genuinely want to do the right thing. Of course there are intellectual challenges and there is money to be made, but equally they are people who don't think when they get up in the morning that they're going to put people out of jobs or bring about the downfall of humanity. As the industry matures it's developing a sense of responsibility.", "And so I think it's very natural for us to see AIs in terms of agents. We anthropomorphise them as these kind of android robots. And then we think about, well, you know, are they part of our in-group, or are they some other group? If they're some other group, it's us against them. Who's going to win? Well, let's see. So I think that's very natural, I think that's very human.\nThere is this long tradition, in Western culture in particular, with associating intelligence and dominance and power. It's interesting to speculate about how, and I wish I knew more about it, and I'd like to see more research on this, about how different cultures perceive AI. It's well known that Japan is very accepting of technology and robots, for example.", "I do think it comes both from some biases that might well be innate, such as anthropomorphism, or our human tendency to ascribe agency to other objects, particularly moving ones, is well-established and probably has sound evolutionary roots. If it moves, it's probably wise to start asking yourself questions like, \"What is it? What might it want? Where might it be going? Might it be hungry? Do I look like food to it?\" I think it makes sense, it's natural for us to think in terms of agency. And when we do, it's natural for us to project our own ways of being and acting. And we, as primates, are profoundly co-operative.", "This conversation cannot be in the hands of any one group. It oughtn't be in the hands of Silicon Valley billionaires alone. They've got their role to play, but this is a conversation we need to be having as widely as possible.\nThe centre is developing some really interesting projects but perhaps one of the most interesting is the discussion of what intelligence might be. Could you go into a bit more detail about the kinds of questions you are trying to explore in this area?\nYou mean kinds of intelligence?\nYeah.\nI think this is very important because historically, we've had an overwhelming tendency to anthropomorphise. We define what intelligence is, historically, as being human-like. And then within that, being like certain humans.", "AI: what's the worst that could happen?\nThe Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. It launched at the University of Cambridge last October, and is a collaboration between four universities and colleges – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and Berkeley – backed with a 10-year, £10m grant from the Leverhulme Trust. \n\n Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. \n\nExecutive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI.", "It certainly is a very ambitious project to create the atlas of intelligence.\nThere was a point I read in something you wrote on our ideas of intelligence that I thought was very interesting. We actually tend to think of intelligence at the societal level when we think about human ability, rather than at the individual level but in the end conflate the two. I think that's a very good point, when we think about our capabilities, we think about what we can achieve as a whole, not individually. But when we talk about AI, we tend to think about that individual piece of technology, or that individual system. So for example if we think about the internet of things and AI, we should discuss intelligence as something encompassed by the whole.\nYeah, absolutely. Yes, right now, perhaps it is a product of our anthropomorphising bias. But there is a tendency to see a narrative of AI versus humanity, as if it's one or the other. And yet, obviously, there are risks in this technology long before it acquires any kind of manipulative agency.", "As to utopian, yes, that's interesting. I certainly mentioned a couple of things. One thing that I hope is that this new technological revolution enables us to undo some of the damage of the last one. That's a very utopian thought and not terribly realistic, but we use fossil fuels so incredibly efficiently. The idea that driverless cars that are shared, basically a kind of shared service located off a Brownfield site does away with 95 per cent of all cars, freeing up a huge amount of space in the city to be greener, many fewer cars need to be produced, they would be on the road much less, there'd be fewer traffic jams.", "AI companies, and in particular the big tech companies, are very concerned that this won't go like climate change, but rather it will go like GMOs: that people will have a gut reaction to this technology as soon as the first great swathe of job losses take hold. People speculate that 50m jobs could be lost in the US if trucking is automated, which is conceivable within 10 years. You could imagine a populist US government therefore simply banning driverless cars.", "And I think, still, this anthropomorphic picture of the kind of humanoid android, the robot, dominates our idea of what AI is too much. And too many people, and the industry as well, talk about human-level artificial intelligence as a goal, or general AI, which basically means like a human. But actually what we're building is nothing like a human. \n\n When the first pocket calculator was made, it didn't do maths like a human. It was vastly better. It didn't make the occasional mistake. When we set about creating these artificial agents to solve these problems, because they have a completely different evolutionary history to humans, they solve problems in very different ways.\nAnd until now, people have been fairly shy about describing them as intelligent. Or rather, in the history of AIs, we think solving a particular problem would require intelligence. Then we solve it. And then that's no longer intelligence, because we've solved it. Chess is a good example.", "That's a big question. Certainly I don't lie awake at night worried that robots are going to knock the door down and come in with a machine gun. If the robots take over the world, it won't be by knocking the door down. At the moment, I think it's certainly as big a risk that we have a GMO moment, and there's a powerful reaction against the technology which prevents us from reaping the benefits, which are enormous. I think that's as big a risk as the risks from the technologies themselves.", "You can think, well, we in the West have long been justifying power relations of a certain kind on the basis that we're 'cleverer'. That's why men get to vote and women don't, or whatever. In a culture where power is not based on intelligence but, say, on a caste system, which is purely hereditary, we’d build an AI, and it would just tune in, drop out, attain enlightenment, just sit in the corner. Or we beg it to come back and help us find enlightenment. It might be that we find a completely different narrative to the one that's dominant in the West.\nOne of the projects the centre is running is looking into what kind of AI breakthroughs may come, when and what the social consequences could be. What do you think the future holds? What are your fears – what do you think could go right and wrong in the short, medium and long term?", "Their conversation has been edited.\nHarry Armstrong: Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field?\nStephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. \n\n That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. \n\n I think there are many areas of science where more interdisciplinary engagement would be valuable. Biotech’s another example. In that sense AI isn’t unique, but I think because thinking about AI is still in very early stages, we have an opportunity to shape the way in which we think about it, and build that community.", "But the reality is, we are creating a whole new world of different artificial agents. And we need to understand that world. We need to understand all the different ways of being clever, if you like. How you can be extremely sophisticated at some particular rational process, and yet extremely bad at another one in a way that bears no relation to the way humans are on these axes. \n\n And this is important, partly because we need to expand our sense of what is intelligent, like we have done with the natural world. Because lots of things follow from saying something is intelligent. Historically, we have a long tradition in Western philosophy of saying those who are intelligent should rule. So if intelligence equates to power, then obviously we need to think about what we mean by intelligence. Who has it and who doesn't. Or how it equates to rights and responsibilities.", "We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. But the first step is learning how to talk to each other.\nAt a recent talk, Naomi Klein said that addressing the challenge of climate change could not have come at a worse time. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. Do you see the same issues hampering a global effort to respond to the challenges AI raises?\nClimate change suffers from the problem that the costs are not incurred in any direct way by the industrialists who own the technology and are profiting from it. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. There has been disruption but so far, compared to industrialisation, the impact has been fairly small. That will probably change.", "Robotic technology is dangerous. Or potentially dangerous. But at the same time, most of what we're using technology for is to enhance ourselves, to increase our capacities. And a lot of what AI is going to be doing is augmenting us – we're going to be working as teams, AI-human teams.\nWhere do you think this AI-human conflict, or concept of a conflict, comes from? Do you think that's just a reflection of historical conversations we've had about automation, or do you think it is a deeper fear?", "So I think we've got a real opportunity, despite the general climate, and in some ways because of it. There's a great opportunity to bring industry on board to make sure the technology is developed in the right way.\nOne of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. If you try and push against this idea you can be labelled as being anti-progress and stuck in the past. But we do have a lot more control than we give ourselves credit for. For example, routineness and susceptibility to automation are not inevitable features of occupations, job design is hugely important. How do we design jobs? How do we create jobs that allow people to do the kind of work they want to do? There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen.", "Certainly, we encounter technological determinism a lot. And it's understandable. For us as individuals, of course it does feel like it always is happening and we just have to cope. No one individual can do much about it, other than adapt.", "And so we do need to worry about deskilling and about becoming dependent. And it is entirely possible that you can imagine a society in which we're all sort of prosperous, in a sense. Our basic bodily needs are provided for, perhaps, in a way, to an extent that we've never before even dreamed of. Unprecedented in human history. \n\n And yet, we're stripped of any kind of meaningful work. We have no purpose. We're escaping to virtual reality. And then you could imagine all sorts of worrying countercultures or Luddite movements or what have you. I guess that's the kind of scenario that – I haven't sketched it terribly well – but that's the kind of thing that worries me more than missile-toting giant robots." ] ]
valid	63041	[ "Which of the following is a false statement about the 98th corpse to be acquired by the ship?", "How long have the Venusians and Earth been in conflict?", "How did Burnett die?", "How many times did Burnett operate the claw in the passage?", "What likely happened to Rice in the end?", "What was Burnett’s greatest motivation to collect the 99th body?", "Why did Lethla come aboard the morgue ship?", "Why are Earth and Venus at war?", "What do we learn of the relationship between Rice and Burnett?" ]	[ [ "He travelled to Earth", "He turned on his superior", "He was a person of power in the opposition", "He was playing dead when found" ], [ "A decade", "Since Earthlings discovered interplanetary travel", "Since Venus was colonized", "A century" ], [ "Betrayal by Rice", "Casualty of fight with Lethla", "Ejection into space", "Suicide " ], [ "Three", "Two", "Four", "One" ], [ "He returned to Earth", "He died of his wounds", "He went to Venus", "He continued to collect bodies until the ship was full" ], [ "He saw a way to end the conflict", "Finally something exciting was happening on the ship", "He wanted to learn more about the mechanism to breathe in space", "He wanted to go home" ], [ "There were only two living people on the ship to overcome", "The ship had invisibility technology", "The ship had safe passage ", "The ship had the specialized claw to retrieve Kriere" ], [ "To maintain control of the solar system", "It is not revealed", "Venusians tried to colonize Earth", "Earth provoked the Venusians" ], [ "They served together in combat", "They are brothers", "They are work colleagues", "They are long time friends" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 2, 4, 1, 1, 3, 2, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n.", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"", "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.", "The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"" ], [ "Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.", "He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!", "\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"", "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands.", "He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nAll the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across\n stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the\n titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited\n glory are always a million miles ahead.\n\n\n He bit his teeth together.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nYou come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped\n trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the\n dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of\n its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see\n it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your\n ribs.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?" ], [ "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"", "Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n.", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead." ], [ "The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.", "Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"" ], [ "The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"", "Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"", "If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?", "Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"", "\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"" ], [ "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"", "Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n\n\n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing\n out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed,\n thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf\n at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n\n\n And then he said softly:\n\n\n \"\nOne hundred.\n\"", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.", "Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n.", "The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.", "\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands." ], [ "\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"", "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its\n slowness.\n\n\n It reached Kriere.\n\n\n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n\n\n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\nLethla watched.\n\n\n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You\n know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the\nConstellation\n. I believe it.\"\nAnd the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all\n around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There\n was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the\n head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n\n\n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n\n\n Burnett spun about and leaped.", "Morgue Ship\nBy RAY BRADBURY\nThis was Burnett's last trip. Three more\n\n shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and\n\n he would be among the living again.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1944.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws\n groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n\n\n There was another dead man aboard the\nConstellation\n.", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?", "Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.", "Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like\n fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead,\n he squinted.\n\n\n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good\n trick.\"\n\n\n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\nBurnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen,\n eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n\n\n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to\n Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last\n time anybody would ever board the\nConstellation\nalive. His stomach\n went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.", "Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"", "Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and\n quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;\n machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see\n anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of\n the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,\n keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n\n\n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical\n gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all\n tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.\n Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor\n warrior's body out of the void.", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over." ], [ "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.", "He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over\n the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that\n was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals.\n Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a\n slow pace.\n\n\n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape?\n See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be\n hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out\n alive; if they cooperated.\n\n\n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves\n in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were\n stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\nYou may never catch up with the war again.\nThe last trip!", "\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"", "\"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus.\n We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture\n was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a\n small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our\n chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to\n trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too\n late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for\n brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n\n\n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the\n protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe\n to Venus.\"\n\n\n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing\n safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"", "Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what\n ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n\n\n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his\n body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms,\n wet thin lips.\n\n\n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n\n\n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n\n\n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies\n being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of\n hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it\n would all be over.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nAll the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across\n stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the\n titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited\n glory are always a million miles ahead.\n\n\n He bit his teeth together.\nYou never catch up with the war.\nYou come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped\n trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the\n dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of\n its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see\n it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your\n ribs.", "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by\n grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over\n feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space\n suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred\n billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you\n extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n\n\n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering\n silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up\n all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n\n\n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.\n After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing\n your job with mechanical hands.", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of\n stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the\nConstellation\n. Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about\n to be rescued.\n\n\n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he\n was about to end a ten-years' war.\n\n\n There was only\none\nway of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be\n fast.\n\n\n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as\n it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a\n good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered\n directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies\n from space.\n\n\n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet,\n too.", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to\n an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the\n head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed\n as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible\n at all.\"\n\n\n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and\n the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and\n quick.\n\n\n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came\n aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n\n\n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's\n your radio?\"\n\n\n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"" ], [ "Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,\n stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as\n delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly\n blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed\n close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a\n cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed\n completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n\n\n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n\n\n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and\n black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n\n\n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n\n\n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.", "Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them\n into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and\n shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one\n another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,\n salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n\n\n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred\n other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n\n\n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots\n inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the\n husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved\n for action.\n\n\n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n\n\n \"Sam!\"", "The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n\n\n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot\n ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back\n like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n\n\n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and\n screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the\n room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and\n started laughing.\n\n\n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever\n claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n\n\n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's\n young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n\n\n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"", "Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes.\n He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship,\n hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own\n heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n\n\n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't\n care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here—what's his name?\n Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine\n beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n\n\n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n\n\n Lethla was alive.", "He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream.\n He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the\n necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what\n language it would use if it had to.\n\n\n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he\n knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a\n pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it\n like a dead cold star.\n\n\n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From\n the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight,\n biting lines into his sharp face.\n\n\n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n \"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"", "Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative\n lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator\n shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to\n life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n\n\n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n\n\n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was\n worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred\n thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood\n cooling in it.\nShaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed\n up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed\n without making any noise on the rungs.", "\"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open.\n Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last\n trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n\n\n \"This is the hard way—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never\n have to come aboard the\nConstellation\n, though, Rice.\" His voice\n trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll\n be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago—\"\n\n\n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his\n mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of\n them out:\n\n\n \"Rice?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"", "Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That\n right?\"\n\n\n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in\n space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n\n\n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell.\n What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone\n else.\n\n\n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think!\n Kriere—The All-Mighty—in our territory. His right hand man dead. That\n means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"", "\"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling\n the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there—number ninety-eight is\n Lethla—number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling\n this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who\n want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back\n any way—but—the way—we used to—\"\n\n\n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen\n warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and\n Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a\n million miles.\n\n\n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n\n\n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to\n dissolve.", "Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade\n where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew,\n artery—heart.\n\n\n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and\n this would be the last trip.\n\n\n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n\n\n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there\n was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in\n the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the\n star-port.\"\n\n\n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly.\n Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back\n kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet\n sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first,\n why—", "Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor.\n Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n\n\n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like\n a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never\n knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number\n ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n\n\n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And\n what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he\n chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo\n wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you\n never knew who it would be.", "\"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred\n thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has\n swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n\n\n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw\n hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His\n fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n \"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n\n\n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's\n barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and\n days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads\n bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who\n start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone—\"", "\"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n\n\n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n\n\n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be\n picked up—\nnow!\n\"\nRice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time\n in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n\n\n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n\n\n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on\n board the\nConstellation\nin half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n\n\n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n\n\n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"", "Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead\n men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first—we must rescue Kriere....\"\n\n\n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n\n\n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes\n lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama.\n Lethla's voice came next:\n\n\n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus\n at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these\n air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked\n unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the\n life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing\n their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the\n Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.", "Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n \"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the\n Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the\n day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick\n of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling\n through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good\n green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n\n\n \"As for Kriere—if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution\n is taken to protect that one.\"\n\n\n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n\n\n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a\n battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n\n\n \"We'll radio for help?\"", "He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and\n forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back\n full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,\n who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a\n decent burial.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice\n from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n\n\n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five,\n ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight\n surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded\n deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n\n\n Rice said:\n\n\n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day\n drunk!\"", "But even a machine breaks down....\n\"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.\n Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy\n official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n\n\n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong\n with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it\n was.\n\n\n Maybe it was because the body looked a little\ntoo\ndead.", "If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end\n of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind\n searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that—\n\n\n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like\n a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat,\n water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy\n jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be\n eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored\n because of his gun.\n\n\n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n\n\n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n\n\n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered,\n fooled—somehow. But—how?", "A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head.\nYou\n never catch up with the war!\nBut what if the war catches up with you?\n\n\n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\nLethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the\n chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick\n fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the\n halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off\n of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been\n inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n\n\n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it,\n Earthman.\"\n\n\n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"", "\"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n \"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock\n is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the\n ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and\n coils. The radio.\n\n\n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his\n feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by\n the new bitterness in it.\n\n\n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n\n\n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk—\"\n\n\n Rice said it, slow:\n\n\n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead\n men belong here.\"" ] ]
valid	60412	[ "When did the earth earn its new title?", "What do the colors in the physicians' titles mean?", "How did the planet get the code to call for help?", "What kind of IV drip did the doctor give the patient?", "What did the doctor administer by feeding tube?", "Why did the Earth doctor use the mortar and pestle?", "How many times did the doctor give the patient aspirin?" ]	[ [ "When humans from Earth started giving medical care wherever they traveled", "When Earth became known as unrivaled in its development of the biological sciences", "When humans from Earth became known as Galactic Pill Peddlers", "When the first contract was signed" ], [ "Stone focuses his practice on medication and Jenkins is a surgeon", "Jenkins focuses his practice on medication and Stone is a surgeon", "They both practice emergency medicine", "They can handle all medical problems on the spot" ], [ "This remains unknown", "Stolen from a contract planet", "From a crew member before they shot them", "From a crew member under threat of having their ear cut off" ], [ "glucose", "aspirin solution", "viremia drugs", "antibiotic" ], [ "antibiotics", "a placebo", "aspirin", "sugar water" ], [ "To help the local doctor understand the treatment", "To keep the IV drip going", "To prepare medication", "As part of the bio-survey" ], [ "3", "2", "4", "1" ] ]	[ 4, 2, 1, 1, 3, 1, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "In the early days of galactic exploration, of course, Medical Services\n was only a minor factor in an expanding commercial network that drew\n multitudes of planets into social and economic interdependence; but\n in any growing civilization division of labor inevitably occurs.\n Other planets outstripped Earth in technology, in communications, in\n transport, and in production techniques—but Earth stood unrivaled in\n its development of the biological sciences. Wherever an Earth ship\n landed, the crew was soon rendering Medical Services of one sort or\n another, whether they had planned it that way or not. On Deneb III\n the Medical Service Contract was formalized, and Hospital Earth came\n into being. Into all known corners of the galaxy ships of the General\n Practice Patrol were dispatched—\"Galactic Pill Peddlers\" forging a", "Certain basic principles were always the same, a fact which accelerated\n the program considerably. Humanoid or not, all forms of life had basic\n qualities in common. Biochemical reactions were biochemical reactions,\n whether they happened to occur in a wing-creature of Wolf IV or a\n doctor from Sol III. Anatomy was a broad determinant: a jelly-blob from\n Deneb I with its fine skein of pulsating nerve fibrils was still just\n a jelly-blob, and would never rise above the level of amoeboid yes-no\n response because of its utter lack of organization. But a creature\n with an organized central nervous system and a functional division of\n work among organ systems could be categorized, tested, studied, and\n compared, and the information used in combating native disease. Given\n no major setbacks, and full cooperation of the natives, the job only\n took about six months to do—", "\"And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes.\" Jenkins shook\n his head. \"Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs.\n We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know\n how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther\n we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later.\n If we still happen to be around later, that is.\"\nIt had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service\n Contract had been signed with Deneb III centuries before, Hospital\n Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation\n stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation,\n whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract.\n That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a\n Contract.", "The\nLancet\nhomed on the dismal grey planet with an escort of eight\n ugly fighter ships which had swarmed up like hornets to greet her. They\n triangled her in, grappled her, and dropped her with a bone-jarring\n crash into a landing slot on the edge of the city. As Sam Jenkins and\n Wally Stone picked themselves off the bulkheads, trying to rearrange\n the scarlet and green uniforms of their respective services, the main\n entrance lock burst open with a squeal of tortured metal. At least a\n dozen Moruans poured into the control room—huge bearlike creatures\n with heavy grey fur ruffing out around their faces like thick hairy\n dog collars. The one in command strode forward arrogantly, one huge\n paw leveling a placer-gun with a distinct air of business about it.\n \"Well, you took long enough!\" he roared, baring a set of yellow fangs\n that sent shivers up Jenkins' spine. \"Fourteen hours! Do you call that\n speed?\"", "\"Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business—\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded heavily. \"There sure was. Five successive attempts\n to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out\n bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was\n summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems\n the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And\n they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch\n doctors and spells.\" He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a\n growl. \"So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code\n they couldn't possibly know.\"\n\n\n The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. \"Looks like\n somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him.\"\n\n\n \"Obviously.\"", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "Jenkins snapped on the intercom. \"Wally,\" he yelped. \"Better get up\n here fast.\"\n\n\n \"Trouble?\" said the squawk-box, sleepily.\n\n\n \"Oh, brother,\" said Jenkins. \"Somebody's cracked the Contract Code or\n something.\"\n\n\n A moment later a tall sleepy man in green undershorts appeared at\n the control room, rubbing his eyes. \"What happened?\" he said. \"We've\n changed course.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Ever hear of Morua II?\"\n\n\n Green Doctor Wally Stone frowned and scratched his whiskered chin.\n \"Sounds familiar, but I can't quite tune in. Crash call?\" His eye\n caught the black-striped card. \"Class VI planet ... a plague spot! How\n can we get a crash-call from\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me,\" said Jenkins.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop\n it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the\n ship from HQ in Standard GPP Contract code for crash priority, which\n meant Top Grade Planetary Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows,\n just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the\n flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic; gyros hummed,\n bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Patrol\n ship\nLancet\nspun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the\n call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class\n VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then.\n\n\n Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial\n Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single\n card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it.", "Aguar halted them at the door-way. \"His Eminence will see you,\" he\n growled.\n\n\n \"Who is His Eminence?\" Jenkins asked.\n\n\n \"The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies,\" Aguar\n rumbled. \"He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he\n can never die. When you enter, bow,\" he added.\n\n\n The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they\n bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On\n a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was\n wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on\n either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light.", "Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed\n it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it\n high. \"You've done well!\" he cried to the bewildered physician. \"It's\n over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover.\"\nThey escorted him in triumphal procession back to the\nLancet\n, where\n Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged\n each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. \"I finally got\n through to somebody at HQ,\" he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard.\n \"It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that\n Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the\n first place, but that's the best they can do....\"", "It was a rugged service for a single planet to provide, and it was\n costly. Many planets studied the terms of Contract and declined,\n pleasantly but firmly—and were assured nevertheless that GPP ships\n would answer an emergency call if one was received. There would be a\n fee, of course, but the call would be answered. And then there were\n other planets—places such as Morua II....", "Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. \"It\n adds up,\" he said heatedly. \"You've got the power, you've got your\n magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so\n violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk\n having outsiders cutting in on your trade.\" Jenkins rubbed his chin\n thoughtfully. \"But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot\n more power if you learned how to control this Pox.\"\n\n\n Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates\n for a long moment. Then: \"You're an idiot. It can't be done.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose it could.\"\n\n\n \"The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him\n laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle\n won't drive him out.\"", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "\"We can't promise,\" Jenkins began. \"Sometimes we're called too\n late—but perhaps not in this case,\" he added hastily when he saw the\n Moruan's face. \"Tenth Son and all that. But you'll have to give us\n freedom to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of freedom?\"\n\n\n \"We'll need supplies and information from our ship. We'll have to\n consult your physicians. We'll need healthy Moruans to examine—\"\n\n\n \"But you will cure him,\" Aguar said.", "They were herded into the car with three guards in front and three\n behind. A tunnel gulped them into darkness as the car careened madly\n into the city. For an endless period they pitched and churned through\n blackness—then suddenly emerged into a high, gilded hall with pale\n sunlight filtering down. From the number of decorated guards, and\n the scraping and groveling that went on as they were hurried through\n embattled corridors, it seemed likely they were nearing the seat of\n government. Finally a pair of steel doors opened to admit them to\n a long, arched hallway. Their leader, who was called Aguar by his\n flunkies, halted them with a snarl and walked across to the tall figure\n guarding the far door. The guard did not seem pleased; he wore a long\n purple cap with a gold ball on the end which twitched wildly as their\n whispered conference devolved into growling and snarling. Finally\n Aguar motioned them to follow, and they entered the far chamber, with\n Purple-Hat glaring at them malignantly as they passed.", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "R\n X\nBY ALAN E. NOURSE\nThe tenth son of a tenth son was very\n \nsick, but it was written that he would\n \nnever die. Of course, it was up to the\n \nEarth doctor to see that he didn't!\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, October 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that" ], [ "His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them\n with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his\n feet. \"Go away,\" he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over\n with his back toward them.\n\n\n The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. \"What\n illness is this?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it\n kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is\n written—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know. He can never die.\" Sam gave Wally a sour look. \"What\n happens, though, if he just up and does?\"\n\n\n Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. \"\nHe\n does not die.\nWe have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure\n him.\"", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. \"All right, we\n bargain,\" he said. \"\nAfter\nyou show us.\"\n\n\n \"Now or never.\" Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards.\n \"I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll\n see you there. If not—\" He fingered his throat suggestively.\n\n\n As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began\n throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him\n in bewilderment. \"You're going to kill him,\" he moaned. \"Prayers,\n promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you.\"\n\n\n Sam grinned. \"Maybe you should operate on him.\nThat\nwould open their\n eyes all right.\"", "Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly.\n \"Try being quiet for a while,\" Jenkins said to Aguar. \"We're going to\n cure the Boss here.\" Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap\n and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor\n and threw it open. \"First off, get rid of those things.\" He pointed\n to the braziers at the bedside. \"They're enough to give anybody a\n headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can\n they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when\n they're raising a din like that?\"\n\n\n Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open\n the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch\n had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the\n braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside.", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "Aguar halted them at the door-way. \"His Eminence will see you,\" he\n growled.\n\n\n \"Who is His Eminence?\" Jenkins asked.\n\n\n \"The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies,\" Aguar\n rumbled. \"He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he\n can never die. When you enter, bow,\" he added.\n\n\n The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they\n bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On\n a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was\n wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on\n either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light.", "Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment\n he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and\n three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam\n Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous\n flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady\n drip-drip-drip.\n\n\n Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag.\n These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to\n high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask\n above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark\n bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an\n ominous purple color.\n\n\n Kiz watched goggle-eyed.", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His\n Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of\n purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly\n Jenkins motioned to Kiz. \"His pulse—quickly!\"\n\n\n Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. \"A hundred and eighty,\"\n he whispered.\n\n\n Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. \"It's a\n bad sign,\" he said. \"The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an\n outsider.\" He motioned toward the mortar. \"Can you do this?\"\n\n\n Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz.\n He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. \"Call me when the bottle\n is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do,\ndon't touch\n anything\n.\"", "Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. \"It\n adds up,\" he said heatedly. \"You've got the power, you've got your\n magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so\n violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk\n having outsiders cutting in on your trade.\" Jenkins rubbed his chin\n thoughtfully. \"But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot\n more power if you learned how to control this Pox.\"\n\n\n Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates\n for a long moment. Then: \"You're an idiot. It can't be done.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose it could.\"\n\n\n \"The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him\n laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle\n won't drive him out.\"", "They were herded into the car with three guards in front and three\n behind. A tunnel gulped them into darkness as the car careened madly\n into the city. For an endless period they pitched and churned through\n blackness—then suddenly emerged into a high, gilded hall with pale\n sunlight filtering down. From the number of decorated guards, and\n the scraping and groveling that went on as they were hurried through\n embattled corridors, it seemed likely they were nearing the seat of\n government. Finally a pair of steel doors opened to admit them to\n a long, arched hallway. Their leader, who was called Aguar by his\n flunkies, halted them with a snarl and walked across to the tall figure\n guarding the far door. The guard did not seem pleased; he wore a long\n purple cap with a gold ball on the end which twitched wildly as their\n whispered conference devolved into growling and snarling. Finally\n Aguar motioned them to follow, and they entered the far chamber, with\n Purple-Hat glaring at them malignantly as they passed.", "\"No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do\n you want me to do?\"\n\n\n \"Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ,\" said Sam\n grimly. \"Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one\n in the next few hours—\"\nIf the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had\n witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey\n to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost\n strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed.\n\n\n Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad\n mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey\n chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the\n sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality.", "chain of Contracts from Aldebaran to Zarn, accepting calls, diagnosing\n ills, arranging for proper disposition of whatever medical problems\n they came across. Serious problems were shuttled back to Hospital Earth\n without delay; more frequently the GPP crews—doctors of the Red and\n Green services, representing the ancient Earthly arts of medicine and\n surgery—were able to handle the problems on the spot and by themselves.", "The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the\n patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite\n suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a\n monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes\n he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and\n regular.", "\"Now!\" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. \"This should\n annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce.\" He popped the tube into\n the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and\n fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white\n pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube.\n\n\n Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from\n his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. \"You see what I'm doing, of course?\"\n he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed,\" said Kiz.\n\n\n \"Fine. Now this is most important.\" Jenkins searched in the bag until\n he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting\n behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect\n rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop\n it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the\n ship from HQ in Standard GPP Contract code for crash priority, which\n meant Top Grade Planetary Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows,\n just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the\n flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic; gyros hummed,\n bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Patrol\n ship\nLancet\nspun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the\n call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class\n VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then.\n\n\n Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial\n Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single\n card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it.", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"" ], [ "Jenkins snapped on the intercom. \"Wally,\" he yelped. \"Better get up\n here fast.\"\n\n\n \"Trouble?\" said the squawk-box, sleepily.\n\n\n \"Oh, brother,\" said Jenkins. \"Somebody's cracked the Contract Code or\n something.\"\n\n\n A moment later a tall sleepy man in green undershorts appeared at\n the control room, rubbing his eyes. \"What happened?\" he said. \"We've\n changed course.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Ever hear of Morua II?\"\n\n\n Green Doctor Wally Stone frowned and scratched his whiskered chin.\n \"Sounds familiar, but I can't quite tune in. Crash call?\" His eye\n caught the black-striped card. \"Class VI planet ... a plague spot! How\n can we get a crash-call from\nthis\n?\"\n\n\n \"You tell me,\" said Jenkins.", "It was a rugged service for a single planet to provide, and it was\n costly. Many planets studied the terms of Contract and declined,\n pleasantly but firmly—and were assured nevertheless that GPP ships\n would answer an emergency call if one was received. There would be a\n fee, of course, but the call would be answered. And then there were\n other planets—places such as Morua II....", "\"Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business—\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded heavily. \"There sure was. Five successive attempts\n to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out\n bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was\n summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems\n the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And\n they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch\n doctors and spells.\" He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a\n growl. \"So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code\n they couldn't possibly know.\"\n\n\n The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. \"Looks like\n somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him.\"\n\n\n \"Obviously.\"", "\"And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes.\" Jenkins shook\n his head. \"Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs.\n We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know\n how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther\n we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later.\n If we still happen to be around later, that is.\"\nIt had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service\n Contract had been signed with Deneb III centuries before, Hospital\n Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation\n stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation,\n whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract.\n That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a\n Contract.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThey didn't realize they were in trouble until it was too late to stop\n it. The call from Morua II came in quite innocently, relayed to the\n ship from HQ in Standard GPP Contract code for crash priority, which\n meant Top Grade Planetary Emergency, and don't argue about it, fellows,\n just get there, fast. Red Doctor Sam Jenkins took one look at the\n flashing blinker and slammed the controls into automatic; gyros hummed,\n bearings were computed and checked, and the General Practice Patrol\n ship\nLancet\nspun in its tracks, so to speak, and began homing on the\n call-source like a hound on a fox. The fact that Morua II was a Class\n VI planet didn't quite register with anybody, just then.\n\n\n Ten minutes later the Red Doctor reached for the results of the Initial\n Information Survey on Morua II, and let out a howl of alarm. A single\n card sat in the slot with a wide black stripe across it.", "Jenkins twisted down the volume on his Translator with a grimace.\n \"You're lucky we came at all,\" he said peevishly. \"Where's your\n Contract? Where did you get the Code?\"\n\n\n \"Bother the Contract,\" the Moruan snarled. \"You're supposed to be\n physicians, eh?\" He eyed them up and down as though he disapproved of\n everything that he saw. \"You make sick people well?\"\n\n\n \"That's the general idea.\"\n\n\n \"All right.\" He poked a hairy finger at a shuttle car perched outside.\n \"In there.\"", "Certain basic principles were always the same, a fact which accelerated\n the program considerably. Humanoid or not, all forms of life had basic\n qualities in common. Biochemical reactions were biochemical reactions,\n whether they happened to occur in a wing-creature of Wolf IV or a\n doctor from Sol III. Anatomy was a broad determinant: a jelly-blob from\n Deneb I with its fine skein of pulsating nerve fibrils was still just\n a jelly-blob, and would never rise above the level of amoeboid yes-no\n response because of its utter lack of organization. But a creature\n with an organized central nervous system and a functional division of\n work among organ systems could be categorized, tested, studied, and\n compared, and the information used in combating native disease. Given\n no major setbacks, and full cooperation of the natives, the job only\n took about six months to do—", "The\nLancet\nhomed on the dismal grey planet with an escort of eight\n ugly fighter ships which had swarmed up like hornets to greet her. They\n triangled her in, grappled her, and dropped her with a bone-jarring\n crash into a landing slot on the edge of the city. As Sam Jenkins and\n Wally Stone picked themselves off the bulkheads, trying to rearrange\n the scarlet and green uniforms of their respective services, the main\n entrance lock burst open with a squeal of tortured metal. At least a\n dozen Moruans poured into the control room—huge bearlike creatures\n with heavy grey fur ruffing out around their faces like thick hairy\n dog collars. The one in command strode forward arrogantly, one huge\n paw leveling a placer-gun with a distinct air of business about it.\n \"Well, you took long enough!\" he roared, baring a set of yellow fangs\n that sent shivers up Jenkins' spine. \"Fourteen hours! Do you call that\n speed?\"", "Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed\n it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it\n high. \"You've done well!\" he cried to the bewildered physician. \"It's\n over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover.\"\nThey escorted him in triumphal procession back to the\nLancet\n, where\n Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged\n each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. \"I finally got\n through to somebody at HQ,\" he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard.\n \"It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that\n Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the\n first place, but that's the best they can do....\"", "\"We can't promise,\" Jenkins began. \"Sometimes we're called too\n late—but perhaps not in this case,\" he added hastily when he saw the\n Moruan's face. \"Tenth Son and all that. But you'll have to give us\n freedom to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of freedom?\"\n\n\n \"We'll need supplies and information from our ship. We'll have to\n consult your physicians. We'll need healthy Moruans to examine—\"\n\n\n \"But you will cure him,\" Aguar said.", "\"Yeah,\" said Wally. \"What, for instance?\"\n\n\n \"Well, we've got a little to go on just from looking at them. They're\n oxygen-breathers, which means they manage internal combustion of\n carbohydrates, somehow. From the grey skin color I'd guess at a cuprous\n or stannous heme-protein carrying system. They're carnivores, but god\n knows what their protein metabolism is like—Let's get going on some of\n these specimens Aguar has rounded up for us.\"\n\n\n They dug in frantically. Under normal conditions a GPP ship would\n send in a full crew of technicians to a newly-Contracted planet to\n make the initial Bio-survey of the indigenous races. Bio-chemists,\n physiologists, anatomists, microbiologists, radiologists—survey\n workers from every Service would examine and study the new clients,\n take them apart cell by cell to see what made them tick.", "In the early days of galactic exploration, of course, Medical Services\n was only a minor factor in an expanding commercial network that drew\n multitudes of planets into social and economic interdependence; but\n in any growing civilization division of labor inevitably occurs.\n Other planets outstripped Earth in technology, in communications, in\n transport, and in production techniques—but Earth stood unrivaled in\n its development of the biological sciences. Wherever an Earth ship\n landed, the crew was soon rendering Medical Services of one sort or\n another, whether they had planned it that way or not. On Deneb III\n the Medical Service Contract was formalized, and Hospital Earth came\n into being. Into all known corners of the galaxy ships of the General\n Practice Patrol were dispatched—\"Galactic Pill Peddlers\" forging a", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat\n tightly. \"Sure, sure,\" he said weakly. \"You just watch us.\"\n\"But what do you think we're going to do?\" the surgeon wailed, back\n in the control room of the\nLancet\n. \"Sam, we can't\ntouch\nhim. If\n he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him\n without a Bio-survey—look what happened on Baron when they tried it!\n Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the\n antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was....\"\n\n\n \"Might not be such a bad idea for Morua,\" the Red Doctor muttered\n grimly. \"Well, what did you expect me to do—politely refuse? And\n have our throats slit right on the spot?\" He grabbed a pad and began\n scribbling. \"We've got to do\nsomething\njust to keep alive for a\n while.\"", "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "chain of Contracts from Aldebaran to Zarn, accepting calls, diagnosing\n ills, arranging for proper disposition of whatever medical problems\n they came across. Serious problems were shuttled back to Hospital Earth\n without delay; more frequently the GPP crews—doctors of the Red and\n Green services, representing the ancient Earthly arts of medicine and\n surgery—were able to handle the problems on the spot and by themselves.", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"", "Aguar halted them at the door-way. \"His Eminence will see you,\" he\n growled.\n\n\n \"Who is His Eminence?\" Jenkins asked.\n\n\n \"The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies,\" Aguar\n rumbled. \"He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he\n can never die. When you enter, bow,\" he added.\n\n\n The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they\n bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On\n a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was\n wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on\n either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light.", "\"No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do\n you want me to do?\"\n\n\n \"Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ,\" said Sam\n grimly. \"Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one\n in the next few hours—\"\nIf the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had\n witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey\n to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost\n strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed.\n\n\n Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad\n mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey\n chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the\n sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality." ], [ "Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment\n he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and\n three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam\n Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous\n flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady\n drip-drip-drip.\n\n\n Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag.\n These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to\n high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask\n above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark\n bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an\n ominous purple color.\n\n\n Kiz watched goggle-eyed.", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the\n patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite\n suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a\n monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes\n he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and\n regular.", "\"Now!\" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. \"This should\n annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce.\" He popped the tube into\n the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and\n fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white\n pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube.\n\n\n Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from\n his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. \"You see what I'm doing, of course?\"\n he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed,\" said Kiz.\n\n\n \"Fine. Now this is most important.\" Jenkins searched in the bag until\n he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting\n behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect\n rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited.", "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "\"Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are\n the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat\n and drink—\" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube\n arrangement Jenkins had prepared. \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment.\"\n Jenkins handed him the liter flask. \"Hold it high.\" He began searching\n for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood\n flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the\n needle; then the flask began to drip slowly.", "The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His\n Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of\n purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly\n Jenkins motioned to Kiz. \"His pulse—quickly!\"\n\n\n Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. \"A hundred and eighty,\"\n he whispered.\n\n\n Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. \"It's a\n bad sign,\" he said. \"The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an\n outsider.\" He motioned toward the mortar. \"Can you do this?\"\n\n\n Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz.\n He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. \"Call me when the bottle\n is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do,\ndon't touch\n anything\n.\"", "The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. \"All right, we\n bargain,\" he said. \"\nAfter\nyou show us.\"\n\n\n \"Now or never.\" Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards.\n \"I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll\n see you there. If not—\" He fingered his throat suggestively.\n\n\n As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began\n throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him\n in bewilderment. \"You're going to kill him,\" he moaned. \"Prayers,\n promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you.\"\n\n\n Sam grinned. \"Maybe you should operate on him.\nThat\nwould open their\n eyes all right.\"", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"", "\"Tell me what spells you've already used.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers.\n As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a\n liter flask, tubing and needles.\n\n\n \"First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his\n belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles\n at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out\n of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were\n certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of\n two—\"\n\n\n Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His\n Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He\n glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. \"But doesn't\nanybody\never recover from this?\"", "Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly.\n \"Try being quiet for a while,\" Jenkins said to Aguar. \"We're going to\n cure the Boss here.\" Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap\n and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor\n and threw it open. \"First off, get rid of those things.\" He pointed\n to the braziers at the bedside. \"They're enough to give anybody a\n headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can\n they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when\n they're raising a din like that?\"\n\n\n Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open\n the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch\n had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the\n braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside.", "They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a\n limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the\n second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged\n loosely from his arm.\n\"Looks like His Eminence can't read,\" Wally muttered. \"He's going fast,\n Doc.\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded grimly. \"What does it look like to you?\"\n\n\n \"How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say\n nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right.\"\n\n\n \"Probably a viremia of some sort.\" Jenkins went over the great groaning\n hulk with inquiring fingers.\n\n\n \"If it's a viremia, we're cooked,\" Stone whispered. \"None of the drugs\n cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any\n new ones—\"", "\"No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do\n you want me to do?\"\n\n\n \"Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ,\" said Sam\n grimly. \"Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one\n in the next few hours—\"\nIf the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had\n witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey\n to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost\n strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed.\n\n\n Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad\n mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey\n chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the\n sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality.", "His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them\n with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his\n feet. \"Go away,\" he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over\n with his back toward them.\n\n\n The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. \"What\n illness is this?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it\n kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is\n written—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know. He can never die.\" Sam gave Wally a sour look. \"What\n happens, though, if he just up and does?\"\n\n\n Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. \"\nHe\n does not die.\nWe have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure\n him.\"", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "\"Look,\" said Jenkins intensely. \"You've seen this illness before. We\n haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does\n it run?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n \"All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus?\n Degeneration?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n Jenkins' face was pale. \"Look, boys—your Boss out there is going to\n cool before long if something doesn't happen fast—\" His eyes narrowed\n on Kiz. \"Of course, that might be right up your alley—how about that?\n His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?\"", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat\n tightly. \"Sure, sure,\" he said weakly. \"You just watch us.\"\n\"But what do you think we're going to do?\" the surgeon wailed, back\n in the control room of the\nLancet\n. \"Sam, we can't\ntouch\nhim. If\n he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him\n without a Bio-survey—look what happened on Baron when they tried it!\n Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the\n antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was....\"\n\n\n \"Might not be such a bad idea for Morua,\" the Red Doctor muttered\n grimly. \"Well, what did you expect me to do—politely refuse? And\n have our throats slit right on the spot?\" He grabbed a pad and began\n scribbling. \"We've got to do\nsomething\njust to keep alive for a\n while.\"" ], [ "\"Now!\" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. \"This should\n annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce.\" He popped the tube into\n the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and\n fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white\n pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube.\n\n\n Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from\n his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. \"You see what I'm doing, of course?\"\n he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed,\" said Kiz.\n\n\n \"Fine. Now this is most important.\" Jenkins searched in the bag until\n he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting\n behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect\n rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited.", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment\n he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and\n three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam\n Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous\n flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady\n drip-drip-drip.\n\n\n Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag.\n These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to\n high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask\n above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark\n bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an\n ominous purple color.\n\n\n Kiz watched goggle-eyed.", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"", "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "\"Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are\n the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat\n and drink—\" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube\n arrangement Jenkins had prepared. \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment.\"\n Jenkins handed him the liter flask. \"Hold it high.\" He began searching\n for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood\n flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the\n needle; then the flask began to drip slowly.", "The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the\n patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite\n suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a\n monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes\n he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and\n regular.", "The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His\n Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of\n purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly\n Jenkins motioned to Kiz. \"His pulse—quickly!\"\n\n\n Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. \"A hundred and eighty,\"\n he whispered.\n\n\n Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. \"It's a\n bad sign,\" he said. \"The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an\n outsider.\" He motioned toward the mortar. \"Can you do this?\"\n\n\n Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz.\n He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. \"Call me when the bottle\n is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do,\ndon't touch\n anything\n.\"", "The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. \"All right, we\n bargain,\" he said. \"\nAfter\nyou show us.\"\n\n\n \"Now or never.\" Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards.\n \"I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll\n see you there. If not—\" He fingered his throat suggestively.\n\n\n As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began\n throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him\n in bewilderment. \"You're going to kill him,\" he moaned. \"Prayers,\n promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you.\"\n\n\n Sam grinned. \"Maybe you should operate on him.\nThat\nwould open their\n eyes all right.\"", "Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly.\n \"Try being quiet for a while,\" Jenkins said to Aguar. \"We're going to\n cure the Boss here.\" Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap\n and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor\n and threw it open. \"First off, get rid of those things.\" He pointed\n to the braziers at the bedside. \"They're enough to give anybody a\n headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can\n they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when\n they're raising a din like that?\"\n\n\n Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open\n the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch\n had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the\n braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside.", "Jenkins took a deep breath and gripped his red tunic around his throat\n tightly. \"Sure, sure,\" he said weakly. \"You just watch us.\"\n\"But what do you think we're going to do?\" the surgeon wailed, back\n in the control room of the\nLancet\n. \"Sam, we can't\ntouch\nhim. If\n he didn't die naturally we'd kill him for sure! We can't go near him\n without a Bio-survey—look what happened on Baron when they tried it!\n Half the planetary population wiped out before they realized that the\n antibiotic was more deadly to the race than the virus was....\"\n\n\n \"Might not be such a bad idea for Morua,\" the Red Doctor muttered\n grimly. \"Well, what did you expect me to do—politely refuse? And\n have our throats slit right on the spot?\" He grabbed a pad and began\n scribbling. \"We've got to do\nsomething\njust to keep alive for a\n while.\"", "\"Tell me what spells you've already used.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers.\n As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a\n liter flask, tubing and needles.\n\n\n \"First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his\n belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles\n at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out\n of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were\n certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of\n two—\"\n\n\n Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His\n Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He\n glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. \"But doesn't\nanybody\never recover from this?\"", "His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them\n with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his\n feet. \"Go away,\" he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over\n with his back toward them.\n\n\n The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. \"What\n illness is this?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it\n kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is\n written—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know. He can never die.\" Sam gave Wally a sour look. \"What\n happens, though, if he just up and does?\"\n\n\n Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. \"\nHe\n does not die.\nWe have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure\n him.\"", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a\n limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the\n second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged\n loosely from his arm.\n\"Looks like His Eminence can't read,\" Wally muttered. \"He's going fast,\n Doc.\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded grimly. \"What does it look like to you?\"\n\n\n \"How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say\n nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right.\"\n\n\n \"Probably a viremia of some sort.\" Jenkins went over the great groaning\n hulk with inquiring fingers.\n\n\n \"If it's a viremia, we're cooked,\" Stone whispered. \"None of the drugs\n cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any\n new ones—\"", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "\"No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do\n you want me to do?\"\n\n\n \"Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ,\" said Sam\n grimly. \"Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one\n in the next few hours—\"\nIf the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had\n witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey\n to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost\n strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed.\n\n\n Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad\n mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey\n chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the\n sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality.", "\"Look,\" said Jenkins intensely. \"You've seen this illness before. We\n haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does\n it run?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n \"All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus?\n Degeneration?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n Jenkins' face was pale. \"Look, boys—your Boss out there is going to\n cool before long if something doesn't happen fast—\" His eyes narrowed\n on Kiz. \"Of course, that might be right up your alley—how about that?\n His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?\"" ], [ "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "\"Now!\" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. \"This should\n annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce.\" He popped the tube into\n the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and\n fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white\n pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube.\n\n\n Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from\n his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. \"You see what I'm doing, of course?\"\n he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed,\" said Kiz.\n\n\n \"Fine. Now this is most important.\" Jenkins searched in the bag until\n he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting\n behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect\n rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited.", "Kiz began sputtering indignantly; the Red Doctor cut him off. \"It\n adds up,\" he said heatedly. \"You've got the power, you've got your\n magic and all. Maybe you were the boys that turned thumbs down so\n violently on the idea of a Hospital Earth Contract, eh? Couldn't risk\n having outsiders cutting in on your trade.\" Jenkins rubbed his chin\n thoughtfully. \"But somehow it seems to me you'd have a whale of a lot\n more power if you learned how to control this Pox.\"\n\n\n Kiz stopped sputtering quite abruptly. He blinked at his confederates\n for a long moment. Then: \"You're an idiot. It can't be done.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose it could.\"\n\n\n \"The Spirit of the Pox is too strong. Our most powerful spells make him\n laugh. He eats our powders and drinks our potions. Even the Iron Circle\n won't drive him out.\"", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His\n Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of\n purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly\n Jenkins motioned to Kiz. \"His pulse—quickly!\"\n\n\n Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. \"A hundred and eighty,\"\n he whispered.\n\n\n Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. \"It's a\n bad sign,\" he said. \"The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an\n outsider.\" He motioned toward the mortar. \"Can you do this?\"\n\n\n Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz.\n He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. \"Call me when the bottle\n is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do,\ndon't touch\n anything\n.\"", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed\n it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it\n high. \"You've done well!\" he cried to the bewildered physician. \"It's\n over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover.\"\nThey escorted him in triumphal procession back to the\nLancet\n, where\n Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged\n each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. \"I finally got\n through to somebody at HQ,\" he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard.\n \"It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that\n Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the\n first place, but that's the best they can do....\"", "His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them\n with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his\n feet. \"Go away,\" he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over\n with his back toward them.\n\n\n The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. \"What\n illness is this?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it\n kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is\n written—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know. He can never die.\" Sam gave Wally a sour look. \"What\n happens, though, if he just up and does?\"\n\n\n Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. \"\nHe\n does not die.\nWe have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure\n him.\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly.\n \"Try being quiet for a while,\" Jenkins said to Aguar. \"We're going to\n cure the Boss here.\" Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap\n and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor\n and threw it open. \"First off, get rid of those things.\" He pointed\n to the braziers at the bedside. \"They're enough to give anybody a\n headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can\n they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when\n they're raising a din like that?\"\n\n\n Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open\n the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch\n had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the\n braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside.", "The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. \"All right, we\n bargain,\" he said. \"\nAfter\nyou show us.\"\n\n\n \"Now or never.\" Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards.\n \"I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll\n see you there. If not—\" He fingered his throat suggestively.\n\n\n As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began\n throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him\n in bewilderment. \"You're going to kill him,\" he moaned. \"Prayers,\n promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you.\"\n\n\n Sam grinned. \"Maybe you should operate on him.\nThat\nwould open their\n eyes all right.\"", "\"Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are\n the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat\n and drink—\" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube\n arrangement Jenkins had prepared. \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment.\"\n Jenkins handed him the liter flask. \"Hold it high.\" He began searching\n for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood\n flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the\n needle; then the flask began to drip slowly.", "\"And spend the next twenty years scrubbing test tubes.\" Jenkins shook\n his head. \"Sorry, it took me too long to get aboard one of these tubs.\n We don't do that in the General Practice Patrol, remember? I don't know\n how Morua II got the code, but they got it, and that's all the farther\n we're supposed to think. We answer the call, and beef about it later.\n If we still happen to be around later, that is.\"\nIt had always been that way. Since the first formal Medical Service\n Contract had been signed with Deneb III centuries before, Hospital\n Earth had laboriously built its reputation on that single foundation\n stone: immediate medical assistance, without question or hesitation,\n whenever and wherever it was required, on any planet bound by Contract.\n That was the law, for Hospital Earth could not afford to jeopardize a\n Contract.", "\"Wait a minute. Seems to me there was some sort of nasty business—\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded heavily. \"There sure was. Five successive attempts\n to establish a Contract with them, and five times we got thrown out\n bodily. The last time an Earth ship landed there half the crew was\n summarily shot and the others came home with their ears cut off. Seems\n the folks on Morua II didn't want a Contract with Hospital Earth. And\n they're still in the jungle, as far as their medicine goes. Witch\n doctors and spells.\" He tossed the Info-card down the chute with a\n growl. \"So now we have an emergency call from them in a Contract code\n they couldn't possibly know.\"\n\n\n The surgeon in the green undershorts chewed his lip. \"Looks like\n somebody in that last crew spilled the beans before they shot him.\"\n\n\n \"Obviously.\"", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "\"Tell me what spells you've already used.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers.\n As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a\n liter flask, tubing and needles.\n\n\n \"First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his\n belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles\n at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out\n of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were\n certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of\n two—\"\n\n\n Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His\n Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He\n glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. \"But doesn't\nanybody\never recover from this?\"", "Aguar halted them at the door-way. \"His Eminence will see you,\" he\n growled.\n\n\n \"Who is His Eminence?\" Jenkins asked.\n\n\n \"The Lord High Emperor of All Morua and Creator of the Galaxies,\" Aguar\n rumbled. \"He is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is written that he\n can never die. When you enter, bow,\" he added.\n\n\n The Tenth Son of a Tenth Son couldn't have cared less whether they\n bowed or not. The room was dark and rank with the smell of sickness. On\n a pallet in the center lay a huge Moruan, panting and groaning. He was\n wrapped like a mummy in bedclothes of scarlet interwoven with gold; on\n either side of the bed braziers flickered with sickly greenish light.", "They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a\n limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the\n second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged\n loosely from his arm.\n\"Looks like His Eminence can't read,\" Wally muttered. \"He's going fast,\n Doc.\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded grimly. \"What does it look like to you?\"\n\n\n \"How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say\n nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right.\"\n\n\n \"Probably a viremia of some sort.\" Jenkins went over the great groaning\n hulk with inquiring fingers.\n\n\n \"If it's a viremia, we're cooked,\" Stone whispered. \"None of the drugs\n cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any\n new ones—\"" ], [ "\"Not quite,\" said the Red Doctor. \"You're forgetting that I had\n one other prescription to use—the oldest, most trustworthy\n healer-of-all-ills known to medicine, just as potent now as it was a\n thousand years ago. Without it, Hospital Earth might just as well pack\n up her little black bag and go home.\" He smiled into the mirror as he\n adjusted the scarlet band of the Red Service across his shoulders. \"We\n call it Tincture of Time,\" he said.", "The plink-plink rose to a frantic staccato as Jenkins checked the\n patient's vital signs, wiped more sweat from his furry brow. Quite\n suddenly His Eminence opened bleary eyes, stared about him, let out a\n monumental groan and buried his head in the blankets. In two minutes\n he was snoring softly. His face was cool now, his heart-beat slow and\n regular.", "\"Oh, the incantations were for the\ndoctors\n,\" said Jenkins. \"They\n expected them, obviously, since that was the only level of medicine\n they could understand. And incidentally, the only level that could\n possibly get us a Contract. Anyway, I couldn't do very much else, under\n the circumstances, except for a little supportive therapy. Without a\n Bio-survey we were hamstrung. But whatever the Pox is, it obviously\n involves fever, starvation and dehydration. I knew that His Eminence\n could assimilate carbohydrates, and I took a long gamble that an\n antipyretic wouldn't hurt him too much—\"\n\n\n Wally Stone's jaw sagged. \"So you treated him with sugar-water and\n aspirin,\" he said weakly. \"And on that you risked our necks.\"", "With that he tiptoed from the room. Four murderous-looking guards\n caught Aguar's eye and followed him out, swords bared. Jenkins sank\n down on a bench in the hall and fell asleep in an instant.\nThey woke him once, hours later, to change the intravenous solution,\n and he found Kiz still intently pounding on the mortar. Jenkins\n administered more of the white powder in water down the tube, and went\n back to his bench. He had barely fallen asleep again when they were\n rousing him with frightened voices. \"Quickly!\" Aguar cried. \"There's\n been a terrible change!\"\n\n\n In the sickroom His Eminence was drenched with sweat, his face\n glistening in the light of the bunsen burners. He rolled from side to\n side, groaning hoarsely. \"\nFaster!\n\" Jenkins shouted to Kiz at the\n mortar, and began stripping off the sodden bedclothes. \"Blankets,\n now—plenty of them.\"", "Aguar met him at the door. \"He's dying,\" he roared angrily. \"Why don't\n you do something? Every hour he sinks more rapidly, and all you do is\n poke holes in the healthy ones! And then you send in\nthis\nbag of\n bones again—\" He glowered at the tall purple-capped figure bending\n over the bed.", "\"Now!\" said Jenkins, pulling out a long thin rubber tube. \"This should\n annoy the Spirit of the Pox something fierce.\" He popped the tube into\n the patient's mouth. His Eminence rose up with a gasp, choking and\n fighting, but the tube went down. The Red Doctor ground three white\n pills into powder, mixed in some water, and poured it down the tube.\n\n\n Then he stepped back to view the scene, wiping cold perspiration from\n his forehead. He motioned to Kiz. \"You see what I'm doing, of course?\"\n he said loudly enough for Aguar and the guards to hear.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes! Indeed, indeed,\" said Kiz.\n\n\n \"Fine. Now this is most important.\" Jenkins searched in the bag until\n he found a large mortar which he set down on the floor. Squatting\n behind it, he began tapping it slowly with the pestle, in perfect\n rhythm with the intravenous drip ... and waited.", "The whispers stopped and Kiz nodded to the Red Doctor. \"All right, we\n bargain,\" he said. \"\nAfter\nyou show us.\"\n\n\n \"Now or never.\" Jenkins threw open the door and nodded to the guards.\n \"I'll be in the sickroom in a very short while. If you're with me, I'll\n see you there. If not—\" He fingered his throat suggestively.\n\n\n As soon as they had gone Jenkins dived into the storeroom and began\n throwing flasks and bottles into a black bag. Wally Stone watched him\n in bewilderment. \"You're going to kill him,\" he moaned. \"Prayers,\n promises, pills and post-mortems. That's the Medical service for you.\"\n\n\n Sam grinned. \"Maybe you should operate on him.\nThat\nwould open their\n eyes all right.\"", "The room was deathly still except for a heavy snuffling sound from His\n Eminence and the plink-plink of the pestle on the mortar. The flask of\n purple stuff gurgled quietly. An hour passed, and another. Suddenly\n Jenkins motioned to Kiz. \"His pulse—quickly!\"\n\n\n Kiz scampered gratefully over to the bedside. \"A hundred and eighty,\"\n he whispered.\n\n\n Jenkins' face darkened. He peered at the sick man intently. \"It's a\n bad sign,\" he said. \"The Spirit is furious at the intrusion of an\n outsider.\" He motioned toward the mortar. \"Can you do this?\"\n\n\n Without breaking the rhythm he transferred the plinking-job to Kiz.\n He changed the dwindling intravenous bottle. \"Call me when the bottle\n is empty—or if there is any change. Whatever you do,\ndon't touch\n anything\n.\"", "His Eminence looked up at them from bloodshot eyes and greeted them\n with a groan of anguish that seemed to roll up from the soles of his\n feet. \"Go away,\" he moaned, closing his eyes again and rolling over\n with his back toward them.\n\n\n The Red Doctor blinked at his companion, then turned to Aguar. \"What\n illness is this?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"He is afflicted with a Pox, as any fool can see. All others it\n kills—but His Eminence is the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son, and it is\n written—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes, I know. He can never die.\" Sam gave Wally a sour look. \"What\n happens, though, if he just up and does?\"\n\n\n Aguar's paw came down with a clatter on the hilt of his sword. \"\nHe\n does not die.\nWe have you here now. You are doctors, you say. Cure\n him.\"", "Jenkins looked sharply at Kiz, and the wizard nodded his head slowly.\n \"Try being quiet for a while,\" Jenkins said to Aguar. \"We're going to\n cure the Boss here.\" Solemnly he slipped off his scarlet tunic and cap\n and laid them on a bench, then set his black bag carefully on the floor\n and threw it open. \"First off, get rid of those things.\" He pointed\n to the braziers at the bedside. \"They're enough to give anybody a\n headache. And tell those people outside to stop the racket. How can\n they expect the Spirit of the Pox to come out of His Eminence when\n they're raising a din like that?\"\n\n\n Aguar's eyes widened for a moment as he hesitated; then he threw open\n the door and screamed a command. The wailing stopped as though a switch\n had been thrown. As a couple of cowering guards crept in to remove the\n braziers, Red Doctor Jenkins drew the wizard aside.", "\"Tell me what spells you've already used.\"\n\n\n Hurriedly, Kiz began enumerating, ticking off items on hairy fingers.\n As he talked Jenkins dug into the black bag and started assembling a\n liter flask, tubing and needles.\n\n\n \"First we brewed witches' root for seven hours and poured it over his\n belly. When the Pox appeared in spite of this we lit three red candles\n at the foot of the bed and beat His Eminence steadily for one hour out\n of four, with new rawhide. When His Eminence protested this, we were\n certain the Spirit had possessed him, so we beat him one hour out of\n two—\"\n\n\n Jenkins winced as the accounting of cabalistic clap-trap continued. His\n Eminence, he reflected, must have had the constitution of an ox. He\n glanced over at the panting figure on the bed. \"But doesn't\nanybody\never recover from this?\"", "Aguar let out a horrified scream and raced from the room; in a moment\n he was back with a detachment of guards, all armed to the teeth, and\n three other Moruan physicians with their retinues of apprentices. Sam\n Jenkins held up his hand for silence. He allowed the first intravenous\n flask to pour in rapidly; the second he adjusted to a steady\n drip-drip-drip.\n\n\n Next he pulled two large bunsen burners and a gas tank from the bag.\n These he set up at the foot of the bed, adjusting the blue flames to\n high spear-tips. On the bedside table he set up a third with a flask\n above it; into this he poured some water and a few crystals from a dark\n bottle. In a moment the fluid in the flask was churning and boiling, an\n ominous purple color.\n\n\n Kiz watched goggle-eyed.", "\"Oh, yes—if the Spirit that afflicts them is very small. Those are\n the fortunate ones. They grow hot and sick, but they still can eat\n and drink—\" The wizard broke off to stare at the bottle-and-tube\n arrangement Jenkins had prepared. \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"I told you about the iron needles, didn't I? Hold this a moment.\"\n Jenkins handed him the liter flask. \"Hold it high.\" He began searching\n for a vein on the patient's baggy arm. The Moruan equivalent of blood\n flowed back greenishly in the tube for an instant as he placed the\n needle; then the flask began to drip slowly.", "Jenkins turned to Aguar. \"How long has this gone on?\"\n\n\n \"For days,\" the Moruan growled. \"He can't speak. He grows hot and\n cannot eat. He moans until the Palace trembles.\"\n\n\n \"What about your own doctors?\"\n\n\n Aguar spat angrily on the floor. \"They are jealous as cats until\n trouble comes. Then they hide in the caves like chickens. See the\n green flames? Death flames. They leave him here to die. But now that\n is all over. We have heard about you wizards from Hospital Earth. You\n cure all, the stories say. You are very wise, they say. You balance\n the humors and drive forth the spirits of the Pox like devils.\" He\n gave them a terrible grin and tightened his hand on the gold-encrusted\n sword. \"Now we see.\"", "\"No thanks, not me. This is a medical case and it's all yours. What do\n you want me to do?\"\n\n\n \"Stay here and try your damnedest to get through to HQ,\" said Sam\n grimly. \"Tell them to send an armada, because we're liable to need one\n in the next few hours—\"\nIf the Tenth Son of a Tenth Son had looked bad before, three hours had\n witnessed no improvement. The potentate's skin had turned from grey\n to a pasty green as he lay panting on the bed. He seemed to have lost\n strength enough even to groan, and his eyes were glazed.\n\n\n Outside the royal chambers Jenkins found a group of green-clad\n mourners, wailing like banshees and tearing out their fur in great grey\n chunks. They stood about a flaming brazier; as Jenkins entered the\n sickroom the wails rose ten decibels and took on a howling-dog quality.", "\"Tell them to forget the armada,\" said Jenkins, grinning. \"And anyway,\n they've got things all wrong back at HQ.\" He brandished a huge roll\n of parchment, stricken through with the colors of the seven Medical\n Services of Hospital Earth. \"Take a look, my boy—the juiciest Medical\n Services Contract that's been written in three centuries—\" He tossed\n the Contract in the dry-storage locker with a sigh. \"Old Kiz just\n finished his first lesson, and he's still wondering what went on—\"\n\n\n \"So am I,\" said the Green Doctor suspiciously.\n\n\n \"It was simple. We cured His Eminence of the Pox.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Incantations?\"", "Jenkins snatched the mortar from Kiz, and with a wild flourish smashed\n it on the stone floor. Then he grabbed the wizard's paw, raising it\n high. \"You've done well!\" he cried to the bewildered physician. \"It's\n over now—the Spirit has departed. His Eminence will recover.\"\nThey escorted him in triumphal procession back to the\nLancet\n, where\n Wally Stone stared in disbelief as Jenkins and Kiz bowed and hugged\n each other like long-lost brothers at a sad farewell. \"I finally got\n through to somebody at HQ,\" he said as the Red Doctor climbed aboard.\n \"It'll take them twenty days at least, to get help, considering that\n Morua is not a Contract planet and we're not supposed to be here in the\n first place, but that's the best they can do....\"", "\"Look,\" said Jenkins intensely. \"You've seen this illness before. We\n haven't. So you can at least get us started. What kind of course does\n it run?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n \"All right then, what causes it? Do you know? Bacteria? Virus?\n Degeneration?\"\n\n\n Silence.\n\n\n Jenkins' face was pale. \"Look, boys—your Boss out there is going to\n cool before long if something doesn't happen fast—\" His eyes narrowed\n on Kiz. \"Of course, that might be right up your alley—how about that?\n His Eminence bows out, somebody has to bow in, right? Maybe you, huh?\"", "For the crew of the\nLancet\nsix hours was seven hours too long. They\n herded cringing Moruan \"volunteers\" into the little ship's lab. Jenkins\n handled external examinations and blood and tissue chemistries; Stone\n ran the X-ray and pan-endoscopic examinations. After four grueling\n hours the Red Doctor groaned and scowled at the growing pile of data.\n \"Okay. It seems that they're vaguely humanoid. And that's about all we\n can say for sure. I think we're wasting time. What say we tackle the\n Wizards for a while?\"\n\n\n Aguar's guards urged the tall Moruan with the purple cap into the\n control room at gunpoint, along with a couple of minor medical\n potentates. Purple-hat's name was Kiz, and it seemed that he wasn't\n having any that day.", "They walked to the bedside and lifted back the covers. Jenkins took a\n limp paw in his hand. He finally found a palpable pulse just below the\n second elbow joint. It was fast and thready. The creature's skin bagged\n loosely from his arm.\n\"Looks like His Eminence can't read,\" Wally muttered. \"He's going fast,\n Doc.\"\n\n\n Jenkins nodded grimly. \"What does it look like to you?\"\n\n\n \"How should I know? I've never seen a healthy Moruan before, to say\n nothing of a sick one. It looks like a pox all right.\"\n\n\n \"Probably a viremia of some sort.\" Jenkins went over the great groaning\n hulk with inquiring fingers.\n\n\n \"If it's a viremia, we're cooked,\" Stone whispered. \"None of the drugs\n cross over—and we won't have time to culture the stuff and grow any\n new ones—\"" ] ]
valid	63855	[ "How many people are in charge of plotting navigational waypoints along the journey?", "About how big is the Cleopatra ship?", "What path did the ship Cleopatra take during the story?", "What are the Eridians?", "Why did the Eridians engage in war?", "How fast is second-order flight?", "How did Hendricks outfit the ship for war?", "What is the history between Tellurians and Eridians?", "What are the directions given to Cleopatra?", "What do Tellurians think of the phenomenon of group-mind?" ]	[ [ "One", "Two", "Zero", "Three" ], [ "Quite large, enough for at least a dozen crew", "Impossible to know", "Somewhat small, only large enough for 4 personnel", "Very small, only will fit Hendricks and Stryke" ], [ "Cleopatra Fleet Base - Tethys - 40 Eridani C II - hyper-space", "Tethys - Cleopatra Fleet Base - hyper-space - 40 Eridani C II - Mars", "Cleopatra Fleet Base - Tethys - 40 Eridani C II - hyper-space - 40 Eridani C II", "Tethys - Cleopatra Fleet Base - hyper-space - 40 Eridani C II - Tethys" ], [ "Drones without the ability to think autonomously", "A species capable of regrowing tentacles that are lost in combat", "Tentacled creatures with the ability to read each other's minds", "Tellurians that went rogue" ], [ "Their ability to overtake new planets and systems was threatened", "They sensed the Tellurians were going to ambush them and acted in defense", "They did not engage in war", "They sought revenge on the Tellurians" ], [ "Quarter the speed of light", "Twice the speed of light", "At least faster than the speed of light", "Half the speed of light" ], [ "She replaced the metal hull to keep it from melting", "She upgraded the weaponry to match what the Eridians were capable of", "She outfitted the ship for discovery, not war", "She had additional screens installed to withstand combat" ], [ "They are both trying to conquer the Saturn system", "They have not previously engaged before, though Tellurians have studied Eridians", "Eridians have tried to make contact with the Tellurians several times", "They have entangled in combat twice before" ], [ "Travel into previously undiscovered space, then they were redirected into combat", "Only one mission, to go and create a diversion in the war", "Return to Mars for the personnel to board Aphrodite and go to war with the Eridians", "Travel into a parallel universe where the Eridians are attacking other planets" ], [ "It has been described from other planets and they are developing ways to combat it", "It is foreign to them and not understood", "Tellurians revere the group mind and wish to contact Eridians for a better understanding", "The Tellurians are never aware of the group-mind, only the reader has that information" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 3, 1, 3, 3, 2, 1, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"I am at that,\" mused Whitley with a foolish grin. \"And I'd better\n enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This\n cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth\n century potables...\"\n\n\n Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. \"Well, I suppose we'd better\n call the crew in.\" He turned to Cob. \"Who is Officer of the Deck\n tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Bayne.\"\n\n\n \"Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to\n get us an orbit plotted.\"\n\n\n \"Will do, Skipper,\" Celia Graham left.\n\n\n \"Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up\n the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the\n bridge.\"", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"Gun deck!\"\n\n\n A feminine voice replied.\n\n\n \"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers\n get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" the woman rapped out.\n\n\n \"Radar!\"\n\n\n \"Right here, Skipper!\"\n\n\n \"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.\n It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces\n of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they\n were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and\n understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge.\n\n\n \"Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may\n encounter here.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain,\" replied Celia gratefully.\n\n\n Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne.\n\n\n \"Astrogation here,\" came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the\n agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have\n been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar\n stars that were his stock-in-trade.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia." ], [ "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "\"Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop.\" Commander Strykalski smoothed out the\n wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar.\n\n\n Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S.\nCleopatra's\nExecutive, set down his Martini\n and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination\n in the mellow light.\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" he began hopefully, \"It could be a forgery?\"\n\n\n Strike shook his head.\n\n\n Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. \"Then perhaps old Brass-bottom\n Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?\" To Cob, eight Martinis\n made anything possible.\n\n\n \"Could there be two Strykalskis?\" demanded the owner of the name under\n discussion.", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO\n TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP\n ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE\n FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL\n HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP\n ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL" ], [ "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"" ], [ "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling\n wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe\n Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human\n intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen\n worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all\n parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no\n human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they\n had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.\n\n\n Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that\n they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "THE STARBUSTERS\nBy ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\nA bunch of kids in bright new uniforms,\n\n transiting the constellations in a disreputable\n\n old bucket of a space-shipâ€”why should the\n\n leathery-tentacled, chlorine-breathing\n\n Eridans take them seriously?\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that" ], [ "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling\n wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe\n Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human\n intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen\n worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all\n parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no\n human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they\n had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.\n\n\n Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that\n they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends." ], [ "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "\"Gun deck!\"\n\n\n A feminine voice replied.\n\n\n \"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers\n get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" the woman rapped out.\n\n\n \"Radar!\"\n\n\n \"Right here, Skipper!\"\n\n\n \"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.\n It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!\"", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "Cob was screaming at the gun-pointers through the open communicator\n circuit, his blood heated by the turbulent cacophony of crackling rays\n and exploding torpedoes. \"Hit 'em! Damn it! Damn it, hit 'em now! Dead\n ahead! Hit 'em again!...\"\n\n\n Ivy stumbled across the throbbing deck to stand at Strykalski's side.\n \"The hyper drive!\" she yelled, \"The hyper drive!\"\n\n\n It was a chance. It was the\nonly\nchance ... for Lover-Girl and Ivy\n and Cob and Celia ... for all of them. He had to chance it. \"Ivy!\" he\n called over his shoulder, \"Check with Engineering! See if the thing's\n hooked into the surge circuit!\"\n\n\n She struggled out of the flying bridge and down the ramp toward the\n engine deck. Strike and Cob stayed and sweated and cursed and fought.\n It seemed that she would never report.", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"" ], [ "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"Gun deck!\"\n\n\n A feminine voice replied.\n\n\n \"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers\n get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" the woman rapped out.\n\n\n \"Radar!\"\n\n\n \"Right here, Skipper!\"\n\n\n \"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.\n It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!\"", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"It's good to see you again, Strike.\"\n\n\n Strykalski studied her. Yes, she hadn't changed. She was still the Ivy\n Hendricks he remembered. She was still calm, still lovely, and still\n very, very competent.\n\n\n \"I've missed you, Ivy.\" Strike wasn't just being polite, either. Then\n he grinned. \"Lover-Girl's missed you, too. There never has been an\n Engineering Officer that could get the performance out of her cranky\n hulk the way you used to!\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing,\" returned Ivy, still smiling, \"that I'll be back at\n my old job for a while, then.\"", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a\n million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless\n field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on\n Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was\n begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her\n over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all\n armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on\n her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and\n re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were\n welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her\n companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in\n mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it...\nIvy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering\n Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "Cob made a sour face. \"Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!\"\n He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally.\n The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting\n nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small,\n \"Warp!\"\n\n\n An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered\n another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and\n turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the\n subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see\n her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when\n they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship\nAtropos\nout of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ...\n good to be around.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall." ], [ "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling\n wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe\n Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human\n intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen\n worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all\n parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no\n human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they\n had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.\n\n\n Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that\n they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall." ], [ "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO\n TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP\n ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE\n FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL\n HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP\n ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "\"I am at that,\" mused Whitley with a foolish grin. \"And I'd better\n enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This\n cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth\n century potables...\"\n\n\n Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. \"Well, I suppose we'd better\n call the crew in.\" He turned to Cob. \"Who is Officer of the Deck\n tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Bayne.\"\n\n\n \"Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to\n get us an orbit plotted.\"\n\n\n \"Will do, Skipper,\" Celia Graham left.\n\n\n \"Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up\n the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the\n bridge.\"", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "\"Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop.\" Commander Strykalski smoothed out the\n wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar.\n\n\n Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S.\nCleopatra's\nExecutive, set down his Martini\n and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination\n in the mellow light.\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" he began hopefully, \"It could be a forgery?\"\n\n\n Strike shook his head.\n\n\n Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. \"Then perhaps old Brass-bottom\n Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?\" To Cob, eight Martinis\n made anything possible.\n\n\n \"Could there be two Strykalskis?\" demanded the owner of the name under\n discussion." ], [ "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling\n wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe\n Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human\n intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen\n worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all\n parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no\n human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they\n had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.\n\n\n Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that\n they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the\n back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a\n lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a\n dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded\n by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs.\n\n\n Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. \"Ye gods and little\n catfish!\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy. \"What do you think it is?\"\n\n\n \"I ... I don't know. Matter itself might be different ... here.\"", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"" ] ]
valid	51461	[ "Why does the Earth have no moon?", "How many people are left alive on Earth?", "What are the layers of frozen material, from bottom to top?", "How does the family communicate when they go outside?", "Why did his father not want the boy to tell his mom if he saw more lights outside?", "How many planets went with the dark star?", "What did the boy see by the window of the opposite apartment?", "How does the family feel about leaving their home?" ]	[ [ "The moon disintegrated in the battle between stars", "The moon was stolen by a dark star", "The moon stayed with the sun", "The moon was flung off into space on its own" ], [ "a number of people in various places", "Only the boy", "Only the boy, his family, and some people in New Mexico", "Only the boy, his mom, his dad, and his sister" ], [ "Water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, helium", "Water, carbon dioxide, helium, oxygen, nitrogen", "Water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, helium, oxygen", "Water, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, helium" ], [ "By talking with their helmets touching", "By radio waves", "By tapping out morse code", "By flashing lights" ], [ "He didn't want to hear her throw fits about it.", "He wanted to protect her like she had protected him", "He knew there was no one out there", "He didn't want her to be hopeful someone was coming" ], [ "All of them", "Just the Earth", "Most of them", "The Earth and a couple of others" ], [ "A small star that had come down to Earth", "A hallucination", "An instrument looking for life", "A young lady's face" ], [ "They want to leave as soon as possible", "They decide to stay in their home forever to keep the fire going", "It takes some time for them to decide to leave", "They are too afraid of strangers to leave" ] ]	[ 3, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't\n get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a\n little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling\n over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and\n carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last\n minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.\n\n\n That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times\n worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa\n calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to\n me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been\n sitting too far from the fire.\nYou see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and\n in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably\n in order to take it away.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.", "He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.", "The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth\n was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was\n pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and\n buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave\n great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked\n out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that\n people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time,\n they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones\n broke or skulls cracked.\n\n\n We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they\n were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of\n leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly\n too busy to notice.", "You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.", "Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't\n something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run\n low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind\n the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other\n things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down\n to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it\n through a door to outside.\n\n\n You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first\n and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on\n top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white\n blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.\n\n\n Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the\n same time.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's\n cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those\n folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound\n pretty wild. He may be right.\nThe dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and\n there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried\n to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out,\n what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of\nunfrozen\nwater!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear\n night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they\n thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to\n get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit\n on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either\n side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's\n beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well—there's quite a\n bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa\n says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was\n air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and\n then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to\n be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I\n pour on the gravy.\n\n\n Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped\n by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only\n whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows,\n underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a\n slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes\n and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.", "All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa\n laughingly says, whatever that is.\nI was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as\n I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my\n suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at\n the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the\n hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,\n as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted\n to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.", "You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.", "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"" ], [ "Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "They were simply people, you see. We hadn't been the only ones to\n survive; we'd just thought so, for natural enough reasons. These three\n people had survived, and quite a few others with them. And when we\n found out\nhow\nthey'd survived, Pa let out the biggest whoop of joy.\n\n\n They were from Los Alamos and they were getting their heat and power\n from atomic energy. Just using the uranium and plutonium intended\n for bombs, they had enough to go on for thousands of years. They had\n a regular little airtight city, with air-locks and all. They even\n generated electric light and grew plants and animals by it. (At this Pa\n let out a second whoop, waking Ma from her faint.)\n\n\n But if we were flabbergasted at them, they were double-flabbergasted at\n us.", "You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.", "\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.", "The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth\n was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was\n pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and\n buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave\n great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked\n out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that\n people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time,\n they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones\n broke or skulls cracked.\n\n\n We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they\n were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of\n leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly\n too busy to notice.", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "One of the men kept saying, \"But it's impossible, I tell you. You\n can't maintain an air supply without hermetic sealing. It's simply\n impossible.\"\n\n\n That was after he had got his helmet off and was using our air.\n Meanwhile, the young lady kept looking around at us as if we were\n saints, and telling us we'd done something amazing, and suddenly she\n broke down and cried.\n\n\n They'd been scouting around for survivors, but they never expected to\n find any in a place like this. They had rocket ships at Los Alamos and\n plenty of chemical fuel. As for liquid oxygen, all you had to do was\n go out and shovel the air blanket at the top\nlevel\n. So after they'd\n got things going smoothly at Los Alamos, which had taken years, they'd\n decided to make some trips to likely places where there might be other\n survivors. No good trying long-distance radio signals, of course, since\n there was no atmosphere to carry them around the curve of the Earth.", "\"So I asked myself then,\" he said, \"what's the use of going on? What's\n the use of dragging it out for a few years? Why prolong a doomed\n existence of hard work and cold and loneliness? The human race is done.\n The Earth is done. Why not give up, I asked myself—and all of a sudden\n I got the answer.\"\n\n\n Again I heard the noise, louder this time, a kind of uncertain,\n shuffling tread, coming closer. I couldn't breathe.", "And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney", "You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.", "Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't\n get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a\n little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling\n over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and\n carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last\n minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.\n\n\n That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times\n worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa\n calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to\n me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been\n sitting too far from the fire.\nYou see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and\n in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably\n in order to take it away.", "Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's\n cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those\n folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound\n pretty wild. He may be right.\nThe dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and\n there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried\n to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out,\n what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of\nunfrozen\nwater!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear\n night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they\n thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to\n get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit\n on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either\n side, but was going to come very close to the Earth." ], [ "Pa says air is tiny molecules that fly away like a flash if there isn't\n something to stop them. We have to watch sharp not to let the air run\n low. Pa always keeps a big reserve supply of it in buckets behind\n the first blankets, along with extra coal and cans of food and other\n things, such as pails of snow to melt for water. We have to go way down\n to the bottom floor for that stuff, which is a mean trip, and get it\n through a door to outside.\n\n\n You see, when the Earth got cold, all the water in the air froze first\n and made a blanket ten feet thick or so everywhere, and then down on\n top of that dropped the crystals of frozen air, making another white\n blanket sixty or seventy feet thick maybe.\n\n\n Of course, all the parts of the air didn't freeze and snow down at the\n same time.", "All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa\n laughingly says, whatever that is.\nI was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as\n I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my\n suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at\n the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the\n hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,\n as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted\n to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling.", "Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.", "First to drop out was the carbon dioxide—when you're shoveling for\n water, you have to make sure you don't go too high and get any of that\n stuff mixed in, for it would put you to sleep, maybe for good, and make\n the fire go out. Next there's the nitrogen, which doesn't count one way\n or the other, though it's the biggest part of the blanket. On top of\n that and easy to get at, which is lucky for us, there's the oxygen that\n keeps us alive. Pa says we live better than kings ever did, breathing\n pure oxygen, but we're used to it and don't notice. Finally, at the\n very top, there's a slick of liquid helium, which is funny stuff.", "Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.", "It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What\n if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life\n and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its\n molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that\n moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the\n ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few\n degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to\n life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?\n\n\n That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the\n dark star to get us.\n\n\n Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down\n from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do\n its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young\n lady and the moving, starlike light.", "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.", "Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"", "Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney", "You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes." ], [ "It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.", "Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"", "In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.", "Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.", "His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.", "\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"", "and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.", "Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.", "Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.", "He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.", "\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years." ], [ "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.", "His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "\"And you watched this light for some time, son?\" he asked when I\n finished.\n\n\n I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face.\n Somehow that part embarrassed me.\n\n\n \"Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.\"\n\n\n \"And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or\n starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?\"", "\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.", "He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.", "Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.", "You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.", "Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light." ], [ "Most of the other planets were on the other side of the Sun and didn't\n get involved. The Sun and the newcomer fought over the Earth for a\n little while—pulling it this way and that, like two dogs growling\n over a bone, Pa described it this time—and then the newcomer won and\n carried us off. The Sun got a consolation prize, though. At the last\n minute he managed to hold on to the Moon.\n\n\n That was the time of the monster earthquakes and floods, twenty times\n worse than anything before. It was also the time of the Big Jerk, as Pa\n calls it, when all Earth got yanked suddenly, just as Pa has done to\n me once or twice, grabbing me by the collar to do it, when I've been\n sitting too far from the fire.\nYou see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and\n in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably\n in order to take it away.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "Sometimes I think Pa exaggerates and makes things out too black. He's\n cross with us once in a while and was probably cross with all those\n folks. Still, some of the things I read in the old magazines sound\n pretty wild. He may be right.\nThe dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and\n there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried\n to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out,\n what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of\nunfrozen\nwater!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear\n night. First off they thought it would hit the Sun, and then they\n thought it would hit the Earth. There was even the start of a rush to\n get to a place called China, because people thought the star would hit\n on the other side. But then they found it wasn't going to hit either\n side, but was going to come very close to the Earth.", "The Big Jerk didn't last long. It was over as soon as the Earth\n was settled down in its new orbit around the dark star. But it was\n pretty terrible while it lasted. Pa says that all sorts of cliffs and\n buildings toppled, oceans slopped over, swamps and sandy deserts gave\n great sliding surges that buried nearby lands. Earth was almost jerked\n out of its atmosphere blanket and the air got so thin in spots that\n people keeled over and fainted—though of course, at the same time,\n they were getting knocked down by the Big Jerk and maybe their bones\n broke or skulls cracked.\n\n\n We've often asked Pa how people acted during that time, whether they\n were scared or brave or crazy or stunned, or all four, but he's sort of\n leery of the subject, and he was again tonight. He says he was mostly\n too busy to notice.", "What, I asked myself, if the frozen folk were coming to life? What\n if they were like the liquid helium that got a new lease on life\n and started crawling toward the heat just when you thought its\n molecules ought to freeze solid forever? Or like the electricity that\n moves endlessly when it's just about as cold as that? What if the\n ever-growing cold, with the temperature creeping down the last few\n degrees to the last zero, had mysteriously wakened the frozen folk to\n life—not warm-blooded life, but something icy and horrible?\n\n\n That was a worse idea than the one about something coming down from the\n dark star to get us.\n\n\n Or maybe, I thought, both ideas might be true. Something coming down\n from the dark star and making the frozen folk move, using them to do\n its work. That would fit with both things I'd seen—the beautiful young\n lady and the moving, starlike light.", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.", "You see, Pa and some scientist friends of his had figured out part of\n what was going to happen—they'd known we'd get captured and our air\n would freeze—and they'd been working like mad to fix up a place with\n airtight walls and doors, and insulation against the cold, and big\n supplies of food and fuel and water and bottled air. But the place\n got smashed in the last earthquakes and all Pa's friends were killed\n then and in the Big Jerk. So he had to start over and throw the Nest\n together quick without any advantages, just using any stuff he could\n lay his hands on.\n\n\n I guess he's telling pretty much the truth when he says he didn't have\n any time to keep an eye on how other folks behaved, either then or\n in the Big Freeze that followed—followed very quick, you know, both\n because the dark star was pulling us away very fast and because Earth's\n rotation had been slowed in the tug-of-war, so that the nights were ten\n old nights long.", "A Pail of Air\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by ED ALEXANDER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe dark star passed, bringing with it\n \neternal night and turning history into\n \nincredible myth in a single generation!\nPa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air. I'd just about scooped\n it full and most of the warmth had leaked from my fingers when I saw\n the thing.", "He sometimes doesn't mind telling that story, and Sis and I sure like\n to listen to it, and he got my idea. So we were all settled around the\n fire in a wink, and Ma pushed up some cans to thaw for supper, and Pa\n began. Before he did, though, I noticed him casually get a hammer from\n the shelf and lay it down beside him.\n\n\n It was the same old story as always—I think I could recite the main\n thread of it in my sleep—though Pa always puts in a new detail or two\n and keeps improving it in spots.\n\n\n He told us how the Earth had been swinging around the Sun ever so\n steady and warm, and the people on it fixing to make money and wars and\n have a good time and get power and treat each other right or wrong,\n when without warning there comes charging out of space this dead star,\n this burned out sun, and upsets everything.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.", "Well, they'd found other colonies at Argonne and Brookhaven and way\n around the world at Harwell and Tanna Tuva. And now they'd been giving\n our city a look, not really expecting to find anything. But they had an\n instrument that noticed the faintest heat waves and it had told them\n there was something warm down here, so they'd landed to investigate.\n Of course we hadn't heard them land, since there was no air to carry\n the sound, and they'd had to investigate around quite a while before\n finding us. Their instruments had given them a wrong steer and they'd\n wasted some time in the building across the street.\nBy now, all five adults were talking like sixty. Pa was demonstrating\n to the men how he worked the fire and got rid of the ice in the chimney", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "All of these gases in neat separate layers. Like a pussy caffay, Pa\n laughingly says, whatever that is.\nI was busting to tell them all about what I'd seen, and so as soon as\n I'd ducked out of my helmet and while I was still climbing out of my\n suit, I cut loose. Right away Ma got nervous and began making eyes at\n the entry-slit in the blankets and wringing her hands together—the\n hand where she'd lost three fingers from frostbite inside the good one,\n as usual. I could tell that Pa was annoyed at me scaring her and wanted\n to explain it all away quickly, yet could see I wasn't fooling." ], [ "When I'd recovered the pail and could look again at the opposite\n apartment, I got an idea of what Ma might be feeling at those times,\n for I saw it wasn't a young lady at all but simply a light—a tiny\n light that moved stealthily from window to window, just as if one\n of the cruel little stars had come down out of the airless sky to\n investigate why the Earth had gone away from the Sun, and maybe to hunt\n down something to torment or terrify, now that the Earth didn't have\n the Sun's protection.\n\n\n I tell you, the thought of it gave me the creeps. I just stood there\n shaking, and almost froze my feet and did frost my helmet so solid on\n the inside that I couldn't have seen the light even if it had come out\n of one of the windows to get me. Then I had the wit to go back inside.", "You know, at first I thought it was a young lady. Yes, a beautiful\n young lady's face all glowing in the dark and looking at me from the\n fifth floor of the opposite apartment, which hereabouts is the floor\n just above the white blanket of frozen air. I'd never seen a live young\n lady before, except in the old magazines—Sis is just a kid and Ma is\n pretty sick and miserable—and it gave me such a start that I dropped\n the pail. Who wouldn't, knowing everyone on Earth was dead except Pa\n and Ma and Sis and you?\nEven at that, I don't suppose I should have been surprised. We all\n see things now and then. Ma has some pretty bad ones, to judge from\n the way she bugs her eyes at nothing and just screams and screams and\n huddles back against the blankets hanging around the Nest. Pa says it\n is natural we should react like that sometimes.", "Here and there a few icicles hang, water icicles from the first days\n of the cold, other icicles of frozen air that melted on the roofs and\n dripped and froze again. Sometimes one of those icicles will catch the\n light of a star and send it to you so brightly you think the star has\n swooped into the city. That was one of the things Pa had been thinking\n of when I told him about the light, but I had thought of it myself\n first and known it wasn't so.\n\n\n He touched his helmet to mine so we could talk easier and he asked me\n to point out the windows to him. But there wasn't any light moving\n around inside them now, or anywhere else. To my surprise, Pa didn't\n bawl me out and tell me I'd been seeing things. He looked all around\n quite a while after filling his pail, and just as we were going inside\n he whipped around without warning, as if to take some peeping thing\n off guard.", "Pa showed them to me once in quick winks of his flashlight, when\n he still had a fair supply of batteries and could afford to waste\n a little light. They scared me pretty bad and made my heart pound,\n especially the young lady.\nNow, with Pa telling his story for the umpteenth time to take our minds\n off another scare, I got to thinking of the frozen folk again. All of a\n sudden I got an idea that scared me worse than anything yet. You see,\n I'd just remembered the face I'd thought I'd seen in the window. I'd\n forgotten about that on account of trying to hide it from the others.", "\"And you watched this light for some time, son?\" he asked when I\n finished.\n\n\n I hadn't said anything about first thinking it was a young lady's face.\n Somehow that part embarrassed me.\n\n\n \"Long enough for it to pass five windows and go to the next floor.\"\n\n\n \"And it didn't look like stray electricity or crawling liquid or\n starlight focused by a growing crystal, or anything like that?\"", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "Still, I've got an idea of some of the things that happened from the\n frozen folk I've seen, a few of them in other rooms in our building,\n others clustered around the furnaces in the basements where we go for\n coal.\n\n\n In one of the rooms, an old man sits stiff in a chair, with an arm and\n a leg in splints. In another, a man and woman are huddled together in\n a bed with heaps of covers over them. You can just see their heads\n peeking out, close together. And in another a beautiful young lady is\n sitting with a pile of wraps huddled around her, looking hopefully\n toward the door, as if waiting for someone who never came back with\n warmth and food. They're all still and stiff as statues, of course, but\n just like life.", "I don't know what the city looked like in the old days, but now it's\n beautiful. The starlight lets you see it pretty well—there's quite a\n bit of light in those steady points speckling the blackness above. (Pa\n says the stars used to twinkle once, but that was because there was\n air.) We are on a hill and the shimmery plain drops away from us and\n then flattens out, cut up into neat squares by the troughs that used to\n be streets. I sometimes make my mashed potatoes look like it, before I\n pour on the gravy.\n\n\n Some taller buildings push up out of the feathery plain, topped\n by rounded caps of air crystals, like the fur hood Ma wears, only\n whiter. On those buildings you can see the darker squares of windows,\n underlined by white dashes of air crystals. Some of them are on a\n slant, for many of the buildings are pretty badly twisted by the quakes\n and all the rest that happened when the dark star captured the Earth.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"", "He wasn't just making up those ideas. Odd things happen in a world\n that's about as cold as can be, and just when you think matter\n would be frozen dead, it takes on a strange new life. A slimy stuff\n comes crawling toward the Nest, just like an animal snuffing for\n heat—that's the liquid helium. And once, when I was little, a bolt of\n lightning—not even Pa could figure where it came from—hit the nearby\n steeple and crawled up and down it for weeks, until the glow finally\n died.\n\n\n \"Not like anything I ever saw,\" I told him.\n\n\n He stood for a moment frowning. Then, \"I'll go out with you, and you\n show it to me,\" he said.", "Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.", "His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.", "Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"", "Pa handled the pail of air in a twist of cloth. Now that it was inside\n the Nest, you could really feel its coldness. It just seemed to suck\n the heat out of everything. Even the flames cringed away from it as Pa\n put it down close by the fire.\n\n\n Yet it's that glimmery white stuff in the pail that keeps us alive.\n It slowly melts and vanishes and refreshes the Nest and feeds the\n fire. The blankets keep it from escaping too fast. Pa'd like to seal\n the whole place, but he can't—building's too earthquake-twisted, and\n besides he has to leave the chimney open for smoke.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"" ], [ "Ma raised a howl at the idea of being left alone, and Sis joined\n in, too, but Pa quieted them. We started climbing into our outside\n clothes—mine had been warming by the fire. Pa made them. They have\n plastic headpieces that were once big double-duty transparent food\n cans, but they keep heat and air in and can replace the air for a\n little while, long enough for our trips for water and coal and food and\n so on.\n\n\n Ma started moaning again, \"I've always known there was something\n outside there, waiting to get us. I've felt it for years—something\n that's part of the cold and hates all warmth and wants to destroy the\n Nest. It's been watching us all this time, and now it's coming after\n us. It'll get you and then come for me. Don't go, Harry!\"", "And when the newcomers began to talk about our all going to Los Alamos,\n as if that were taken for granted, I could see that something of the\n same feeling struck Pa and Ma, too. Pa got very silent all of a sudden\n and Ma kept telling the young lady, \"But I wouldn't know how to act\n there and I haven't any clothes.\"\n\n\n The strangers were puzzled like anything at first, but then they got\n the idea. As Pa kept saying, \"It just doesn't seem right to let this\n fire go out.\"\nWell, the strangers are gone, but they're coming back. It hasn't been\n decided yet just what will happen. Maybe the Nest will be kept up as\n what one of the strangers called a \"survival school.\" Or maybe we will\n join the pioneers who are going to try to establish a new colony at the\n uranium mines at Great Slave Lake or in the Congo.", "\"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest,\" I said, wanting to cry,\n kind of. \"It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared\n at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers.\"\n\n\n He nodded and put another piece of coal on the fire. Then he looked at\n the little pile and grinned suddenly and put a couple of handfuls on,\n just as if it was one of our birthdays or Christmas.\n\n\n \"You'll quickly get over that feeling son,\" he said. \"The trouble with\n the world was that it kept getting smaller and smaller, till it ended\n with just the Nest. Now it'll be good to have a real huge world again,\n the way it was in the beginning.\"\n\n\n I guess he's right. You think the beautiful young lady will wait for me\n till I grow up? I'll be twenty in only ten years.", "It's Pa who is the chief guardian of the fire, though. I always think\n of him that way: a tall man sitting cross-legged, frowning anxiously\n at the fire, his lined face golden in its light, and every so often\n carefully placing on it a piece of coal from the big heap beside it. Pa\n tells me there used to be guardians of the fire sometimes in the very\n old days—vestal virgins, he calls them—although there was unfrozen\n air all around then and you didn't really need one.\n\n\n He was sitting just that way now, though he got up quick to take the\n pail from me and bawl me out for loitering—he'd spotted my frozen\n helmet right off. That roused Ma and she joined in picking on me. She's\n always trying to get the load off her feelings, Pa explains. He shut\n her up pretty fast. Sis let off a couple of silly squeals too.", "Pretty soon I was feeling my familiar way through the thirty or so\n blankets and rugs Pa has got hung around to slow down the escape of\n air from the Nest, and I wasn't quite so scared. I began to hear the\n tick-ticking of the clocks in the Nest and knew I was getting back\n into air, because there's no sound outside in the vacuum, of course.\n But my mind was still crawly and uneasy as I pushed through the last\n blankets—Pa's got them faced with aluminum foil to hold in the\n heat—and came into the Nest.\nLet me tell you about the Nest. It's low and snug, just room for the\n four of us and our things. The floor is covered with thick woolly\n rugs. Three of the sides are blankets, and the blankets roofing it\n touch Pa's head. He tells me it's inside a much bigger room, but I've\n never seen the real walls or ceiling.", "His talking to me that way made me feel grown-up and good. But it\n didn't wipe away the thing outside from the back of my mind—or the\n fact that Pa took it seriously.\nIt's hard to hide your feelings about such a thing. When we got back in\n the Nest and took off our outside clothes, Pa laughed about it all and\n told them it was nothing and kidded me for having such an imagination,\n but his words fell flat. He didn't convince Ma and Sis any more than\n he did me. It looked for a minute like we were all fumbling the\n courage-ball. Something had to be done, and almost before I knew what\n I was going to say, I heard myself asking Pa to tell us about the old\n days, and how it all happened.", "In fact, there was so much talking and excitement that Pa forgot about\n things, and it wasn't until they were all getting groggy that he looked\n and found the air had all boiled away in the pail. He got another\n bucket of air quick from behind the blankets. Of course that started\n them all laughing and jabbering again. The newcomers even got a little\n drunk. They weren't used to so much oxygen.\n\n\n Funny thing, though—I didn't do much talking at all and Sis hung on\n to Ma all the time and hid her face when anybody looked at her. I felt\n pretty uncomfortable and disturbed myself, even about the young lady.\n Glimpsing her outside there, I'd had all sorts of mushy thoughts, but\n now I was just embarrassed and scared of her, even though she tried to\n be nice as anything to me.\n\n\n I sort of wished they'd all quit crowding the Nest and let us be alone\n and get our feelings straightened out.", "Of course, now that the strangers are gone, I've been thinking a\n lot about Los Alamos and those other tremendous colonies. I have a\n hankering to see them for myself.\n\n\n You ask me, Pa wants to see them, too. He's been getting pretty\n thoughtful, watching Ma and Sis perk up.\n\n\n \"It's different, now that we know others are alive,\" he explains to me.\n \"Your mother doesn't feel so hopeless any more. Neither do I, for that\n matter, not having to carry the whole responsibility for keeping the\n human race going, so to speak. It scares a person.\"\n\n\n I looked around at the blanket walls and the fire and the pails of air\n boiling away and Ma and Sis sleeping in the warmth and the flickering\n light.", "\"So right then and there,\" Pa went on, and now I could tell that he\n heard the steps, too, and was talking loud so we maybe wouldn't hear\n them, \"right then and there I told myself that I was going on as if\n we had all eternity ahead of us. I'd have children and teach them all\n I could. I'd get them to read books. I'd plan for the future, try to\n enlarge and seal the Nest. I'd do what I could to keep everything\n beautiful and growing. I'd keep alive my feeling of wonder even at the\n cold and the dark and the distant stars.\"", "The frozen folk with minds from the dark star behind their unwinking\n eyes, creeping, crawling, snuffing their way, following the heat to the\n Nest.\n\n\n I tell you, that thought gave me a very bad turn and I wanted very\n badly to tell the others my fears, but I remembered what Pa had said\n and clenched my teeth and didn't speak.\n\n\n We were all sitting very still. Even the fire was burning silently.\n There was just the sound of Pa's voice and the clocks.\n\n\n And then, from beyond the blankets, I thought I heard a tiny noise. My\n skin tightened all over me.\n\n\n Pa was telling about the early years in the Nest and had come to the\n place where he philosophizes.", "and all that. Ma had perked up wonderfully and was showing the young\n lady her cooking and sewing stuff, and even asking about how the women\n dressed at Los Alamos. The strangers marveled at everything and praised\n it to the skies. I could tell from the way they wrinkled their noses\n that they found the Nest a bit smelly, but they never mentioned that at\n all and just asked bushels of questions.", "Sis quit helping Ma be frightened and came over and did as she was\n told. Ma quieted down pretty suddenly, though her eyes were still kind\n of wild as she watched Pa fix on his helmet tight and pick up a pail\n and the two of us go out.\nPa led the way and I took hold of his belt. It's a funny thing, I'm not\n afraid to go by myself, but when Pa's along I always want to hold on to\n him. Habit, I guess, and then there's no denying that this time I was a\n bit scared.\n\n\n You see, it's this way. We know that everything is dead out there. Pa\n heard the last radio voices fade away years ago, and had seen some of\n the last folks die who weren't as lucky or well-protected as us. So we\n knew that if there was something groping around out there, it couldn't\n be anything human or friendly.", "\"Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,\"\n Pa was saying. \"The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of\n miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might\n have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't\n matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture,\n like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers—you've seen\n pictures of those, but I can't describe how they feel—or the fire's\n glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that's as true for the\n last man as the first.\"\n\n\n And still the steps kept shuffling closer. It seemed to me that the\n inmost blanket trembled and bulged a little. Just as if they were\n burned into my imagination, I kept seeing those peering, frozen eyes.", "Pa had everything on but his helmet. He knelt by the fireplace and\n reached in and shook the long metal rod that goes up the chimney and\n knocks off the ice that keeps trying to clog it. Once a week he goes up\n on the roof to check if it's working all right. That's our worst trip\n and Pa won't let me make it alone.\n\n\n \"Sis,\" Pa said quietly, \"come watch the fire. Keep an eye on the air,\n too. If it gets low or doesn't seem to be boiling fast enough, fetch\n another bucket from behind the blanket. But mind your hands. Use the\n cloth to pick up the bucket.\"", "Against one of the blanket-walls is a big set of shelves, with tools\n and books and other stuff, and on top of it a whole row of clocks. Pa's\n very fussy about keeping them wound. He says we must never forget time,\n and without a sun or moon, that would be easy to do.\n\n\n The fourth wall has blankets all over except around the fireplace, in\n which there is a fire that must never go out. It keeps us from freezing\n and does a lot more besides. One of us must always watch it. Some of\n the clocks are alarm and we can use them to remind us. In the early\n days there was only Ma to take turns with Pa—I think of that when she\n gets difficult—but now there's me to help, and Sis too.", "You know, I find it hard to believe in the way those people felt,\n any more than I can believe in the swarming number of them. Imagine\n people getting ready for the horrible sort of war they were cooking up.\n Wanting it even, or at least wishing it were over so as to end their\n nervousness. As if all folks didn't have to hang together and pool\n every bit of warmth just to keep alive. And how can they have hoped to\n end danger, any more than we can hope to end the cold?", "But then the blanket actually did move and lift. And there was a bright\n light somewhere behind it. Pa's voice stopped and his eyes turned to\n the widening slit and his hand went out until it touched and gripped\n the handle of the hammer beside him.\nIn through the blanket stepped the beautiful young lady. She stood\n there looking at us the strangest way, and she carried something\n bright and unwinking in her hand. And two other faces peered over her\n shoulders—men's faces, white and staring.\n\n\n Well, my heart couldn't have been stopped for more than four or five\n beats before I realized she was wearing a suit and helmet like Pa's\n homemade ones, only fancier, and that the men were, too—and that the\n frozen folk certainly wouldn't be wearing those. Also, I noticed that\n the bright thing in her hand was just a kind of flashlight.\n\n\n The silence kept on while I swallowed hard a couple of times, and after\n that there was all sorts of jabbering and commotion.", "I could feel it, too. The old peace was gone. There was something\n lurking out there, watching, waiting, getting ready.", "Besides that, there's a feeling that comes with it always being night,\ncold\nnight. Pa says there used to be some of that feeling even in the\n old days, but then every morning the Sun would come and chase it away.\n I have to take his word for that, not ever remembering the Sun as being\n anything more than a big star. You see, I hadn't been born when the\n dark star snatched us away from the Sun, and by now it's dragged us out\n beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, Pa says, and taking us farther\n out all the time.\n\n\n I found myself wondering whether there mightn't be something on the\n dark star that wanted us, and if that was why it had captured the\n Earth. Just then we came to the end of the corridor and I followed Pa\n out on the balcony.", "Inside, he said to me, touching helmets, \"If you see something like\n that again, son, don't tell the others. Your Ma's sort of nervous these\n days and we owe her all the feeling of safety we can give her. Once—it\n was when your sister was born—I was ready to give up and die, but your\n Mother kept me trying. Another time she kept the fire going a whole\n week all by herself when I was sick. Nursed me and took care of the two\n of you, too.\"\n\"You know that game we sometimes play, sitting in a square in the Nest,\n tossing a ball around? Courage is like a ball, son. A person can hold\n it only so long, and then he's got to toss it to someone else. When\n it's tossed your way, you've got to catch it and hold it tight—and\n hope there'll be someone else to toss it to when you get tired of being\n brave.\"" ] ]
valid	20031	[ "Why did the author say his father had left him a big estate?", "Why does the author feel like crying?", "Why does the author discuss his father's clothing and mementos?", "What best describes the author's father?", "How did the author's father feel about the USA?", "How did the author's father decide where to work?", "How did the author's father deal with setbacks in life?", "What has impacted the author's more recent decisions in life?", "Why did the author's father always assist him when he asked?", "Why does the author wish he did not have his father's estate?" ]	[ [ "Because he did leave a large amount before taxes", "Because his father lived frugally and saved a little", "Because he only has 1 sibling to share the inheritance", "Because of the intangible things his father left him" ], [ "He hasn't been frugal and needs the money", "The IRS taxes the rich so steeply", "His father carefully saved and now it is going to someone else", "He misses his father" ], [ "They are things he wants to sell", "They will have to be valued and taxed", "They are the biggest part of the estate", "They are nostalgic to him" ], [ "He was equally loyal to his employees and employers", "He thought loyalty was impossible when working in politics", "He was loyal to his employer at the expense of his employees", "He was loyal to his employees at the expense of his employer" ], [ "He focused mainly on how far it had come", "He was constantly criticizing its faults", "He thought it was equal among many nations", "He focused mainly on how far it had left to go" ], [ "He took whatever job he could apply for", "He took the job that would give him the most fame", "He took the best paying job he could find", "He took the job he was most passionate about" ], [ "He changed his perspective", "He became hysterical", "He became stingy", "He quit his job" ], [ "His father's advice and peer pressure", "Only peer pressure", "His father's advice, peer pressure, and desire for fame", "Only his father's advice" ], [ "He knew he asked because he wanted his father to feel needed", "He knew he wasn't capable on his own", "He knew he was lazy", "He wanted him to feel supported" ], [ "It is stressful working with the lawyer's and paperwork", "He would rather he were still alive", "It is annoying having people ask him questions about it", "The IRS is taxing it at a high rate" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 4, 1, 1, 4, 1, 4, 4, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far." ], [ "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose", "tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.", "This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss." ], [ "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him." ], [ "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss." ], [ "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined." ], [ "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "tank where he hung his hat for many years, into account; and the words of Mrs. Wiggins, who ran the cafeteria at the AEI; and the thoughts of Alan Greenspan or the head of Goldman, Sachs; and valued them entirely" ], [ "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he" ], [ "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "to and from my mother when they were courting in 1935 and 1936, still tied with light blue ribbon in what was my mother's lingerie drawer, talking about their love triumphing over the dangers of the Depression. I suppose" ], [ "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "was interesting and challenging, not what paid the most. I never knew him to chase a deal or a job (he never in his whole life applied for a job!) for any other reason except that it was of interest to him.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "Even in his hospital bed, hearing my son's voice on the phone could make him smile through the fear and the pain. (\"He sounds so sweet when he calls me 'Grandpa,' \" my father said, beaming even with tubes in him.)", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "Once, about 25 years ago, when my boss treated me unfairly, my father said that if it happened again, I should quit and he would take care of me until I found a job. I never needed to do it, but the offer hung in my mind as a last refuge forever. \n\n This reassurance--that somehow things will be all right, that there is a lot of ruin in a man, as well as in a nation, to paraphrase his idol, Adam Smith--has become part of me, and I can still summon it up when I am terrified because of a huge quarterly tax payment due or a bad day on the market. Again, the IRS taxes it at zero.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far.", "on their merits to him, not on the basis of how much press or money the speaker had. He never once in my lifetime's recall said that any man or woman deserved special respect for riches--in fact, like Adam Smith, he" ], [ "My Father's Estate \n\n A letter from an ill-mannered former high-school classmate of long ago, one of several like it, which I pass on in paraphrase: \"I saw that your father had died,\" she wrote. \"He was always so clever about money. Did he leave you a big estate? Did he figure out a way around the estate tax?\" It's a rude question, but it has an answer. \n\n My sister and I have been going through my father's estate lately with his lawyer, and we're pawing through old, dusty files to find bank account numbers and rules for annuities, so maybe it's a good time to think about what my father, Herbert Stein, left to us.", "My father himself, as far as I know, inherited no money at all from his father. He did inherit a belief that hard work would solve most problems, that spending beyond one's means was a recipe for disaster, that flashy showoff behavior with borrowed money was understandable but foolish. He did inherit enough common sense to tell his son that buying property he would never live in was probably a bad mistake. (He rarely spoke in moral absolutes. He believed instead that humans could and would make individual choices but that there were surely consequences to those choices that could be considered.) He passed these beliefs on to me, although they have become somewhat attenuated by my 20-plus years in the fleshpots of Hollywood. Still, I am one of the only men I know here who has never been drastically short of money (so far), and that I attribute to hearing his rules of prudence.", "This good name cannot be taxed at all, at least not right now. My sister and I and our children will have it for as long as we keep it clean. It's priceless, incalculable in value. \n\n So, in answer to the query from the forward high-school classmate, \"Yes, my father did leave an immense estate, and yes, he did manage to beat the estate tax.\" The only problem is that I miss him every single minute, and I already had the best parts of the estate without his being gone, so the death part is pure loss.", "That's another item my father left: his own poetry and his massive prose writings. Very little of it is about anything at all abstruse. There are no formulas and no graphs or charts, except from his very last years. There are many essays about how much he missed my mom when she died, about how much he loved the sights of Washington, about how dismaying it was that there was still so much confusion about basic issues in economics. And there are his satires of haiku about public policy, his takeoffs on Wordsworth and Shakespeare, often composed for a friend's birthday, then sometimes later published. I suppose there will not be much tax on these because my father was hardly a writer for the large audience.", "This quality of devotion and the rewards I get from it are worth far more than any stocks or bonds in my father's estate--and cannot be taken away at the marginal rate of 55 percent. Plus, I can pass it on to my son without any generation-skipping surcharge. \n\n And he left something else of perhaps even greater value: a good name. Many people quarreled with my father's ideas about taxes or about when to balance the budget. He faced frequent opposition to his belief in a large defense budget. Of course, most of the people he knew disagreed with him about RN. But no one ever questioned that he came by his views honestly, by means of research and analysis and sometimes sentiment, but not for any venal reason or by the process of money changing hands. His reputation for honesty was simply without a speck of question upon it.", "My father's stance against seeking money for its own sake--so wildly unsuited to today's age, but so reassuring to his children--cannot be taken by the Treasury. \n\n Pop had a way of putting what I thought of as catastrophes into their rightful context. If I was hysterical about losing some scriptwriting job, my father would brush it aside as a basic risk, part of the life I had chosen. If my stocks went down, even dramatically, my father would explain that if I had a roof over my head and enough to eat, I was far, far ahead of the game. Most reassuring, my father would tell me that my family and I could always come to Washington, D.C., and live quietly, keeping him company, for which not a lot of money was required. (My father lived on a fraction of the income from his savings, even allowing for paying for his grandchildren's education.)", "But these are the trivia of what he left me and my sister. The really valuable estate cannot be touched by the death tax. The man's legacy to his family has almost nothing to do with anything that can be appraised in dollars and cents. \n\n The example of loyalty and principle: When he had just taken over as the chairman of President Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, he hired a young staff economist named Ron Hoffman (brother of Dustin Hoffman). Almost immediately, John Dean, then White House counsel, came to see my father to tell him that he had to fire Hoffman. Apparently, Ron Hoffman had signed a public anti-war letter. The FBI, or whoever, said that showed he was not loyal and not qualified. My father said that this was a free country, that Ron Hoffman was hired as an economist not as a political flack for RN, and that he would not be fired because he disagreed with some aspect of Nixon policy. After much worrying, Hoffman was allowed to stay--and performed well.", "believed that the pleadings of the rich merited special suspicion. He did not believe that my sister or I should devote our lives to the pursuit of money, and by his life set an example to us of pursuing only what", "My father was loyal, and the IRS cannot impound that legacy. When RN ran into every kind of problem after June of 1972, most of which were unearned and a chunk of which was earned, my father never thought of disavowing him or even distancing himself from Nixon. Even though he had an appointment to the University of Virginia in his pocket, Pop several times extended his stay at the White House to help out with the struggles over inflation and recession, and never once publicly said a word against Nixon. \n\n Long after, when Nixon was blasted as an anti-Semite, my father told in print and in person of the Nixon he knew: kind; concerned about all on his staff, regardless of ethnicity; pro-Israel; pro-Jewish in every important cause. My father would never turn his back on a man who had been as conscientious to the cause of peace and as kind to the Stein family as RN had been. \n\n \"Loyalty.\" There is no item for it in the inventory of estate assets to be taxed.", "beguiling because he had always wanted to live by the ocean and write. And there are his furniture and his clothes, none of which has any value at all except to me because they remind me of him and because, when I", "He did indeed leave some money. By the standards we read about in the Wall Street Journal or Sports Illustrated , it was not worthy of much ink. In any event, because of the class-warfare-based death tax, the amount that will be left is vastly less than what he had saved. As an economist, my father was famous for defending taxes as a necessary evil. But even he was staggered, not long before his death, when he considered the taxes on his savings that would go to the Internal Revenue Service.", "Never once did my sister or I ever ask him for help that he hesitated, let alone declined, to give. Usually this was some research we were too lazy to do, but which he did without any resistance at all. When I was a child and had a chore like leaf raking that I didn't want to do, his simple answer was to say, \"Let's do it together. It'll take half as long.\" I use that with my son almost every day, along with the devotion, and my father's example about his friends from long ago to make my life work. He stayed close with friends from Williams College Class of '35, especially Richard Helms of the CIA. He had lunch with one of his pals from Williams, Johnny Davis, class of '33, who got him a job as a dishwasher at Sigma Chi, days before he went into the hospital.", "He grieved like a banshee when my mother died in 1997 and never really got over the loss of a soul mate of 61 years, who literally dreamed the same dreams he did. Once, he wrote my mother a poem (which he called \"Route 29\") about the beauty of Route 29 north of Charlottesville, Va., and the pleasure of riding along it with my mom. He filed it away for further work and never touched it again. The day after my mother's death, he found it--with her reply poem telling of how she hoped to never see those hills and those clouds and those cattle with anyone else but Pop. She had written her poem (which she titled \"Only You\") and put it back in the file without ever telling him. He survived that terrible loss with the help of a beautiful widow, whom he also came to appreciate and live for. He probably spent more time trying to help her with an annuity problem than he ever did on any financial feature of his own life. A simple call from her inviting him to dinner in her kitchen on Kalorama Circle was enough to make his life complete.", "They never had live-in help. My father washed the dishes after my mother made the meatloaf. My father took the bus whenever he could. His only large expenditure in his and my mom's whole lives was to pay for schools for his children and grandchildren. He never bought bottled, imported water; he said whatever came out of the tap was good enough for him. They still used bargain-basement furniture from before the war for their bedroom furniture and their couch. I never once knew them to order the most expensive thing in a restaurant, and they always took the leftovers home. \n\n They made not one penny of it from stock options or golden parachutes. They made it all by depriving themselves in the name of thrift and prudence and preparing for the needs of posterity. To think that this abstemiousness and this display of virtue will primarily benefit the IRS is really just so galling I can hardly stand it. The only possible reason for it is to satisfy some urge of jealousy by people who were less self-disciplined.", "Most of all, my father believed in loving and appreciating those persons close to him. He stayed close to all his pals from the Nixon days (and would not hear personal criticism of Pat Buchanan, who had been a friend and colleague, although he was bewildered by Pat's stands on many issues). He basked in the pleasure of the company of his colleagues and friends at the American Enterprise Institute, which he thought of as one of his three homes--the Cosmos Club and his extremely modest but well-situated apartment at the Watergate were the others. \n\n He could form attachments readily. Even in his last days in the hospital, he took a liking to a Ukrainian-born doctor and used to refer to him as \"Suvorov,\" after the Russian general written of glowingly in War and Peace-- which still sits on the table next to his reading chair, with his notes on little pieces of paper in it.", "My father lived his life, especially in the latter years of it, in a haze of appreciation. Whatever small faults he could and did find with America, he endlessly reminded anyone who listened that the best achievement of mankind was America, whose current failings were trivial by historic standards, which was in a constant process of amelioration, and which offered its citizens the best chance in history for a good life. \n\n When he did consider the failures of American life in the past, especially institutionalized racism, he did so to note the astonishing progress that had been made in his lifetime. He had no use for those who held up a mirror of fault-finding from the left or the right when he could see in his own era what vast improvements in freedom had been made for blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, and every other minority.", "There are a few material, tangible items that an assessor will have to come in to appraise. There are my father's books, from his days at Williams College and the University of Chicago, many of them still neatly underlined and annotated in his handwriting, which did not change from 1931 until days before his death. Most of them are about economics, but some are poetry.", "stand near them in his closet, I can still smell his smell of hair and skin and leather shoes, the closet smelling a lot like he smelled when he came home from work in 1954 carrying a newspaper that said there could", "He derived more pleasure from speaking to his pals at the book club of the Cosmos Club about John Keats than he did from giving speeches to trade associations that paid him handsomely.", "He appreciated art, especially ballet and opera. He sat for hours in front of the television watching videos of Romeo and Juliet or Les Sylphides or Tosca . He lived to go to the Kennedy Center to see great ballet or opera, and he talked of it endlessly. But he also appreciated art in the form of obscure fountains in front of federal buildings, of the statues of BolÃvar and George Washington and San Martin. He appreciated the intricate moldings on the ceiling of the second floor of the Cosmos Club. He was in awe of the beauty of the mighty Potomac in fall and of the rolling green hunt country around Middleburg and The Plains, Va., in summer. \n\n This quality of gratitude for America and for the beauty of life cannot be taxed, at least not so far." ] ]
valid	20041	[ "What is the author’s thesis?", "What is the fallacy that the author presents?", "What does the author think is not possible to ensure?", "What does the author argue is newly developing in relation to Keynesianism?", "What is the feedback that controls the interest rate set by the Federal reserve?", "What is supposed to be the desired effect of lowering interest rates?", "What did Keynes posit was an influence on the rate of interest in the economy?", "How does the author use the word vulgar in the piece? To mean:" ]	[ [ "That even Keynesian economists are misinterpreting some of the intentions of Keynes’ original theories", "There are so many unknowns in Keynes’ theories that it has come time to develop a new set of economic theories separate from his", "Keynesian economists are more united than divided", "It’s not possible to know what Keynes’ true intentions were" ], [ "There are several untrue versions of Keynes’ theories that were circulated early on in his career", "There are too many people in control of the interest rate to know who makes the decisions", "Setting the employment capacity for the economy in dangerous", "The Federal Reserve having complete say on the interest rate cannot coexist with the idea that savings rates increasing is bad for the economy " ], [ "More unemployed people will be linked with greater savings", "Less savings due to low interest rates will translate to more investments", "Investments will always increase in the long run", "Keynes’ theories are still relevant to the economy today" ], [ "There is a sense of Keynes’ theories being overstated ", "Kaynes is being left out of current economic teachings", "It’s been misinterpreted as only a way to explain unemployment and nothing more", "It’s being boiled down to the idea that low consumer spend rates cause problems to occur in the economy" ], [ "Jobs and investments", "Investments only", "Savings rate", "Jobs only" ], [ "Lower unemployment", "Lower employment", "Decrease investments", "Increase savings" ], [ "Desire to hold cash unless incentivized otherwise", "Full employment", "Balance between savings and investment", "Number of crashes per decade" ], [ "An accident", "Danger", "A partisan understanding", "A distorted view" ] ]	[ 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 1, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you." ], [ "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does." ], [ "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment." ], [ "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you." ], [ "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you.", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing." ], [ "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you.", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves" ], [ "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you.", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing." ], [ "Vulgar Keynesians \n\n Economics, like all intellectual enterprises, is subject to the law of diminishing disciples. A great innovator is entitled to some poetic license. If his ideas are at first somewhat rough, if he exaggerates the discontinuity between his vision and what came before, no matter: Polish and perspective can come in due course. But inevitably there are those who follow the letter of the innovator's ideas but misunderstand their spirit, who are more dogmatic in their radicalism than the orthodox were in their orthodoxy. And as ideas spread, they become increasingly simplistic--until what eventually becomes part of the public consciousness, part of what \"everyone knows,\" is no more than a crude caricature of the original. \n\n Such has been the fate of Keynesian economics. John Maynard Keynes himself was a magnificently subtle and innovative thinker. Yet one of his unfortunate if unintentional legacies was a style of thought--call it vulgar Keynesianism--that confuses and befogs economic debate to this day.", "quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\") It is perhaps not surprising that the same ideas are echoed by John B. Judis in the ; but when you see the idea that higher savings", "Am I missing something? \n\n To read the reply of \"Vulgar Keynesian\" James K. Galbraith, in which he explains green cheese and Keynes, click here.", "and the widow's cruse are both major themes in William Greider's latest book, which I discussed last month. (Although it is doubtful whether Greider is aware of the source of his ideas--as Keynes wrote, \"Practical men, who believe themselves", "of the idea that reduced consumer spending is always a bad thing. In the United States, where inflation and the budget deficit have receded for the time being, vulgar Keynesianism has recently staged an impressive comeback. The paradox of thrift", "will actually reduce growth treated seriously in (\"Looking for Growth in All the Wrong Places,\" Feb. 3), you realize that there is a real cultural phenomenon developing.", "It was a brilliant re-imagining of the way the economy worked, one that received quick acceptance from the brightest young economists of the time. True, some realized very early that Keynes' picture was oversimplified; in particular, that the level of employment and output would normally feed back to interest rates, and that this might make a lot of difference. Still, for a number of years after the publication of The General Theory , many economic theorists were fascinated by the implications of that picture, which seemed to take us into a looking-glass world in which virtue was punished and self-indulgence rewarded. \n\n Consider, for example, the \"paradox of thrift.\" Suppose that for some reason the savings rate--the fraction of income not spent--goes up. According to the early Keynesian models, this will actually lead to a decline in total savings and investment. Why? Because higher desired savings will lead to an economic slump, which will reduce income and also reduce investment demand; since in the end savings and investment are always equal, the total volume of savings must actually fall!", "What has made it into the public consciousness--including, alas, that of many policy intellectuals who imagine themselves well informed--is a sort of caricature Keynesianism, the hallmark of which is an uncritical acceptance", "Or consider the \"widow's cruse\" theory of wages and employment (named after an old folk tale). You might think that raising wages would reduce the demand for labor; but some early Keynesians argued that redistributing income from profits to wages would raise consumption demand, because workers save less than capitalists (actually they don't, but that's another story), and therefore increase output and employment. \n\n Such paradoxes are still fun to contemplate; they still appear in some freshman textbooks. Nonetheless, few economists take them seriously these days. There are a number of reasons, but the most important can be stated in two words: Alan Greenspan.", "Keynes was willing to concede that in some sufficiently long run, these theories might indeed be valid; but, as he memorably pointed out, \"In the long run we are all dead.\" In the short run, he asserted, interest rates were determined not by the balance between savings and investment at full employment but by \"liquidity preference\"--the public's desire to hold cash unless offered a sufficient incentive to invest in less safe and convenient assets. Savings and investment were still necessarily equal; but if desired savings at full employment turned out to exceed desired investment, what would fall would be not interest rates but the level of employment and output. In particular, if investment demand should fall for whatever reason--such as, say, a stock-market crash--the result would be an economy-wide slump.", "Before the 1936 publication of Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , economists had developed a rich and insightful theory of microeconomics , of the behavior of individual markets and the allocation of resources among them. But macroeconomics --the study of economy-wide events like inflation and deflation, booms and slumps--was in a state of arrested development that left it utterly incapable of making sense of the Great Depression. \n\n So-called \"classical\" macroeconomics asserted that the economy had a long-run tendency to return to full employment, and focused only on that long run. Its two main tenets were the quantity theory of money--the assertion that the overall level of prices was proportional to the quantity of money in circulation--and the \"loanable funds\" theory of interest, which asserted that interest rates would rise or fall to equate total savings with total investment.", "To justify the claim that savings are actually bad for growth (as opposed to the quite different, more reasonable position that they are not as crucial as some would claim), you must convincingly argue that the Fed is impotent--that it cannot, by lowering interest rates, ensure that an increase in desired savings gets translated into higher investment. \n\n It is not enough to argue that interest rates are only one of several influences on investment. That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car. So what? I am able to adjust that pressure, and so my car's speed is normally determined by how fast I think I can safely drive. Similarly, Greenspan is able to change interest rates freely (the Fed can double the money supply in a day, if it wants to), and so the level of employment is normally determined by how high he thinks it can safely go--end of story.", "After all, the simple Keynesian story is one in which interest rates are independent of the level of employment and output. But in reality the Federal Reserve Board actively manages interest rates, pushing them down when it thinks employment is too low and raising them when it thinks the economy is overheating. You may quarrel with the Fed chairman's judgment--you may think that he should keep the economy on a looser rein--but you can hardly dispute his power. Indeed, if you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.", "But putting Greenspan (or his successor) into the picture restores much of the classical vision of the macroeconomy. Instead of an invisible hand pushing the economy toward full employment in some unspecified long run, we have the visible hand of the Fed pushing us toward its estimate of the noninflationary unemployment rate over the course of two or three years. To accomplish this, the board must raise or lower interest rates to bring savings and investment at that target unemployment rate in line with each other. And so all the paradoxes of thrift, widow's cruses, and so on become irrelevant. In particular, an increase in the savings rate will translate into higher investment after all, because the Fed will make sure that it does.", "To me, at least, the idea that changes in demand will normally be offset by Fed policy--so that they will, on average, have no effect on employment--seems both simple and entirely reasonable. Yet it is clear that very few people outside the world of academic economics think about things that way. For example, the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement was conducted almost entirely in terms of supposed job creation or destruction. The obvious (to me) point that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance, never made it into the public consciousness. (In fact, when I made that argument at one panel discussion in 1993, a fellow panelist--a NAFTA advocate, as it happens--exploded in rage: \"It's remarks like that that make people hate economists!\")", "Anyway, this is a moot point, because the people who insist that savings are bad do not think that the Fed is impotent. On the contrary, they are generally the same people who insist that the disappointing performance of the U.S. economy over the past generation is all the Fed's fault, and that we could grow our way out of our troubles if only Greenspan would let us. \n\n Let's quote the Feb. 3 Business Week commentary: \n\n Some contrarian economists argue that forcing up savings is likely to slow the economy, depressing investment rather than sparking it. \"You need to stimulate the investment decision,\" says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, a Keynesian. He would rather stimulate growth by cutting interest rates. \n\n So, increasing savings will slow the economy--presumably because the Fed cannot induce an increase in investment by cutting interest rates. Instead, the Fed should stimulate growth by cutting interest rates, which will work because lower interest rates will induce an increase in investment.", "No, to make sense of the claim that savings are bad you must argue either that interest rates have no effect on spending (try telling that to the National Association of Homebuilders) or that potential savings are so high compared with investment opportunities that the Fed cannot bring the two in line even at a near-zero interest rate. The latter was a reasonable position during the 1930s, when the rate on Treasury bills was less than one-tenth of 1 percent; it is an arguable claim right now for Japan, where interest rates are about 1 percent. (Actually, I think that the Bank of Japan could still pull that economy out of its funk, and that its passivity is a case of gross malfeasance. That, however, is a subject for another column.) But the bank that holds a mortgage on my house sends me a little notice each month assuring me that the interest rate in America is still quite positive, thank you." ] ]
valid	20068	[ "Which of the following statements is the most true about how the author feels about dentistry?", "According to the article, why do most people value the dentist?", "Why are people less satisfied with their smile now than in previous generations?", "Which of the following is a real danger to one's health from improper mouth care?", "How do people now feel about keeping all of their natural teeth?", "What is the best definition for \"treatment acceptance\"?", "How can patients improve the dental industry?", "Why did this author likely write this article?" ]	[ [ "It is a waste of money", "Perfect smiles are important", "Insurance doesn't help enough with the costs", "It is valuable in the right context" ], [ "Cosmetic reasons", "Medical reasons", "Curing halitosis", "They don't" ], [ "People had nicer smiles in the past", "Plastic implants are not as effective as amalgam fillings", "They aren't", "They have different expectations" ], [ "Heart disease", "Yellow teeth", "Halitosis", "Crooked smile" ], [ "Insecure", "Entitled", "No information provided in the article", "Proud" ], [ "Optimum care", "Contentment with cheaper treatment plans", "Dental care marketing", "Parting patients with their money" ], [ "Pay more out-of-pocket for services", "Follow any advice given by the dentist", "Change values from cosmetic to health", "Get better dental insurance" ], [ "To help the reader with a new perspective on dentistry", "To convince the reader to avoid cosmetic dentistry", "To draw attention to the inadequacies of dental insurance", "To motivate the reader to go to the dentist" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 4, 1, 2, 4, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel." ], [ "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel." ], [ "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel." ], [ "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel.", "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass." ], [ "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel." ], [ "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works." ], [ "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life.", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel." ], [ "The transformation of American dentistry from drill-and-fill to shoot-and-loot is an unlikely business success story of the '90s, a case study in how a profession can work itself out of a job and still prosper. Dentists, after all, are supposed to be extinct by now. While they happily (and profitably) scraped teeth and filled cavities during the '60s and '70s, fluoride was quietly choking off their revenue stream. The percentage of children with cavities fell by half and kept falling. People stopped going to the dentist, because they didn't need to. At the same time, the government funded dental-school construction, spilling new dentists into a saturated market. Many found themselves cleaning teeth for $10 an hour in mall clinics. In 1984, Forbes magazine forecast the end of the profession. Only a few lonely dentists would survive to fill the few remaining cavities, the last vestiges of a once-great civilization on Long Island.", "Entrepreneurial dentists market this elective care with trained aggression. Dental management organizations often require their employees to recite a quasisales script guiding patients toward profitable cosmetics. Ads in the Journal of the American Dental Association and on the Web promote tapes and classes on marketing techniques. One person I know quit his dentist when he spied a pamphlet in the office instructing the dentist in how to get his patients to \"trade up\" to more expensive treatment. The ADA's annual conference is overflowing with seminars on topics such as \"how to move your patients to 'yes.' \" \n\n The industry calls this technique \"treatment acceptance,\" a marvelous euphemism for parting you from your money. According to the ADA's journal, this year's ADA conference will include an all-day \"Treatment Acceptance\" seminar \"for the dental team that is fed up with patients accepting only what insurance covers or asking for alternative cheaper treatment plans. Involve the entire team in creating the strategies for patients to accept optimum care.\"", "Instead, the number of dentists has jumped 20 percent, and the average salary soared from $76,000 in 1987 to $124,000 in 1996. What happened? In part, the oversupply of dentists and the declining demand for fillings forced the profession to change. Dentists had to become nicer and visits less unpleasant. The Marathon Man has been replaced by Dr. Soothe. \"People figured out pretty darn quickly that if you were an ass, patients would not come to you,\" says Dr. William Hartel, a St. Louis dentist. Many dentists' offices let you don virtual reality glasses and watch movies on them. Others offer massage therapy and hot tubs. Does your dentist have a certificate of pain management on her wall? I bet she does.", "The most important discovery dentists made was the endless vanity of aging baby boomers. \"We are dealing now with the boomers who are the runners and the joggers and the dieters, and they are very concerned with how they look,\" says American Dental Association President Dr. Timothy Rose. Since going to the dentist was no longer a necessary evil, dentists made it an unnecessary pleasure. They allied themselves with the self-improvement movement. \"You still go for the needs, for the cavity that has to get filled, but more and more people ... come here to feel better about themselves,\" says Dr. Stephen Friedman, a Maryland dentist.", "This hard sell is critical in dentistry in a way that it isn't in other medicine because of the profession's brutal economics. Dental insurance covers only 44 percent of Americans (compared to more than 80 percent for health insurance), and provides skimpy coverage for those who do have it. As a result, patients pay most dental costs--about 60 percent of them--out of their own pockets. Dental care is just another way to spend discretionary income, competing with a vacation or a new car. Dentists have to make patients want adult orthodontics in a way physicians don't have to make patients want a quadruple bypass.", "Which brings us to the irony of dentistry's comeback: Just as patients love the dental care they should suspect, they resent the care they should appreciate. Aesthetic dentistry is the most profitable segment of the business because it is an easy sell. Put a camera in your mouth and you'll want whiter teeth, too. It is much harder to convince someone to poke her gums every night with a piece of rubber, to sleep with a choking plastic tooth guard, and to undergo four surgeries to fix a gum flap, all for a benefit that is decades away. The very success of dentistry has raised expectations so high that patients now object to any inconvenience. Americans under 60 believe keeping all their teeth is an entitlement: Telling them they need gum surgery to preserve their teeth makes them angry, not grateful--even though those teeth would have been goners 20 years ago.", "People used to be happy if they made it to old age with enough choppers to chew. But boomers, lured by media images of the Great American Smile, expect more. According to an ADA poll, the percentage of people who are \"very satisfied\" with their teeth has dropped from 57 percent to 46 percent in the past decade. Dentists have learned to play on this vanity and anxiety, encouraging dental care that is medically unnecessary but attractive to patients. \"It's as if you went to a physician for a treatment for a disease and he said you needed a nose job,\" says Dr. John Dodes, author of Healthy Teeth: A User's Manual .", "When I surveyed 100 friends and acquaintances about their dental complaints, few bitched about cosmetic dentistry that was foisted on them. They like their whiter, straighter teeth. No, they griped about the medically advisable treatments that their dentists prescribed, especially gum surgeries and mouth guards. Pity the poor dentist who abjures cosmetic dentistry but vigorously protects patients' teeth. Patients don't like periodontal treatment, so they suspect it's a rip-off. This could not be further from the truth. \n\n \"Dentists are aware of providing what patients want,\" says Hartel. \"I had a woman come in with a terrible toothache. She needed a root canal, but she did not want it. But she did want her teeth bleached, and she paid cash for it.\" \n\n Such is the triumph of American dentists: If they can't sell you what you need, they'll sell you what you want.", "To flog $500 teeth whitenings and multi-thousand dollar adult orthodontic treatments, dentists run computer simulations of your whitened, straightened teeth. Tooth color is measured on a scale that starts at A1. \"My dentist showed me these disgusting color charts and told me, 'You're an A2 now, but by the time you want to get married you are going to be an A4. And no one wants to marry an A4,' \" says one woman who got her teeth bleached. Dentists also prod patients to replace perfectly functional gray-metal fillings with tooth-colored plastic ones and to dump their solid gold crowns for white porcelain. Other dentists sell the psychology of tooth appearance. One dentist specializing in porcelain caps advises that male bosses with small teeth seem \"weak.\"", "Defining Decay Down \n\n If you haven't visited a dentist in the past few years, first of all, that's gross. (Checkups are every six months, and don't pretend you forgot.) Second, be grateful that you have avoided the \"intra-oral camera.\" As the dentist (or assistant) navigates this horrifying little gadget through the graveyard of your mouth, a color television magnifies the florid pustulance of your gums and the puke-yellow dinge of your smile. A harmless crevice in your silver-mercury amalgam filling looks like Hell's Canyon. The microcracks in your enamel look like a broken window. All this can be fixed, of course, with 10 grand of straightening, filling, sealing, and whitening. \"You will agree to anything the second they put that thing in your mouth,\" says one recent victim of the camera. \"You can't believe you are walking around with that, that, that ick in your mouth.\"", "Scientists have learned how bacteria can build up in gaps in the gum, cause infection, weaken the jawbone, and eventually murder teeth. New research links these periodontal bacteria to heart disease, diabetes, low birth-weight babies, and other nastiness you'd expect from bacteria running wild in the bloodstream. This is why your dentist hectors you to rubber-tip your gums, brush with a superconcentrated fluoride toothpaste, and wear a night guard to control your bruxing (which loosens teeth, opening pockets between teeth and gum, etc.). It's also why your dentist may bully you into gum surgery. It all seems unpleasant and slightly absurd--the night guard is \"an excellent form of birth control,\" as one wearer puts it--but the alternative is losing your teeth at 40, getting dentures, and gumming your food. Dentistry is a hassle now because it works.", "Some dentists dress up these cosmetic measures in medical scare talk. A friend of mine just quit a dentist who was pressuring him to whiten his teeth as a \"preventive measure.\" (To prevent what? Yellow teeth?) Many dentists claim, without scientific evidence, that the mercury in amalgam fillings is dangerous. They urge patients to replace the excellent amalgam with plastic fillings at four times the price.", "Dentists make a killing on bad breath--or \"halitosis,\" as they prefer to call it. Breath clinics have sprouted up all over the country and are heavily advertised on the Web. They terrify patients with a \"halimeter,\" a new gadget that measures a nasty smelling chemical called methyl mercaptan. Armed with the halimeter proof, the dentist then dangles expensive mouthwashes and tongue scrapers in front of the patient. Never mind that you can get the same results for free with careful brushing and basic tongue-scraping. The machine makes the sale. \"Now that there is this machine that can document your complaint and can put a number on it, it motivates a patient to actually do something about it. But the treatments available now are the same ones that have been available for 15 years,\" says Hartel.", "\"If you think back a couple of generations, it was considered inevitable that people would lose their teeth when they reached midlife. Around 40 or 45, you would have your teeth taken out. Periodontal disease was not understood, and decay was rampant. But now teeth are resistant to decay and are lasting a lifetime. I have gone in 18 years from learning how to make dentures and thinking it is OK for people to lose teeth to being appalled if anyone loses teeth. It is a failure,\" says Dr. Judith Penski, my own fabulous D.C. dentist.", "It's tempting to dismiss the whole industry as a scam, particularly when dentists keep coming up with new ailments such as bruxism (teeth grinding), periodontal disease, malocclusion (bad bite), and microcracks. But these ailments are real, and our awareness of them shows how far dentistry has come. A generation ago, dentists filled teeth and cast dentures because that's all they knew. Decay killed so many teeth that fancier problems seldom arose. Since then, researchers have studied bonding, implants, and periodontal disease. Dentists can now make crowns that last forever, bridges that stay anchored, dentures that behave almost like real teeth. A generation ago, implants were a joke. Today's implants, affixed to your jawbone by a titanium screw, can hold for the rest of your life." ] ]
valid	22876	[ "What is Ravdin’s job?", "Which word does NOT describe Lord Nehmon’s leadership?", "What is the relationship between Ravdin and Dana?", "Why do they need to burn the city?", "Which word describes Frankle’s leadership?", "Predict: was Ravdin and Dana’s plan successful?", "What is “the link”?", "What is a theme in the story?", "Why do Dana and Ravdin stay behind?", "Nehmon wants to flee, but Ravdin and Dana argue with him. What is Dana's argument?" ]	[ [ "He scouts space for the Hunters. ", "He is a warrior. ", "He is a spy. ", "He is a musician." ], [ "Passive", "Resilient", "Gentle", "Ineffective " ], [ "They are married.", "Dana is Ravdin’s supervisor. ", "They are brother and sister.", "They are both watchmen. " ], [ "They need to destroy evidence of their civilization to throw the Hunters off their trail. ", "The Hunters will destroy the city anyway. ", "They don’t want to share their resources with others. ", "They don’t want the Hunters to steal their secrets. " ], [ "Ineffective", "Militaristic ", "Democratic ", "Passive " ], [ "No, because the Hunters will never change their hostile ways. ", "Yes, because Frankle decided to declare peace. ", "No, because they were left in the jungle, separated from the rest of their people. ", "Yes, because they planted the seed in Frankle’s mind to change their hostile ways. " ], [ "Ravdin planted a microchip on Frankle so that his people will know where the Hunters are. ", "The magical music connects people by bringing out their humanity. ", "The peace offering from the Hunters. ", "The magic that Ravdin and Dana use to blank out their minds. " ], [ "Good will always triumph over evil. ", "Art has the power to change hearts. ", "Hatred is stronger than benevolence. ", "It is better to flee than to fight. " ], [ "They want to populate the Jungle-land to ensure the survival of their race. ", "They want to resolve the conflict with the Hunters to stop the endless cycle of fleeing.", "They will shoot down the Hunter's ship to stop their attack. ", "They will spy on the Hunters to find out where they are going next. " ], [ "She believes the Hunters may have changed and that peace is possible. ", "She wants to fight the Hunters and kill them. ", "She wants to surrender to the Hunters. ", "She wants to burn the Hunters' space ship. " ] ]	[ 1, 4, 1, 1, 2, 4, 2, 2, 2, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down\n the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the\n shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished\n floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green,\n broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet,\n reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind.\n Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human\n habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered\n the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long,\n low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the\n wind, a distant whisper of life....", "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "Ravdin nodded. \"That's the trouble. They come closer every\n time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the\n next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we\n fight them.\" He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on\n the street below. \"If we only knew, for certain, what we were\n running from.\"\n\n\n There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a\n gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. \"Ravdin,\"\n she said softly, \"\nhave you ever seen a Hunter\n?\"\n\n\n Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music\n burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly\n hopeful. \"No,\" he said, \"no, of course not. You know that.\"\n\n\n The girl rose from her seat. \"Nor have I. Never, not once.\"\n She turned to Lord Nehmon. \"Have\nyou\n?\"", "A bell chimed softly in his ear. Ravdin forced his attention\n back to the landing operation. He was still numb and shaken\n from the Warp-passage, his mind still muddled by the abrupt\n and incredible change. Moments before, the sky had been a\n vast, starry blanket of black velvet; then, abruptly, he had\n been hovering over the city, sliding down toward warm\n friendly lights and music. He checked the proper switches, and\n felt the throbbing purr of the anti-grav motors as the ship slid\n in toward the landing slot. Tall spires of other ships rose to\n meet him, circle upon circle of silver needles pointing skyward.\n A little later they were blotted out as the ship was grappled\n into the berth from which it had risen days before.\n\n\n With a sigh, Ravdin eased himself out of the seat, his heart\n pounding with excitement. Perhaps, he thought, he was too\n excited, too eager to be home, for his mind was still reeling\n from the fearful discovery of his journey.", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "\"We are not criminals.\"\n\n\n The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. \"Then why are you\n here?\nWhy?\nAre you going to tell me now, or do you propose\n to waste a few hours of my time first?\"\n\n\n \"There is no mystery,\" Ravdin said softly. \"We stayed behind\n to plead for peace.\"\n\n\n \"For peace?\" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged,\n his face tired. \"I might have known. Peace! Where have your\n people gone?\"\n\n\n Ravdin met him eye for eye. \"I can't say.\"\n\n\n The Hunter laughed. \"Let's be precise, you don't\nchoose\nto\n say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all\n your heart to tell me.\"", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "The little shuttle-car settled down softly on the green terrace\n near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece\n of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a\n full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm\n breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace.\n There was other music here, different music, a wilder,\n more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened\n for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the\n overpowering beauty in the vaulted room.\n\n\n A girl with red hair the color of new flame was dancing\n with enthralling beauty and abandon, her body moving like\n ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its\n throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every\n flowing turn a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced\n to the wild music.\n\n\n \"Lord Nehmon!\"", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nThe Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction\n Stories by Alan E. Nourse\npublished in 1963. Extensive research did\n not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was\n renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected\n without note.\nThe\n\n Link\nIt\n was nearly sundown when Ravdin eased the ship down\n into the last slow arc toward the Earth's surface. Stretching\n his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in\n his tired muscles. Carefully, he tightened the seat belt for\n landing; below him he could see the vast, tangled expanse of\n Jungle-land spreading out to the horizon. Miles ahead was the\n bright circle of the landing field and the sparkling glow of the\n city beyond. Ravdin peered to the north of the city, hoping to\n catch a glimpse of the concert before his ship was swallowed\n by the brilliant landing lights." ], [ "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched\n the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more,\n because the space on the ships must take people, not remembrances,\n and he knew that the remembrances would bring only\n pain. All day Nehmon had supervised the loading, the intricate\n preparation, following plans laid down millennia before.\n He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless\n mile of microfilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry\n them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history\n of a people was recorded on that film, a people once proud and\n strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers as toll\n for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who\n would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old\n fear. They\nhad\nto run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive.", "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man.\n \"I'm sorry,\" he said gently. \"It seems logical, but it's false\n logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives\n are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And\n human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental\n basis of our very existence. Without it we would be\n Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's\n why we must run away now, and always. Because we know\n that we must not kill men.\"\nOn the street below, the night air was suddenly full of\n voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional\n brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted\n on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their\n voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness.", "\"We are not animals.\" Nehmon's voice cut the air like a\n whiplash.\n\n\n \"But we could fight.\"\n\n\n \"Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals,\n and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight\n like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight.\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"Do you mean that the Hunters are\n not men like us?\" he said. \"That's what you're saying, that\n they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't\n that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect\n ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "The last overtones of the music broke abruptly, like a glass\n shattered on stone. The room was deathly still. Lord Nehmon\n searched the young man's face. Then he turned away, not quite\n concealing the sadness and pain in his eyes. \"You're certain?\n You couldn't be mistaken?\"\n\n\n \"No chance. I found signs of their passing in a dozen places.\n Then I saw\nthem\n, their whole fleet. There were hundreds.\n They're coming, I saw them.\"\n\n\n \"Did they see you?\" Nehmon's voice was sharp.\n\n\n \"No, no. The Warp is a wonderful thing. With it I could\n come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But I could see them\n in the twinkling of an eye.\"\n\n\n \"And it couldn't have been anyone else?\"\n\n\n \"Could anyone else build ships like the Hunters?\"", "Ravdin nodded. \"That's the trouble. They come closer every\n time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the\n next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we\n fight them.\" He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on\n the street below. \"If we only knew, for certain, what we were\n running from.\"\n\n\n There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a\n gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. \"Ravdin,\"\n she said softly, \"\nhave you ever seen a Hunter\n?\"\n\n\n Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music\n burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly\n hopeful. \"No,\" he said, \"no, of course not. You know that.\"\n\n\n The girl rose from her seat. \"Nor have I. Never, not once.\"\n She turned to Lord Nehmon. \"Have\nyou\n?\"", "The scout looked up at Nehmon in desperation. \"But what\n can we do? We have only weeks, maybe days, before they're\n here. We have no time to plan, no time to prepare for them.\n What can we do?\"", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "Nehmon sighed wearily. \"No one that we know.\" He\n glanced up at the young man. \"Sit down, son, sit down. I—I'll\n just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were\n they? How far?\"\n\n\n \"Seven light years,\" Ravdin said. \"Can you imagine it?\n Just seven, and moving straight this way.\nThey know where\n we are\n, and they are coming quickly.\" His eyes filled with\n fear. \"They\ncouldn't\nhave found us so soon, unless they too\n have discovered the Warp and how to use it to travel.\"\n\n\n The older man's breath cut off sharply, and there was real\n alarm in his eyes. \"You're right,\" he said softly. \"Six months\n ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an area completely\n remote from us. Now just\nseven\n. In six months they\n have come so close.\"", "Nehmon's voice broke in, almost harshly, as he faced the\n excited pair. \"The Hunters don't have concerts,\" he said\n grimly. \"You're deluding yourself, Dana. They laugh at our\n music, they scoff at our arts and twist them into obscene\n mockeries. They have no concept of beauty in their language.\n The Hunters are incapable of change.\"\n\n\n \"And you can be certain of that when\nnobody has seen\n them for thousands of years\n?\"", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"", "Nehmon's voice broke the silence. \"If you must stay behind,\n then go now. The city will burn an hour after the\n count-down.\"\n\n\n \"We will be safe, outside the city.\" Dana gripped her husband's\n hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her\n strength and confidence. \"Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link\n can be forged, we will forge it.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you the best in everything.\" There were tears in the\n old man's eyes as he turned and left the room.\nThey stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of\n frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the\n bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry\n sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring\n with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets\n dwindled to specks and flickered out.", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him.\n Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of\n Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed,\n forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts\n of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving\n them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals\n in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless.\n\n\n Only three thoughts filled their minds:\n\n\n It was raining.\n\n\n They were hungry.\n\n\n The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight.\n\n\n They never knew that the link had been forged.", "The little shuttle-car settled down softly on the green terrace\n near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece\n of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a\n full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm\n breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace.\n There was other music here, different music, a wilder,\n more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened\n for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the\n overpowering beauty in the vaulted room.\n\n\n A girl with red hair the color of new flame was dancing\n with enthralling beauty and abandon, her body moving like\n ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its\n throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every\n flowing turn a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced\n to the wild music.\n\n\n \"Lord Nehmon!\"", "Nehmon's face went white. \"You know there is no coming\n back, once you do that. You would never regain your memory.\n You must save it for a last resort.\"\n\n\n Down below on the street the last groups of people were\n passing; the last sweet, eerie tones of the concert were rising\n in the gathering twilight. Soon the last families would have\n taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to trigger\n the fire bombs to ignite the beautiful city after the ships\n started on their voyage. The concerts were over; there would\n be long years of aimless wandering before another home could\n be found, another planet safe from the Hunters and their ships.\n Even then it would be more years before the concerts could\n again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, generations\n before they could begin work again toward the climactic expression\n of their heritage." ], [ "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down\n the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the\n shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished\n floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green,\n broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet,\n reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind.\n Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human\n habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered\n the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long,\n low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the\n wind, a distant whisper of life....", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "The little shuttle-car settled down softly on the green terrace\n near the center of the city. The building was a masterpiece\n of smoothly curving walls and tasteful lines, opening a\n full side to the south to catch the soft sunlight and warm\n breezes. Ravdin strode across the deep carpeting of the terrace.\n There was other music here, different music, a wilder,\n more intimate fantasy of whirling sound. An oval door opened\n for him, and he stopped short, staggered for a moment by the\n overpowering beauty in the vaulted room.\n\n\n A girl with red hair the color of new flame was dancing\n with enthralling beauty and abandon, her body moving like\n ripples of wind to the music which filled the room with its\n throbbing cry. Her beauty was exquisite, every motion, every\n flowing turn a symphony of flawless perfection as she danced\n to the wild music.\n\n\n \"Lord Nehmon!\"", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky.\n They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled\n to the earth as powerful, flaming jets.\n\n\n They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures,\n hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the\n tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's\n signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them,\n standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater.\n Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and\n dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters\n had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held\n at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the\n flagship.\n\n\n As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped\n hands to bolster their failing hope.", "Ravdin nodded. \"That's the trouble. They come closer every\n time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the\n next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we\n fight them.\" He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on\n the street below. \"If we only knew, for certain, what we were\n running from.\"\n\n\n There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a\n gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. \"Ravdin,\"\n she said softly, \"\nhave you ever seen a Hunter\n?\"\n\n\n Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music\n burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly\n hopeful. \"No,\" he said, \"no, of course not. You know that.\"\n\n\n The girl rose from her seat. \"Nor have I. Never, not once.\"\n She turned to Lord Nehmon. \"Have\nyou\n?\"", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed\n its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music seemed to swell\n from it, blossoming in the silence. Frankle tensed, a chill running\n up his spine, his eyes drawn back to the gleaming jewel.\n Suddenly, the music filled the room, rising sweetly like an\n overpowering wave, filling his mind with strange and wonderful\n images. The stone shimmered and changed, taking the\n form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it\n rose. Frankle felt his mind groping toward the music, trying\n desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it.\n\n\n Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed\n at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds to\n create the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the\n depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song\n of their people." ], [ "The city burned. Purple spumes of flame shot high into the\n air, throwing a ghastly light on the frightened Jungle-land.\n Spires of flame seemed to be seeking the stars with their fingers\n as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled,\n blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before\n their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last\n remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour\n before. Then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of\n a grave. Out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the\n Jungle-land crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious,\n then bolder and bolder as the wisps of grass and little animals\n ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had\n stood. Bit by bit the Jungle-land gathered courage, and the\n clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear.", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "Nehmon's voice broke the silence. \"If you must stay behind,\n then go now. The city will burn an hour after the\n count-down.\"\n\n\n \"We will be safe, outside the city.\" Dana gripped her husband's\n hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her\n strength and confidence. \"Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link\n can be forged, we will forge it.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you the best in everything.\" There were tears in the\n old man's eyes as he turned and left the room.\nThey stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of\n frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the\n bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry\n sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring\n with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets\n dwindled to specks and flickered out.", "Nehmon's face went white. \"You know there is no coming\n back, once you do that. You would never regain your memory.\n You must save it for a last resort.\"\n\n\n Down below on the street the last groups of people were\n passing; the last sweet, eerie tones of the concert were rising\n in the gathering twilight. Soon the last families would have\n taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to trigger\n the fire bombs to ignite the beautiful city after the ships\n started on their voyage. The concerts were over; there would\n be long years of aimless wandering before another home could\n be found, another planet safe from the Hunters and their ships.\n Even then it would be more years before the concerts could\n again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, generations\n before they could begin work again toward the climactic expression\n of their heritage.", "Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud.\n \"You could forbid us,\" she said, facing the old man. \"But\n you could never stop us.\"\nAt the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with\n green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the\n glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of\n light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again.\n In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of\n the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle\n to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all\n carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships.\n There was music among them still, but it was a different sort", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the\n two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be\n filled. For these two would not go.\n\n\n It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and\n begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that\n the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the\n Hunters was insane. Yet he knew\nthey\nwere sane, perhaps unwise,\n naive, but their decision had been reached, and they\n would not be shaken.", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man.\n \"I'm sorry,\" he said gently. \"It seems logical, but it's false\n logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives\n are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And\n human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental\n basis of our very existence. Without it we would be\n Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's\n why we must run away now, and always. Because we know\n that we must not kill men.\"\nOn the street below, the night air was suddenly full of\n voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional\n brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted\n on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their\n voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness.", "He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling.\n \"Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But\n find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll\n take the music out of them, once and for all.\"\nThe inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no\n concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The\n blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's\n vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams,\n rising with each question they would not answer until their\n throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. Finally\n they reached the limit they could endure, and muttered\n together the hoarse words that could deliver them. Not words", "In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched\n the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more,\n because the space on the ships must take people, not remembrances,\n and he knew that the remembrances would bring only\n pain. All day Nehmon had supervised the loading, the intricate\n preparation, following plans laid down millennia before.\n He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless\n mile of microfilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry\n them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history\n of a people was recorded on that film, a people once proud and\n strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers as toll\n for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who\n would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old\n fear. They\nhad\nto run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive.", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "To run away. In the darkness of secrecy, to be gone, without\n a trace, without symbol or vestige of their presence, leaving\n only the scorched circle of land for the jungle to reclaim,\n so that no eyes, not even the sharpest, would ever know how\n long they had stayed, nor where they might have gone.", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "\"We are not animals.\" Nehmon's voice cut the air like a\n whiplash.\n\n\n \"But we could fight.\"\n\n\n \"Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals,\n and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight\n like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight.\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"Do you mean that the Hunters are\n not men like us?\" he said. \"That's what you're saying, that\n they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't\n that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect\n ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?\"", "Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky.\n They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled\n to the earth as powerful, flaming jets.\n\n\n They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures,\n hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the\n tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's\n signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them,\n standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater.\n Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and\n dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters\n had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held\n at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the\n flagship.\n\n\n As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped\n hands to bolster their failing hope.", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"" ], [ "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "that Frankle could hear, but words to bring deliverance, to\n blank out their minds like a wet sponge over slate. The hypnotic\n key clicked into the lock of their minds; their screams\n died in their brains. Frankle stared at them, and knew instantly\n what they had done, a technique of memory obliteration\n known and dreaded for so many thousands of years that\n history could not remember. As his captives stood mindless\n before him, he let out one hoarse, agonized scream of frustration\n and defeat.", "The leader of the Hunters looked up from his desk as they\n were thrust into his cabin. Frankle's face was a graven mask\n as he searched their faces dispassionately. The captives were\n pale and seemed to cringe from the pale interrogation light.\n \"Chickens!\" the Hunter snorted. \"We have been hunting down\n chickens.\" His eyes turned to one of the guards. \"They have\n been searched?\"\n\n\n \"Of course, master.\"\n\n\n \"And questioned?\"\n\n\n The guard frowned. \"Yes, sir. But their language is almost\n unintelligible.\"\n\n\n \"You've studied the basic tongues, haven't you?\" Frankle's\n voice was as cold as his eyes.\n\n\n \"Of course, sir, but this is so different.\"\n\n\n Frankle stared in contempt at the fair-skinned captives, fixing\n his eyes on them for a long moment. Finally he said,\n \"Well?\"", "But strangely enough he did not kill them. He left them\n on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the\n ships of his fleet rose one by one and vanished like fireflies in\n the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone on the planet of the\n Jungle-land. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they\n did not even know that in the departing ships a seed had been\n planted. For Frankle\nhad\nheard the music. He had grasped the\n beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant\n they had become less his enemies. A tiny seed of doubt had\n been planted. The seed would grow.\n\n\n The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance, a beast\n roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall.\n They sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair. Then one\n of them grunted, and moved into the dry darkness of the cave.\n Deep within him some instinct spoke, warning him to fear\n the roar of the animal.", "Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. \"We\n don't have the words to express ourselves,\" she said softly.\n \"We can't tell you in words what we have to say, but music\n is a language even you can understand. We can tell you what\n we want in music.\"\n\n\n Frankle scowled. He knew about the magic of this music,\n he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people\n could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal strong\n men's minds from them and make them like children before\n wolves. But he had never heard this music with his own ears.\n He looked at them, his eyes strangely bright. \"You know I\n cannot listen to your music. It is forbidden, even you should\n know that. How dare you propose—\"\n\n\n \"But this is different music.\" Dana's eyes widened, and she\n threw an excited glance at her husband. \"Our music is beautiful,\n wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—\"", "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling.\n \"Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But\n find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll\n take the music out of them, once and for all.\"\nThe inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no\n concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The\n blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's\n vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams,\n rising with each question they would not answer until their\n throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. Finally\n they reached the limit they could endure, and muttered\n together the hoarse words that could deliver them. Not words", "A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of\n love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples\n driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only\n peace, even peace with those who drove them.\n\n\n Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for\n his mind could not grasp the meaning, the true overtones of\n those glorious chords, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs\n of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful\n strains, dazzled by the dancing light. He stared wide-eyed\n and trembling at the couple across the room, and for an\n instant it seemed that he was stripped naked. For a fleeting moment\n the authority was gone from his face; gone too was the\n cruelty, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment\n his cold gray eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden\n ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard.", "\"Never.\" The man hesitated. \"Your music is forbidden,\n poisonous.\"\n\n\n Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the\n Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. \"But who is to permit\n or forbid? After all, you are the leader here, and forbidden\n pleasures are all the sweeter.\"\n\n\n Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a\n graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive\n stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly\n luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn\n as if by magic. Then he looked away, and a cruel smile curled\n his lips. He motioned toward the stone. \"All right,\" he said\n mockingly. \"Do your worst. Show me your precious music.\"", "Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed\n its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music seemed to swell\n from it, blossoming in the silence. Frankle tensed, a chill running\n up his spine, his eyes drawn back to the gleaming jewel.\n Suddenly, the music filled the room, rising sweetly like an\n overpowering wave, filling his mind with strange and wonderful\n images. The stone shimmered and changed, taking the\n form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it\n rose. Frankle felt his mind groping toward the music, trying\n desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it.\n\n\n Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed\n at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds to\n create the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the\n depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song\n of their people.", "\"We are not criminals.\"\n\n\n The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. \"Then why are you\n here?\nWhy?\nAre you going to tell me now, or do you propose\n to waste a few hours of my time first?\"\n\n\n \"There is no mystery,\" Ravdin said softly. \"We stayed behind\n to plead for peace.\"\n\n\n \"For peace?\" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged,\n his face tired. \"I might have known. Peace! Where have your\n people gone?\"\n\n\n Ravdin met him eye for eye. \"I can't say.\"\n\n\n The Hunter laughed. \"Let's be precise, you don't\nchoose\nto\n say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all\n your heart to tell me.\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the\n two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be\n filled. For these two would not go.\n\n\n It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and\n begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that\n the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the\n Hunters was insane. Yet he knew\nthey\nwere sane, perhaps unwise,\n naive, but their decision had been reached, and they\n would not be shaken.", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him.\n Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of\n Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed,\n forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts\n of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving\n them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals\n in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless.\n\n\n Only three thoughts filled their minds:\n\n\n It was raining.\n\n\n They were hungry.\n\n\n The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight.\n\n\n They never knew that the link had been forged.", "The city burned. Purple spumes of flame shot high into the\n air, throwing a ghastly light on the frightened Jungle-land.\n Spires of flame seemed to be seeking the stars with their fingers\n as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled,\n blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before\n their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last\n remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour\n before. Then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of\n a grave. Out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the\n Jungle-land crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious,\n then bolder and bolder as the wisps of grass and little animals\n ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had\n stood. Bit by bit the Jungle-land gathered courage, and the\n clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear.", "Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud.\n \"You could forbid us,\" she said, facing the old man. \"But\n you could never stop us.\"\nAt the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with\n green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the\n glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of\n light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again.\n In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of\n the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle\n to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all\n carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships.\n There was music among them still, but it was a different sort", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"" ], [ "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky.\n They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled\n to the earth as powerful, flaming jets.\n\n\n They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures,\n hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the\n tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's\n signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them,\n standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater.\n Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and\n dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters\n had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held\n at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the\n flagship.\n\n\n As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped\n hands to bolster their failing hope.", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down\n the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the\n shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished\n floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green,\n broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet,\n reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind.\n Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human\n habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered\n the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long,\n low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the\n wind, a distant whisper of life....", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "Ravdin nodded. \"That's the trouble. They come closer every\n time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the\n next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we\n fight them.\" He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on\n the street below. \"If we only knew, for certain, what we were\n running from.\"\n\n\n There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a\n gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. \"Ravdin,\"\n she said softly, \"\nhave you ever seen a Hunter\n?\"\n\n\n Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music\n burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly\n hopeful. \"No,\" he said, \"no, of course not. You know that.\"\n\n\n The girl rose from her seat. \"Nor have I. Never, not once.\"\n She turned to Lord Nehmon. \"Have\nyou\n?\"", "\"We are not criminals.\"\n\n\n The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. \"Then why are you\n here?\nWhy?\nAre you going to tell me now, or do you propose\n to waste a few hours of my time first?\"\n\n\n \"There is no mystery,\" Ravdin said softly. \"We stayed behind\n to plead for peace.\"\n\n\n \"For peace?\" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged,\n his face tired. \"I might have known. Peace! Where have your\n people gone?\"\n\n\n Ravdin met him eye for eye. \"I can't say.\"\n\n\n The Hunter laughed. \"Let's be precise, you don't\nchoose\nto\n say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all\n your heart to tell me.\"", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"" ], [ "Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him.\n Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of\n Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed,\n forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts\n of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving\n them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals\n in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless.\n\n\n Only three thoughts filled their minds:\n\n\n It was raining.\n\n\n They were hungry.\n\n\n The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight.\n\n\n They never knew that the link had been forged.", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nThe Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction\n Stories by Alan E. Nourse\npublished in 1963. Extensive research did\n not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was\n renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected\n without note.\nThe\n\n Link\nIt\n was nearly sundown when Ravdin eased the ship down\n into the last slow arc toward the Earth's surface. Stretching\n his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in\n his tired muscles. Carefully, he tightened the seat belt for\n landing; below him he could see the vast, tangled expanse of\n Jungle-land spreading out to the horizon. Miles ahead was the\n bright circle of the landing field and the sparkling glow of the\n city beyond. Ravdin peered to the north of the city, hoping to\n catch a glimpse of the concert before his ship was swallowed\n by the brilliant landing lights.", "Nehmon's voice broke the silence. \"If you must stay behind,\n then go now. The city will burn an hour after the\n count-down.\"\n\n\n \"We will be safe, outside the city.\" Dana gripped her husband's\n hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her\n strength and confidence. \"Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link\n can be forged, we will forge it.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you the best in everything.\" There were tears in the\n old man's eyes as he turned and left the room.\nThey stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of\n frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the\n bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry\n sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring\n with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets\n dwindled to specks and flickered out.", "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man.\n \"I'm sorry,\" he said gently. \"It seems logical, but it's false\n logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives\n are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And\n human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental\n basis of our very existence. Without it we would be\n Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's\n why we must run away now, and always. Because we know\n that we must not kill men.\"\nOn the street below, the night air was suddenly full of\n voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional\n brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted\n on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their\n voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness.", "answer there, only sadness. \"Think of the concerts. It's taken\n so long, but at last we've come so close to the ultimate goal.\"\n He gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining\n the walls, the panels which had made the dancer-illusion\n possible. \"Think of the beauty and peace we've found here.\"", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "that Frankle could hear, but words to bring deliverance, to\n blank out their minds like a wet sponge over slate. The hypnotic\n key clicked into the lock of their minds; their screams\n died in their brains. Frankle stared at them, and knew instantly\n what they had done, a technique of memory obliteration\n known and dreaded for so many thousands of years that\n history could not remember. As his captives stood mindless\n before him, he let out one hoarse, agonized scream of frustration\n and defeat.", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "But strangely enough he did not kill them. He left them\n on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the\n ships of his fleet rose one by one and vanished like fireflies in\n the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone on the planet of the\n Jungle-land. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they\n did not even know that in the departing ships a seed had been\n planted. For Frankle\nhad\nheard the music. He had grasped the\n beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant\n they had become less his enemies. A tiny seed of doubt had\n been planted. The seed would grow.\n\n\n The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance, a beast\n roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall.\n They sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair. Then one\n of them grunted, and moved into the dry darkness of the cave.\n Deep within him some instinct spoke, warning him to fear\n the roar of the animal.", "Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. \"We\n don't have the words to express ourselves,\" she said softly.\n \"We can't tell you in words what we have to say, but music\n is a language even you can understand. We can tell you what\n we want in music.\"\n\n\n Frankle scowled. He knew about the magic of this music,\n he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people\n could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal strong\n men's minds from them and make them like children before\n wolves. But he had never heard this music with his own ears.\n He looked at them, his eyes strangely bright. \"You know I\n cannot listen to your music. It is forbidden, even you should\n know that. How dare you propose—\"\n\n\n \"But this is different music.\" Dana's eyes widened, and she\n threw an excited glance at her husband. \"Our music is beautiful,\n wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—\"", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of\n love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples\n driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only\n peace, even peace with those who drove them.\n\n\n Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for\n his mind could not grasp the meaning, the true overtones of\n those glorious chords, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs\n of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful\n strains, dazzled by the dancing light. He stared wide-eyed\n and trembling at the couple across the room, and for an\n instant it seemed that he was stripped naked. For a fleeting moment\n the authority was gone from his face; gone too was the\n cruelty, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment\n his cold gray eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden\n ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard.", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud.\n \"You could forbid us,\" she said, facing the old man. \"But\n you could never stop us.\"\nAt the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with\n green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the\n glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of\n light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again.\n In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of\n the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle\n to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all\n carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships.\n There was music among them still, but it was a different sort", "And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the\n two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be\n filled. For these two would not go.\n\n\n It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and\n begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that\n the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the\n Hunters was insane. Yet he knew\nthey\nwere sane, perhaps unwise,\n naive, but their decision had been reached, and they\n would not be shaken.", "\"Never.\" The man hesitated. \"Your music is forbidden,\n poisonous.\"\n\n\n Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the\n Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. \"But who is to permit\n or forbid? After all, you are the leader here, and forbidden\n pleasures are all the sweeter.\"\n\n\n Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a\n graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive\n stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly\n luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn\n as if by magic. Then he looked away, and a cruel smile curled\n his lips. He motioned toward the stone. \"All right,\" he said\n mockingly. \"Do your worst. Show me your precious music.\"", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the" ], [ "A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of\n love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples\n driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only\n peace, even peace with those who drove them.\n\n\n Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for\n his mind could not grasp the meaning, the true overtones of\n those glorious chords, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs\n of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful\n strains, dazzled by the dancing light. He stared wide-eyed\n and trembling at the couple across the room, and for an\n instant it seemed that he was stripped naked. For a fleeting moment\n the authority was gone from his face; gone too was the\n cruelty, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment\n his cold gray eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden\n ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard.", "Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man.\n \"I'm sorry,\" he said gently. \"It seems logical, but it's false\n logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives\n are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And\n human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental\n basis of our very existence. Without it we would be\n Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's\n why we must run away now, and always. Because we know\n that we must not kill men.\"\nOn the street below, the night air was suddenly full of\n voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional\n brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted\n on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their\n voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness.", "But strangely enough he did not kill them. He left them\n on a cold stone ledge, blinking dumbly at each other as the\n ships of his fleet rose one by one and vanished like fireflies in\n the dark night sky. Naked, they sat alone on the planet of the\n Jungle-land. They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they\n did not even know that in the departing ships a seed had been\n planted. For Frankle\nhad\nheard the music. He had grasped the\n beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant\n they had become less his enemies. A tiny seed of doubt had\n been planted. The seed would grow.\n\n\n The two sat dumbly, shivering. Far in the distance, a beast\n roared against the heavy night, and a light rain began to fall.\n They sat naked, the rain soaking their skin and hair. Then one\n of them grunted, and moved into the dry darkness of the cave.\n Deep within him some instinct spoke, warning him to fear\n the roar of the animal.", "The city burned. Purple spumes of flame shot high into the\n air, throwing a ghastly light on the frightened Jungle-land.\n Spires of flame seemed to be seeking the stars with their fingers\n as the plastic walls and streets of the city hissed and shriveled,\n blackening, bubbling into a vanishing memory before\n their eyes. The flames shot high, carrying with them the last\n remnants of the city which had stood proud and tall an hour\n before. Then a silence fell, deathly, like the lifeless silence of\n a grave. Out of the silence, little whispering sounds of the\n Jungle-land crept to their ears, first frightened, then curious,\n then bolder and bolder as the wisps of grass and little animals\n ventured out and out toward the clearing where the city had\n stood. Bit by bit the Jungle-land gathered courage, and the\n clearing slowly, silently, began to disappear.", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "Dana looked at her husband, and her eyes were proud.\n \"You could forbid us,\" she said, facing the old man. \"But\n you could never stop us.\"\nAt the edge of the Jungle-land a great beast stood with\n green-gleaming eyes, licking his fanged jaws as he watched the\n glowing city, sensing somehow that the mystifying circle of\n light and motion was soon to become his Jungle-land again.\n In the city the turmoil bubbled over, as wave after wave of\n the people made the short safari across the intervening jungle\n to the circles of their ships. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers—all\n carried their small, frail remembrances out to the ships.\n There was music among them still, but it was a different sort", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling.\n \"Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But\n find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll\n take the music out of them, once and for all.\"\nThe inquisition had been horrible. Their minds had had no\n concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The\n blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's\n vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams,\n rising with each question they would not answer until their\n throats were scorched and they could no longer scream. Finally\n they reached the limit they could endure, and muttered\n together the hoarse words that could deliver them. Not words", "Blinking dully, the woman crept into the cave after him.\n Three thoughts alone filled their empty minds. Not thoughts of\n Nehmon and his people; to them, Nehmon had never existed,\n forgotten as completely as if he had never been. No thoughts\n of the Hunters, either, nor of their unheard-of mercy in leaving\n them their lives—lives of memoryless oblivion, like animals\n in this green Jungle-land, but lives nonetheless.\n\n\n Only three thoughts filled their minds:\n\n\n It was raining.\n\n\n They were hungry.\n\n\n The Saber-tooth was prowling tonight.\n\n\n They never knew that the link had been forged.", "answer there, only sadness. \"Think of the concerts. It's taken\n so long, but at last we've come so close to the ultimate goal.\"\n He gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining\n the walls, the panels which had made the dancer-illusion\n possible. \"Think of the beauty and peace we've found here.\"", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. \"We\n don't have the words to express ourselves,\" she said softly.\n \"We can't tell you in words what we have to say, but music\n is a language even you can understand. We can tell you what\n we want in music.\"\n\n\n Frankle scowled. He knew about the magic of this music,\n he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken-people\n could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal strong\n men's minds from them and make them like children before\n wolves. But he had never heard this music with his own ears.\n He looked at them, his eyes strangely bright. \"You know I\n cannot listen to your music. It is forbidden, even you should\n know that. How dare you propose—\"\n\n\n \"But this is different music.\" Dana's eyes widened, and she\n threw an excited glance at her husband. \"Our music is beautiful,\n wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—\"", "\"We are not animals.\" Nehmon's voice cut the air like a\n whiplash.\n\n\n \"But we could fight.\"\n\n\n \"Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals,\n and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight\n like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight.\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"Do you mean that the Hunters are\n not men like us?\" he said. \"That's what you're saying, that\n they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't\n that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect\n ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?\"", "And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the\n two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be\n filled. For these two would not go.\n\n\n It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and\n begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that\n the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the\n Hunters was insane. Yet he knew\nthey\nwere sane, perhaps unwise,\n naive, but their decision had been reached, and they\n would not be shaken.", "\"Never.\" The man hesitated. \"Your music is forbidden,\n poisonous.\"\n\n\n Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the\n Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. \"But who is to permit\n or forbid? After all, you are the leader here, and forbidden\n pleasures are all the sweeter.\"\n\n\n Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a\n graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive\n stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly\n luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn\n as if by magic. Then he looked away, and a cruel smile curled\n his lips. He motioned toward the stone. \"All right,\" he said\n mockingly. \"Do your worst. Show me your precious music.\"", "Riding the shuttle over the edges of Jungle-land toward the\n shining bright beauty of the city, Ravdin settled back, trying\n to clear his mind of the shock and horror he had encountered\n on his journey. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed\n him, lighted with a million hues. He realized that his whole\n life was entangled in the very beauty of this wonderful city.\n Everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered here\n in the ever-changing rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds.\n And now, he knew, he would soon see his beloved city burning\n once again, turning to flames and ashes in a heart-breaking\n memorial to the age-old fear of his people.", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no" ], [ "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "\"We are not criminals.\"\n\n\n The Hunter's fist crashed on the desk. \"Then why are you\n here?\nWhy?\nAre you going to tell me now, or do you propose\n to waste a few hours of my time first?\"\n\n\n \"There is no mystery,\" Ravdin said softly. \"We stayed behind\n to plead for peace.\"\n\n\n \"For peace?\" Frankle stared in disbelief. Then he shrugged,\n his face tired. \"I might have known. Peace! Where have your\n people gone?\"\n\n\n Ravdin met him eye for eye. \"I can't say.\"\n\n\n The Hunter laughed. \"Let's be precise, you don't\nchoose\nto\n say, just now. But perhaps very soon you will wish with all\n your heart to tell me.\"", "And with a blaze of anger in his heart, he almost hated the\n two young people waiting here with him for the last ship to be\n filled. For these two would not go.\n\n\n It had been a long and painful night. He had pleaded and\n begged, tried to persuade them that there was no hope, that\n the very idea of remaining behind or trying to contact the\n Hunters was insane. Yet he knew\nthey\nwere sane, perhaps unwise,\n naive, but their decision had been reached, and they\n would not be shaken.", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave.", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "Nehmon's voice broke the silence. \"If you must stay behind,\n then go now. The city will burn an hour after the\n count-down.\"\n\n\n \"We will be safe, outside the city.\" Dana gripped her husband's\n hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her\n strength and confidence. \"Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link\n can be forged, we will forge it.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you the best in everything.\" There were tears in the\n old man's eyes as he turned and left the room.\nThey stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of\n frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the\n bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry\n sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring\n with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets\n dwindled to specks and flickered out.", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "Days later new sparks of light appeared in the black sky.\n They grew to larger specks, then to flares, and finally settled\n to the earth as powerful, flaming jets.\n\n\n They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures,\n hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the\n tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's\n signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them,\n standing on a hilltop above the demolished amphitheater.\n Men had come out of the ships, large men with cold faces and\n dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters\n had blinked at them, unbelieving, with their weapons held\n at ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the\n flagship.\n\n\n As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped\n hands to bolster their failing hope.", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "And then, with a scream of rage he was stumbling into the\n midst of the light, lashing out wildly at the heart of its shimmering\n brilliance. His huge hand caught the hypnotic stone\n and swept it into crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the\n cold steel bulkhead. He stood rigid, his whole body shaking,\n eyes blazing with fear and anger and hatred as he turned on\n Ravdin and Dana. His voice was a raging storm of bitterness\n drowning out the dying strains of the music.\n\n\n \"Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make\n me forget my duty and listen to your rotten, poisonous noise!\n Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen,\nI didn't\n! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down,\n I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and your foul\n music will be dead!\"", "The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down\n the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked in with the\n shiny punch-card robot, and walked swiftly across the polished\n floor. The wall panels pulsed a somber blue-green,\n broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet,\n reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind.\n Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human\n habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered\n the shuttle station. Suddenly, the music caught him, a long,\n low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the\n wind, a distant whisper of life...." ], [ "Nehmon met her steady eyes, read the strength and determination\n there. He knew, despairingly, what she was thinking—that\n he was old, that he couldn't understand, that his\n mind was channeled now beyond the approach of wisdom.\n \"You mustn't think what you're thinking,\" he said weakly.\n \"You'd be blind. You wouldn't know, you couldn't have any\n idea what you would find. If you tried to contact them, you\n could be lost completely, tortured, killed. If they haven't\n changed, you wouldn't stand a chance. You'd never come\n back, Dana.\"\n\n\n \"But she's right all the same,\" Ravdin said softly. \"You're\n wrong, my lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive.\n Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that\n was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do\n it, Dana and I.\"\n\n\n \"I could forbid you to go.\"", "Ravdin's eyes were bright. \"Yes, we flee, we cringe, we hide\n under stones, we break up our lives and uproot our families,\n running like frightened animals in the shadows of night and\n secrecy.\" He gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's\n angrily. \"\nWhy do we run, my lord?\n\"\n\n\n Nehmon's eyes widened. \"Because we have no choice,\" he\n said. \"We must run or be killed. You know that. You've seen\n the records, you've been taught.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes, I know what I've been taught. I've been taught\n that eons ago our remote ancestors fought the Hunters, and\n lost, and fled, and were pursued. But why do we keep running?\n Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and\n fled.\nWhy?\nEven animals know that when they're cornered\n they must turn and fight.\"", "The day was almost gone as the last ships began to fill.\n Nehmon turned to Ravdin and Dana, his face lined and tired.\n \"You'll have to go soon,\" he said. \"The city will be burned,\n of course, as always. You'll be left with food, and with weapons\n against the jungle. The Hunters will know that we've been\n here, but they'll not know when, nor where we have gone.\"\n He paused. \"It will be up to you to see that they don't learn.\"\n\n\n Dana shook her head. \"We'll tell them nothing, unless it's\n safe for them to know.\"\n\n\n \"They'll question you, even torture you.\"\n\n\n She smiled calmly. \"Perhaps they won't. But as a last resort,\n we can blank out.\"", "\"We are not animals.\" Nehmon's voice cut the air like a\n whiplash.\n\n\n \"But we could fight.\"\n\n\n \"Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals,\n and now we must run from the Hunters who continue to fight\n like animals. So be it. Let the Hunters fight.\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"Do you mean that the Hunters are\n not men like us?\" he said. \"That's what you're saying, that\n they are animals. All right. We kill animals for our food, isn't\n that true? We kill the tiger-beasts in the Jungle to protect\n ourselves, why not kill the Hunters to protect ourselves?\"", "Ravdin nodded wordlessly.\n\n\n Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears\n in her eyes. \"We came so close tonight, so very close. I\nfelt\nthe music before it was sung, do you realize that? I\nfelt\nthe\n fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't\n vague or fuzzy, it was\nclear\n! The transference was perfect.\"\n She turned to face the old man. \"It's taken so long to come\n this far, Nehmon. So much work, so much training to reach a\n perfect communal concert. We've had only two hundred years\n here, only\ntwo hundred\n! I was just a little girl when we came,\n I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we\n were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four\n thousand. But\ntwo hundred\n—we\ncan't\nleave now. Not when\n we've come so far.\"", "\"The concert's over!\" Ravdin walked to the window, feeling\n a chill pass through him. \"So soon, I wonder why?\" Eagerly\n he searched the faces passing in the street for Dana's face,\n sensing the lurking discord in the quiet talk of the crowd. Suddenly\n the sound-boards in the room tinkled a carillon of ruby\n tones in his ear, and she was in the room, rushing into his arms\n with a happy cry, pressing her soft cheek to his rough chin.\n \"You're back! Oh, I'm so glad, so very glad!\" She turned to\n the old man. \"Nehmon, what has happened? The concert was\n ruined tonight. There was something in the air, everybody felt\n it. For some reason the people seemed\nafraid\n.\"\n\n\n Ravdin turned away from his bride. \"Tell her,\" he said to\n the old man.\n\n\n Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror.\n \"The Hunters! They've found us?\"", "Nehmon sighed, and reached out a hand to the young man.\n \"I'm sorry,\" he said gently. \"It seems logical, but it's false\n logic. The Hunters are men just like you and me. Their lives\n are different, their culture is different, but they are men. And\n human life is sacred, to us, above all else. This is the fundamental\n basis of our very existence. Without it we would be\n Hunters, too. If we fight, we are dead even if we live. That's\n why we must run away now, and always. Because we know\n that we must not kill men.\"\nOn the street below, the night air was suddenly full of\n voices, chattering, intermingled with whispers of song and occasional\n brief harmonic flutterings. The footfalls were muted\n on the polished pavement as the people passed slowly, their\n voices carrying a hint of puzzled uneasiness.", "\"I know. How well I know.\"\n\n\n \"Yet now the Hunters come again, and again we must run\n away.\" Ravdin stared at the old man, his eyes suddenly bright.\n \"Nehmon, when I saw those ships I began thinking.\"\n\n\n \"I've spent many years thinking, my son.\"\n\n\n \"Not what I've been thinking.\" Ravdin sat down, clasping\n his hands in excitement. \"The Hunters come and we run away,\n Nehmon. Think about that for a moment. We run, and we run,\n and we run. From what? We run from the Hunters. They're\n hunting\nus\n, these Hunters. They've never quite found us, because\n we've always already run. We're clever, we're fortunate,\n and we have a way of life that they do not, so whenever they\n have come close to finding us, we have run.\"\n\n\n Nehmon nodded slowly. \"For thousands of years.\"", "The room was silent. Finally the aged leader stood up,\n wearily, some fraction of his six hundred years of life showing\n in his face for the first time in centuries. \"We can do once\n again what we always have done before when the Hunters\n came,\" he said sadly. \"We can run away.\"\nThe bright street below the oval window was empty and\n quiet. Not a breath of air stirred in the city. Ravdin stared out\n in bitter silence. \"Yes, we can run away. Just as we always\n have before. After we have worked so hard, accomplished so\n much here, we must burn the city and flee again.\" His voice\n trailed off to silence. He stared at Nehmon, seeking in the old\n man's face some answer, some reassurance. But he found no", "Ravdin glanced briefly at Dana's white face. His voice\n seemed weak and high-pitched in comparison to the Hunter's\n baritone. \"You are the leader of the Hunters?\"\n\n\n Frankle regarded him sourly, without replying. His thin\n face was swarthy, his short-cut gray hair matching the cold\n gray of his eyes. It was an odd face, completely blank of any\n thought or emotion, yet capable of shifting to a strange biting\n slyness in the briefest instant. It was a rich face, a face of\n inscrutable depth. He pushed his chair back, his eyes watchful.\n \"We know your people were here,\" he said suddenly. \"Now\n they've gone, and yet you remain behind. There must be a\n reason for such rashness. Are you sick? Crippled?\"\n\n\n Ravdin shook his head. \"We are not sick.\"\n\n\n \"Then criminals, perhaps? Being punished for rebellious\n plots?\"", "Ravdin nodded. \"That's the trouble. They come closer every\n time. This time they will catch us. Or the next time, or the\n next. And that will be the end of everything for us, unless we\n fight them.\" He paused, watching the last groups dispersing on\n the street below. \"If we only knew, for certain, what we were\n running from.\"\n\n\n There was a startled silence. The girl's breath came in a\n gasp and her eyes widened as his words sank home. \"Ravdin,\"\n she said softly, \"\nhave you ever seen a Hunter\n?\"\n\n\n Ravdin stared at her, and felt a chill of excitement. Music\n burst from the sounding-board, odd, wild music, suddenly\n hopeful. \"No,\" he said, \"no, of course not. You know that.\"\n\n\n The girl rose from her seat. \"Nor have I. Never, not once.\"\n She turned to Lord Nehmon. \"Have\nyou\n?\"", "Nehmon's voice broke the silence. \"If you must stay behind,\n then go now. The city will burn an hour after the\n count-down.\"\n\n\n \"We will be safe, outside the city.\" Dana gripped her husband's\n hand, trying to transmit to him some part of her\n strength and confidence. \"Wish us the best, Nehmon. If a link\n can be forged, we will forge it.\"\n\n\n \"I wish you the best in everything.\" There were tears in the\n old man's eyes as he turned and left the room.\nThey stood in the Jungle-land, listening to the scurry of\n frightened animals, and shivering in the cool night air as the\n bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry\n sky. A man and a woman alone, speechless, watching, staring\n with awful longing into the skies as the bright rocket jets\n dwindled to specks and flickered out.", "Nehmon sighed wearily. \"No one that we know.\" He\n glanced up at the young man. \"Sit down, son, sit down. I—I'll\n just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were\n they? How far?\"\n\n\n \"Seven light years,\" Ravdin said. \"Can you imagine it?\n Just seven, and moving straight this way.\nThey know where\n we are\n, and they are coming quickly.\" His eyes filled with\n fear. \"They\ncouldn't\nhave found us so soon, unless they too\n have discovered the Warp and how to use it to travel.\"\n\n\n The older man's breath cut off sharply, and there was real\n alarm in his eyes. \"You're right,\" he said softly. \"Six months\n ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an area completely\n remote from us. Now just\nseven\n. In six months they\n have come so close.\"", "Dana's voice was sharp. \"We're telling you the truth. We\n want peace, nothing more. This constant hunting and running\n is senseless, exhausting to both of us. We want to make peace\n with you, to bring our people together again.\"\n\n\n Frankle snorted. \"You came to us in war, once, long ago.\n Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your\n bosom, smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on\n to greater things?\"\n\n\n Ravdin's face flushed hotly. \"Much greater things,\" he\n snapped.\n\n\n Frankle sat down slowly. \"No doubt,\" he said. \"Now understand\n me clearly. Very soon you will be killed. How quickly\n or slowly you die will depend largely upon the civility of your\n tongues. A civil tongue answers questions with the right answers.\n That is my definition of a civil tongue.\" He sat back\n coldly. \"Now, shall we commence asking questions?\"", "Dana's face glowed with excitement, alive with new vitality,\n new hope. \"Ravdin, can't you see?\nThey might have changed.\nThey might not be the same. Things can happen. Look at us,\n how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how\n our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you\n were to be master at a concert next month. Think how the concerts\n have changed! Even my grandmother can remember\n when the concerts were just a few performers playing, and\n everyone else just sitting and\nlistening\n! Can you imagine anything\n more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference\n then, they never dreamed what a\nreal\nconcert could be! Why,\n those people had never begun to understand music until they\n themselves became a part of it. Even we can see these changes,\n why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as\n we have?\"", "The dancer threw back her head sharply, eyes wide, her\n body frozen in mid-air, and then, abruptly, she was gone, leaving\n only the barest flickering image of her fiery hair. The\n music slowed, singing softly, and Ravdin could see the old\n man waiting in the room. Nehmon rose, his gaunt face and\n graying hair belying the youthful movement of his body. Smiling,\n he came forward, clapped Ravdin on the shoulder, and\n took his hand warmly. \"You're too late for the concert—it's\n a shame. Mischana is the master tonight, and the whole city\n is there.\"\n\n\n Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile. \"I had to\n let you know,\" he said. \"\nThey're coming\n, Nehmon! I saw\n them, hours ago.\"", "The concert, of course. Everyone would be at the concert\n tonight, and even from two miles away, the beauty of\n four hundred perfectly harmonized voices was carried on\n the breeze. Ravdin's uneasiness disappeared; he was eager to\n discharge his horrible news, get it off his mind and join the\n others in the great amphitheater set deep in the hillside outside\n the city. But he knew instinctively that Lord Nehmon,\n anticipating his return, would not be at the concert.", "In the rounded room of his house, Lord Nehmon dispatched\n the last of his belongings, a few remembrances, nothing more,\n because the space on the ships must take people, not remembrances,\n and he knew that the remembrances would bring only\n pain. All day Nehmon had supervised the loading, the intricate\n preparation, following plans laid down millennia before.\n He saw the libraries and records transported, mile upon endless\n mile of microfilm, carted to the ships prepared to carry\n them, stored until a new resting place was found. The history\n of a people was recorded on that film, a people once proud and\n strong, now equally proud, but dwindling in numbers as toll\n for the constant roving. A proud people, yet a people who\n would turn and run without thought, in a panic of age-old\n fear. They\nhad\nto run, Nehmon knew, if they were to survive.", "Ravdin felt the desolation in the people's minds, saw the\n utter hopelessness in the old man's face, and suddenly felt the\n pressure of despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and\n so dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his\n people against the Hunters, so many thousand years before.\n They had risen together, a common people, their home a single\n planet. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own\n people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the\n arts, despising the bitterness and barrenness of hatred and killing—and\n the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of\n government for the perpetuation of government, split farther\n and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the", "Hunters sneered and ridiculed, and then grew to hate Ravdin's\n people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love,\n happiness. Ravdin knew of his people's slowly dawning awareness\n of the sanctity of life, shattered abruptly by the horrible\n wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the\n wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much\n in those long years. They had conquered disease. They had\n grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. But now the\n end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a\n ghastly grave." ] ]
valid	99916	[ "What is the author's general attitude toward the democratic process?", "What does the author see as the most concerning political movement in the current era", "Why does the author believe that radical government movements are taking hold?", "What is meant by the term \"distributed consensus\"?", "What classic issues of the democratic process could blockchain-based voting solve?", "What issues does the Author see with blockchain-based democracy systems?", "What does the author argue as a main barrier to a digital democracy?", "What does the author argue as a solution for solving the issues faced by modern-day democracy?", "What does the author see as an integral aspect of an anarchist viewpoint?" ]	[ [ "They believe it does nothing", "They believe it could make both positive and negative impacts", "They believe it has the power to do great evil", "They believe it has the power to make positive change" ], [ "Networked platform democracy", "Distributed consensus ", "Authoritarian governments ", "Blockchain-based voting" ], [ "Blockchain-based distributed consensus governing processes are too difficult to understand", "Democracy has failed to accurately represent the will of the people in many ways", "The propaganda that people are exposed to on a daily basis is working", "It is a natural function of the evolution of human sociological interaction" ], [ "The system of using electorates to represent the public's vote", "A basic income provided to the public in Cryptocurrency", "A coalition style government that requires cooperation between parties ", "Group decision making done in a non-hierarchical structure" ], [ "Corruption of the physical voting process", "Authoritarian governments holding falsified elections", "Time constraints of the voting public", "Low public engagement in the voting process" ], [ "The blockchain networks are not without their security flaws", "The blockchain frameworks have original owners that could have too much power", "The blockchain process is too confusing for the general public to understand", "All of the other answers are correct" ], [ "Security and encryption issues", "Power consumption and environmental impact", "Technological literacy ", "Ownership of adequate digital devices" ], [ "Embracing blockchain-based voting technology as it is", "Returning to classical methods such as forums and polls", "Creating a brand new framework for collective decision-making", "Educating the public about the political process and its flaws" ], [ "The ability to remove voting members at will", "Lack of state or national delegation", "A desire for a peer to peer networked democracy", "Embracing distributed consensus created by blockchain" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. \n\n Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough.", "Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control." ], [ "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. \n\n Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform." ], [ "What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. \n\n Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough.", "Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion." ], [ "There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth.\nOne of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "All three are based on the decentralised system of authentication that was originally developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The details of this mechanism are fiendishly difficult to understand, but its essence – and the innovation that so excites fans of networked democracy – is that it proves the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions computationally, instead of relying on the authority of any government or banking institution.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being." ], [ "Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth.\nOne of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "All three are based on the decentralised system of authentication that was originally developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The details of this mechanism are fiendishly difficult to understand, but its essence – and the innovation that so excites fans of networked democracy – is that it proves the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions computationally, instead of relying on the authority of any government or banking institution.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language." ], [ "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth.\nOne of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "All three are based on the decentralised system of authentication that was originally developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The details of this mechanism are fiendishly difficult to understand, but its essence – and the innovation that so excites fans of networked democracy – is that it proves the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions computationally, instead of relying on the authority of any government or banking institution.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines." ], [ "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "All three are based on the decentralised system of authentication that was originally developed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The details of this mechanism are fiendishly difficult to understand, but its essence – and the innovation that so excites fans of networked democracy – is that it proves the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions computationally, instead of relying on the authority of any government or banking institution.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth.\nOne of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian." ], [ "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. \n\n Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "Under such circumstances, decisions could be compared between polities and jurisdictions, or with ones made locally in the past, and every aspect of a community's process of self-determination could be searchable, so available to all who might benefit. Over time, we might even learn to make wiser decisions, individually and collectively. Though the devil is always in the detail of implementation, these possibilities are all well worth exploring; and taken together they certainly furnish us with a strong case for networked democracy. \n\n But there are problems even with such relatively simple articulations of civic technology. Not everyone owns a smartphone, even now, let alone any more expensive networked devices. Just over 60 per cent of North Americans do, which falls far short of the universal access on which any system for networked democracy would need to be based. And technologists and advocates for new technology are often blind to the digital divide, which prevents measures that seem utterly obvious and self-evident to them from being at all suited to the lives of others.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "Everything rests on the blockchain, a permanent, transparent record of every exchange of Bitcoin ever made, an identical copy of which is held locally by every machine participating in the network. The blockchain maintains and reconciles all account balances, and is the sole arbiter in the event of a discrepancy or dispute. Whenever a new transaction appears on the Bitcoin network, all of its nodes perform an elaborate series of calculations aimed at validating it, and a majority of them must agree its legitimacy before it can be added to the shared record. This peer-to-peer process of distributed consensus can be applied beyond cryptocurrency to other situations that require some kind of procedure for the collective construction of truth.\nOne of these is communal decision-making, at every level from household to nation. So by extension distributed consensus could be applied to the practice of democracy. Moreover, frameworks based on the blockchain promise to solve a number of long-standing democratic problems.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes." ], [ "They get a lot of things very right, after all – particularly their understanding that democracy is an ongoing process, and not something that happens in a voting booth on one day every four or five years. And by framing the practice of active citizenship as something appropriate to every scale of collective existence, they suggest that such participation should occupy a larger place in our civic lives; that we can and should assume control over a wider range of the circumstances of our being.", "Enthusiasm for distributed consensus is especially marked on the left, and it's easy to understand why: you'd have a hard time intentionally designing language more likely to appeal to tech-savvy horizontalists than 'distributed consensus'. The phrase summons up images of a society organised as a supple network instead of a hierarchy, its far-flung and mobile constituents bound together by a guiding ethos of participation, and an immaterial but powerful calculated technology.\nThoughtful veterans of the post-2008 moment could be forgiven for thinking that, just maybe, here at last is a concrete way of achieving ends promised but never quite delivered by 15M, Occupy, Nuit Débout, or what has come to be known as the broader global 'movement of the squares': a commons outside the market and the state, a framework for democratic decision-making truly suited to the context of 21st-century life, and just possibly a functioning anarchy.", "This is certainly a novel and interesting definition of a democracy. In fact, we find, on looking just a little more closely, that relations of property and ownership are absolutely central to this set of technologies – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its origins in the libertarian cryptocurrency community. This, for example, is how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin thinks of human association: \n\n \"In general, a human organisation can be defined as combination of two things: a set of property, and a protocol for a set of individuals, which may or may not be divided into certain classes with different conditions for entering or leaving the set, to interact with each other including rules for under what circumstances the individuals may use certain parts of the property.\"", "These are certainly depressing responses to the situation we find ourselves in, but they're not in any way irrational. Yet there's another, more hopeful and interesting way of responding to this same set of facts. It argues that what we need now is more democracy, not less; and a new kind of democracy at that, one founded on technical means. This curious prospect is presented to us by modes of social organisation and self-governance based on the blockchain, the technology underlying the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. And though blockchain advocates are nowhere near as prominent as the neo-authoritarian tendencies everywhere around us, what they are arguing for – 'distributed consensus' – is so interesting and so utterly unlike anything that has gone before that it deserves our fullest and most serious consideration.\nWe're told that this emerging technology of 'distributed consensus' makes entirely new forms of human association possible; that anyone who wants to will be able to organise themselves into non-hierarchical groups with as much ability to act in the world as any state or corporation.", "When I meet people who are genuinely excited by platforms like democracy.earth, Ethereum and Backfeed, most often what they're responding to is not so much about how these frameworks address the practicalities of small-group decision-making. They're more about the radical, classically anarchist vision they offer of a world in which power is distributed across a federation of nonhierarchical assemblies unsanctioned by any apparatus of state, each one lasting just long enough to enact its participants' will before evaporating for ever. \n\n And that's why it's little short of heartbreaking to conclude that their hopes stem from a confusion of language.", "The idea is that governmental structures at just about every level of society would be replaced by voluntary associations represented as software. Participants in these groups could remain anonymous to one another, if desired. But their identities would be verified – and their votes authenticated – by the same processes that secure the Bitcoin network, meaning that a permanent, secure record of every vote ever taken would be available for all to see. As each of these groups would be able to dispose of fiscal resources directly, Porto Alegre-style participatory budgeting could be realised, at whatever scale required. And just like Bitcoin, all of this functionality would be distributed across the network, making it inherently resistant to attempts at state censorship or control.", "On closer inspection, this doesn't seem to have much to do with the practice of collective self-determination. And with a similar emphasis on property rights, the discourse around the blockchain also routinely treats as uncontroversial statements which are no such thing. The acceptance of these values runs so deep that when democracy.earth announced itself \"a Y Combinator-backed organisation\", nobody involved evidently wondered whether something which aspired to be a radical new way of doing politics should tout its backing by a venture-capital seed fund based in Silicon Valley.", "They give organisers the ability to form associations rapidly and equip them with clear, secure and answerable decision processes. Their provisions allow members of those associations to float proposals, raise points for discussion among their peers, and allow enough time for deliberation before a question is called to a vote. They seem well suited to address some of the limits and frustrations of the Occupy-style forum, chiefly its requirement that everyone sharing an interest be present at once in order to be counted. And by allowing an association to specify any decision rule it pleases – from simple majority to absolute consensus – these frameworks even seem as if they might address the distaste some of us have always harboured for the coercion implicit in any majoritarian process (many don't like the idea that they need to go along with a notion just because 52 per cent of the population voted for it). \n\n These systems would appear to be applicable to democracy, then. But more than that, they gesture beyond conventional politics, toward something not far off utopian.", "However utopian a politics of distributed consensus might sound to us, then, there's no way in which it can be prised apart from the entirely conventional constructions of ownership, private property and capital accumulation at its very heart, at least not in its present form. The profoundly murky quality of blockchain technology – and the relative lack of accessible but technically sophisticated resources that might explain it – thus causes some of us to endorse a set of propositions we'd otherwise recoil from. We criticise lack of government transparency, yet the blockchain is unfathomable to most people.", "Some voters, either impervious to the lessons of history, or certain that whatever comes, they'll wind up on top, seek the clarity and vigour of a strong hand. They are perhaps encouraged by authoritarian leaders abroad, with their own internal reasons for disparaging the practice of democracy and much to gain by undermining confidence in it. Other voters have no particular time for the right, but feel betrayed by the parties they once trusted to advance their class interest. When they look around and see that someone other than them is indeed profiting from the status quo, they lose all patience with the idea that redress can be found in the ballot box. They're willing to see their own house burned down, if that's what it takes to stick it to the despised elites that are suddenly, heedlessly gentrifying their neighbourhoods and 'decanting' them from their homes.", "To mistake the one for the other is to commit a dangerous error.\nWhy dangerous? One of the primary risks we face in embracing blockchain-based structures is that we may not actually be advancing the set of values we think we are. The provisions that frameworks like Ethereum, Backfeed and democracy.earth are founded on, in particular, are difficult to reconcile with other values and commitments we may hold, especially the notion of a life in common. \n\n An Ethereum distributed autonomous organisation, for example, requires that members buy shares in it in order to participate. This is necessitated by the reward structure that incentivises machines to perform the calculations that establish distributed consensus; but it seems curiously at odds with our understanding of political participation as an inalienable right. Ethereum democracies, too, have something most others do not: owners, someone empowered to add or remove voting members at will, set its binding decision rules, and change those rules whenever they desire.", "Transplanting democracy on to the blockchain is more problematic still, especially for those of us who aspire to a life broadly governed by the principles of the commons. When we dig beneath appealing-sounding buzzwords like 'peer-to-peer' and 'open source', we find that all of the current, real-world examples of blockchain technology commit us to a set of values that isn't merely at variance with those principles, but is outright inimical to them. (Our ignorance about how the blockchain actually works is an additional source of concern. When something is this complicated, this difficult for even very bright people to understand, it's inherently open to the greatest potential for abuse. The market in derivative securities comes to mind.) \n\n But maybe these are errors we can learn from. It's worth asking if some of the things the blockchain-based frameworks promise to do for us might be lifted whole out of the matrix of their origins.", "What all of these more recent developments have in common is the sense among a wide swath of the electorate, in country after country, that the conventional practice of democracy has failed them. It no longer expresses the will of the people, if it ever did, and now serves only the needs of distant, shadowy, unspecified elites. And as is so often the case, there is a grain of truth to this. \n\n Our democracies certainly do seem to be having a hard time reckoning with many profound crises, whether these involve the integration of refugees, the disappearance of work or the threats of climate change. Our existing ways of making collective decisions have conspicuously failed to help us develop policies equal to the scale of crisis. There really is a global 1 per cent, and they seem to be hell-bent on having themselves a new Gilded Age, even as the public services the rest of us depend on are stripped to the bone. Throw in the despair that sets in after many years of imposed austerity and it's no wonder that many people have had enough.", "Voting blocks\nEven if your interest in global politics extends no further than an occasional worried glance at the headlines, it will not have escaped your notice that there's something in the air these past few years: a kind of comprehensive, worldwide souring of the possibilities of representative democracy. \n\n You might not have thought of it in just these terms, but you'll certainly recognise its effects: it has shown up in phenomena as varied and seemingly disconnected as the Brexit referendum, the candidacy of Donald Trump in the USA and the turn toward authoritarian parties and governments in France, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and elsewhere. This is, perhaps, the pre-eminent political story of our time.", "There's a fair degree of slippage between the way we'd be likely to interpret 'distributed consensus' in a political context, and what the same phrase actually denotes in its proper, technical context. As it turns out, here the word 'consensus' doesn't have anything to do with that sense of common purpose nurtured among a group of people over the course of long and difficult negotiations. Rather, it is technical jargon: it simply refers to the process by which all of the computers participating in the Bitcoin network eventually come to agree that a given transaction is valid. Instead of being a technically mediated process of agreement among peers and equals separated from one another in space and time, it's actually just a reconciliation of calculations being performed by distant machines.", "This is certainly a supremely attractive vision, at least for those of us whose hearts beat a little bit faster at the prospect of ordinary people everywhere taking their fate into their own hands. In fact, there's really only one problem with it: it's all based on a misunderstanding.\nLet's back up a little. What, exactly, does distributed consensus mean? And what does it have to do with the new forms of democracy that might now be available to us? \n\n At a time when 'disruption' and 'disintermediation' remain potent words in the tech community, it was inevitable that someone would think to disrupt the way we organise civic life. Early experiments in digital democracy mostly confined themselves to tinkering in the mechanics of an otherwise conventional political process – working out, for example, how verified electronic voting might work. But more recent proposals, such as the \"distributed autonomous organisations\" pioneered by the Ethereum project, and the structurally similar Backfeed and democracy.earth initiatives, offer far more ambitious ideas of networked citizenship and decision-making.", "If people could participate in public life from their laptop (or smartphone, or gaming platform), we might be able to democratise democracy itself, in all sorts of salutary ways. We might fold in all those who, by dint of their work, childcare or family obligations, are too exhausted or pressed for time to attend a decision-making assembly, and prevent the common circumstance in which such an assembly is captured by a bad-faith participant with an axe to grind. We could avoid having to gather stakeholders in a given place and time to make decisions of common import, and allow people to participate in public life as and when they were able to. And we could apply to that participation all the tools that arise from being networked and digital, particularly the ability to capture and analyse detailed data about a matter up for discussion.", "Though they may someday be robust enough to undergird decisions of genuine import, the experience of the DAO suggests that blockchain-based protocols are at present no more trustworthy than any of the less glamorous methods for assessing communal sentiment we already have at our disposal: the assembly, the discussion and the poll.\nThere's a long list of benefits that might follow from shifting civic life on to a networked platform.", "Finally, too many of those touting distributed democracy retain a weirdly naive faith in the promises made about the blockchain's ability to transcend human fallibility, despite the well-known history of Bitcoin hacks, thefts and exploits. The founders of democracy.earth, for example, would have us believe that the blockchain is 'incorruptible', when, as all long-time observers of the cryptocurrency scene know, it's anything but. There is no better case in point than Ethereum's own networked democracy, a distributed venture fund rather confusingly called the DAO – Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – which was notoriously drained of a full third of its value by someone who evidently understood its coding better than its own originators. The Ethereum blockchain was subsequently 'hard forked' to undo this exploit, but only at the cost of angering that passionate fraction of their community convinced that distributed calculation could achieve what millennia of human law and custom had not.", "By the same token, democratic practice is a subtle thing. It is possible to do a great deal of damage by applying it without due regard for its strengths and limitations – witness Brexit. So perhaps the most important thing we might seek to gain from our encounter with tools like Backfeed and democracy.earth is a lesson in what works at what scale and what doesn't. We could then design a generation of distributed collective decision processes that are straightforward enough to be understood by the people using them, and not beholden to profoundly interested notions of private advantage. Developing an infrastructure built from the ground up would be a great way of redeeming the hope that's already been invested in these systems, and it might even convince those who have become disillusioned with democracy that there's more life in the concept yet. Maybe it's time we got started.\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article." ] ]
valid	99911	[ "What seems to be the draw to renting coworking space when you can simply work from home?", "Second Home ", "These new coworking spaces", "Those who typically rent these sorts of spaces", "By becoming part of these coworking spaces, ", "Many owners of coworking spaces", "Coworking spaces", "The members of WeWork", "WeWork is", "Each different coworking space" ]	[ [ "It is a tax credit that people don't often realize.", "You can have interactions with like-minded individuals. It also is a good place to network.", "No one wants to sit at home all of the time.", "They often just like to show others they have the expendable income for such things." ], [ "does not offer enough for the cost of service.", "seems to be geared towards \"hipsters.\"", "is family friendly.", "is an uncomfortable environment." ], [ "tend to be built only in warehouse-type buildings.", "are all cramped spaces which makes one wonder what their appeal is.", "are all one-size-fits-all places, so there is no need to look around at different options.", "seem to offer an exclusivity that adds to their appeal." ], [ "hate their home, so they have to get out.", "want to add to their social life, and they are great places to meet people other than online dating sites.", "are freelancers and startups.", "lonely and need friends." ], [ "people are conforming to stereotypes.", "feel superior to those who opt to work from home.", "people force themselves to hone in on their social skills.", "people seem to find more meaning in their work." ], [ "do not seem to put any sort of effort into the type of environment they supply.", "have cornered a market and are making a killing off of people.", "say that people actually enjoy coming to the office now.", "are losing money because no one is buying into the nonsense of what they are selling." ], [ "are often distractions because of the atmosphere they encourage.", "are almost cult-like atmospheres.", "do not allow for a positive work environment.", "are a trend that reflects our changing attitude towards what office life should be." ], [ "can connect with members worldwide.", "are not allowed to interact with anyone outside of their coworking space.", "have been brainwashed by the atmosphere.", "really don't have that much quality interaction with anyone there." ], [ "encourages open communication about what takes place in their space.", "downsizing and only offering smaller spaces.", "charges members extra for anything that is not specifically included in the space they rent.", "expanding to include access to coworking spaces around the world." ], [ "has a different theme that the occupants must adhere to.", "is the same anywhere you go.", "is its own unique environment. ", "is exactly like going to work at a 9-5 job." ] ]	[ 2, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 1, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\"." ], [ "When I arrive at the Second Home reception desk, a sign urges me to \"join us tonight at 3.30pm for meditation.\" Before that, there's the option to have lunch at the atrium restaurant, Jago, founded by a former head chef of Ottolenghi and the former general manager of Morito. Today, there are cauliflower fritters made with lentil flour (gluten-free), which you can eat while admiring the exuberant architecture of Spanish firm SelgasCano, which has transformed the former carpet warehouse near Brick Lane: a plexiglass bubble punched out of the front of the building, sweeping curved walls, a wide cantilevered staircase up to the pod-like offices on the first floor.", "Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "Morgan's case may have been helped by her previous role as head of property for Tech City, the government initiative promoted by David Cameron's advisor Rohan Silva, who also happens to be the co-founder of Second Home. Wood admits that he and Gudka, who previously traded energy at Barclays for eight years, did know some people at Second Home already. \"When we looked on the website, some of the faces were familiar. And we hoped our business idea was quite good.\"", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "As we have to rely more on ourselves and on our own resources at work, it's probably not surprising that we seek out the reassuring sight of other people doing the same. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri say in their 2012 book, Declaration, \"The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory but has drifted outside its walls. Society has become a factory.\" \n\n Work has blurred into life, in part owing to the peculiar nature of our current relationship to technology. We do not conceive of machines, as we did in the past, as engines of oppression, exploiting workers; rather, we frame our devices as intimate and personal, interactive and fun, blurring the distinctions between work and play.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\"." ], [ "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are." ], [ "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "Wood and Gudka's first post-kitchen office was in Second Home's roaming area, where freelancers come and go. A desk costs £350 a month; they are sold several times over (a four-to-one ratio is thought to ensure the right level of occupancy without straining supply). The pair subsequently moved into a studio, then a larger office; they will take a bigger space upstairs when the refurbishment of three upper floors is completed. \"It doesn't feel like being a tenant,\" says Wood. \"The community team here has taught us a lot about how to interact with our own members.\"", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.", "In what Armstrong calls \"a somewhat unconventional deal with Peabody\", the Trampery is about to start building Fish Island Village in Hackney Wick: a co-living space that will also include traditional social housing. This experiment is partly a response to the pricing out of London of artists and other creatives and partly an attempt \"to move beyond a single workspace to think about a neighbourhood\".", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people; in Paddington, one company has 230 desks." ], [ "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "The Freelancers' Union in the US claims that 30 per cent of the US working population is now freelance, and predicts a rise to 50 per cent by 2035. One in eight London workers are self-employed. But the unstoppable rise and rise of coworking isn't simply about corporate downsizing and the growth of the startup and the gig economy, significant though these are.", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\"." ], [ "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"" ], [ "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"" ], [ "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people; in Paddington, one company has 230 desks.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "Being a Second Home business gives you access to others that have also made the grade. \"We had a strong business plan, but there were other things we didn't have,\"says Wood. \"Someone at Second Home recommended our branding agency, Ragged Edge. Congregation Partners, who are here, have helped with recruiting; and we met Blue State Digital [a digital strategy agency that worked on Obama's election campaign, whose London office is based at Second Home] in the bar one Friday night and they offered us a workshop about how to market and launch. It's an extremely generous collaborative culture.\"\nOther kinds of business at Second Home include venture capitalists; the European headquarters of chore-outsourcing company TaskRabbit; and ASAP54, an app that scans online fashion and locates where to buy it. Silva and Aldenton curate events that help them to network and that offer a kind of intellectual support and ballast – so Amit Gudka, a fan of the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok was able to hear him speak at Second Home and afterwards have dinner with him and Silva.", "This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships." ], [ "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "WeWork Moorgate is the second largest coworking space in the UK after WeWork Paddington, accommodating 3,000 people over eight floors. A permanent desk will cost you £425 a month, rising to £675 depending on its location in the building. A one-person office will set you back £725 to £825 a month, a four-person £2,600 to £3,100. The largest office here is for 40 people; in Paddington, one company has 230 desks.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "New work order\nIn March 2015, it was time for Hayden Wood and Amit Gudka to move out of the kitchen. The pair had raised investment for their startup, Bulb, a renewable energy supplier, and they were looking for an office. \n\n A coworking space was the obvious choice: somewhere that would allow them to take on more desks as needed. (When I meet them a little over a year later, they were eight strong and hiring around one more each month.) \"We looked at a few different spaces,\" says Wood, who had previously spent 10 years in management consultancy for Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and Bain & Company. \"Second Home had been open a few months and we took the tour. We were nervous: were we going to get in?\"", "At a purely economic level, it's easy to see why. As large corporates downsize their core operations, they no longer need vast offices. Iris Lapinski watched the process in action when her educational non-profit startup, Apps for Good, squatted in Royal Bank of Scotland’s offices in the City in late 2008. \"RBS was going through huge waves of redundancies. On our floor, it was three of us and 150 empty desks,\" she says, \"and then new people would come in and they'd get fired too. Eventually they'd fired so many people they closed down the building.\" Aware that \"tech companies were doing something funkier\", she moved Apps for Good into the Trampery, the first coworking space in Shoreditch.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen." ], [ "It seems likely that coworking spaces will follow a pattern set by festivals. They will proliferate, each developing its own distinctive vibe, projecting an array of differing identities while all answering a need for the increasingly autonomous workers of the future to hang out with other people.", "Coworking organisations increasingly see a market in digital nomads: if you can work from a coffee shop in Seven Dials, why not a rooftop in Bali? It's not even necessary to have a string of spaces across the world to attract drop-ins from elsewhere:Coworking Visa andCoPass offer 'passports' that guarantee a certain amount of time in any of their participating spaces. \n\n The Trampery, the pioneering coworking organisation in London that attracted Iris Lapinski, is now moving into co-living. Founded by the sociologist-entrepreneur-musician-traveller-dandy Charles Armstrong, The Trampery currently has three spaces, at Old Street, near City Hall, and in Hackney Wick. Armstrong began with a cross-sector workspace but now specialises in fashion and retail at Old St, travel and tourism at London Bridge, and digital artists, fashion and design in Hackney, finding this a better way to create 'intentional communities' and secure corporate partnerships.", "What distinguishes contemporary coworking spaces is the nature of their cultural claims. A study by Harvard Business Review found that coworkers believe their work has more meaning. The authors suggested that working alongside people doing different things reinforces workers' identity and distinctiveness; that coworkers feel they have more control over their lives (many spaces are open 24/7); that they have a stronger sense of community; and that there is still a social mission inherent in the idea of coworking, as outlined in the Coworking manifesto, and reinforced by the annual Global Coworking UnConference or GCUC (pronounced 'juicy'). WeWork's website urges you to \"Create your life's work\". \n\n \"Do what you love\" is one of WeWork's slogans, emblazoned on the front of a notebook they give me when I visit. Another is \"Thank God it's Monday\". Neumann describes his generation (he is 36) as the 'we generation' which, he explains, \"cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things, and loves working.\"", "Whatever, this shift in our sense of work helps to explain why workplaces have increasingly come to resemble clubs, and why no one is falling about laughing at the idea of Silva and Aldenton calling their workspace Second Home. The workspace has become an expression of identity – which raises two questions: first, if coworking is all about finding a space to express your individualism, follow your passions, explore your creativity, why do the spaces all look so alike? And second, if the workplace is all about belonging to a club and clubs are by their nature exclusive, how scalable is that?\nThere are new buildings rising all around WeWork Moorgate, in the City of London; an insistent noise of drilling, a clang of girders, a rumble of concrete mixers. This is some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Crossrail's engineers are tunnelling beneath; giant new buildings advertise themselves on construction hoardings everywhere at street level: there is a provisional air, as though the city can't quite catch up with its own wealth.", "We are all members now, it seems. Business ventures are turning themselves into clubs, making what used to be banal choices about office space or energy supply statements of identity. There was no shortage of office options for Wood and Gudka, and all of them carried connotations about what kind of business they meant to be: incubators and accelerators run by different sorts of organisations; hacker spaces; industry- and sector-coworking spaces; more traditional office rentals from companies like Regus and Workspace; and all manner of coworking spaces, from scruffy coops to coworking empires. \n\n Coworking began because startups and freelancers, typically in tech and the creative industries, needed somewhere to work. But as more organisations outsource more of their operations – or as large corporates seek to reach those startups – the range of activities represented among coworkers has expanded to comprehend almost everything. KPMG’s tech startup advice arm is based at Interchange in Camden. Merck, Microsoft, American Express and GE all lease desks at WeWork, in addition to running their own offices.", "Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe, says that WeWork is \"much more than an office space provider. Members are given the space, community and services they need to create their life's work\". Going around the building, what you mainly notice is that the spaces allotted to people's life's work are rather tiny and cramped. Effectively off corridors, they seem rather conventional behind their glass partitions: a desk, a chair, a lamp, a drawer. Many coworkers sit with their backs to their colleagues, staring at blank walls, with barely enough space for a third person to pass between them. You need a keycard to get anywhere inside the building. \n\n WeWork's enthusiasts, though, emphasise the connections they make with others, either physically or through an app that links members to 50,000 others worldwide. Miropolski claims \"more than 70 per cent of our members collaborate with each other\".", "So what of those questions about style and scalability? As far as the former is concerned, coworking spaces do all look a little bit alike – but design has a long history of innovators and followers. Inevitably, everyone borrows the more directional visual cues, even to the point of pastiche. \n\n But they are not, in fact, all alike. They are surprising in their degree of difference. There are industrial-scale operators that lack the warmth and personal touches of the smaller providers (no one at WeWork is ever going to come out of the kitchen as you arrive, knowing your name and whom you're here to visit, which is what happens at the Trampery); but which also lack their preciousness about who is allowed to the party. And then there are the cool clubs that everyone in their right mind would want to join, but where few are chosen.", "The benches are orange, the floors yellow. (\"There is quite a lot of science behind the colours, to do with improving mood and productivity,\" says Morgan.) Flowers flop in elegant vases and masses of plants sit in pots on sills, desks and walls. A row of fruit trees is in blossom outside. The exposed concrete pillars look unfinished, with scribble and tags still visible. Sam Aldenton, Silva's co-founder, has sourced 600 mid-century modern chairs from all over Europe.\n\"It's an aesthetic that tells an investor you're being frugal with their money,\" says Morgan, \"but it's also playful and energetic and that works for your brand. For us, it tells the tech companies we want to work with that we understand them. Coworking spaces say something about you, that you're a Second Home business or a Central Working business.\"", "The coworking space – even on a vast, industrial scale as at WeWork – is a club. And the whole point of clubs is that you want to belong to them. To someone raised in the era of the corporate office, used to the subversive feeling of being behind enemy lines, this may seem an odd way to think about the workplace. To anyone for whom The Office of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant was painfully recognisable, with its grey partitions and random people thrown together to do pretty pointless things and get on each other's nerves, it might seem risible. \n\n But clearly lots of people want this. A paradoxical effect of the internet has been to make us desire more social connection in the real world. From coffee shops to festivals to gyms, examples are everywhere of people keen to come together and share experiences.", "The interior ticks all the coworking style boxes: raw concrete; exposed ceilings revealing air conditioning ducts, pipes and silvered insulation; multicoloured upholstery; a kitchen with its own island bar offering free tea, coffee and craft beer; easy chairs and sofas; tables of varying heights and sizes; music; and some signifiers of fun, such as a table tennis table (but, unlike at WeWork's South Bank site, no arcade machines; nor, unlike at its Devonshire Square, any skateboards on the walls). \n\n In the toilet, cups for mouthwash urge you to 'stay fresh', which I am sure is meant jocularly but which arouses in me the same sort of mulish resentment I used to feel when I worked in advertising in my twenties and slogans in reception ordered me to \"reach for the stars\". (What makes you think I wouldn't, mate?).", "Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale, coffee shop-workspace hybrid Timberyard is dematerialising the desk, providing mobile workers who need to sit down and check their emails with the most ad hoc of workspaces. Most of Timberyard's users don't pay for space, the usual coworking business model, but they do pay for the tea and coffee (\"award-winning\", co-founder Darren Elliott is keen to point out) and for the artisan-produced, wellness-focused food (super seeds with almond butter on toast, beetroot, avocado and hummus on toast, hibiscus cake). Unlike most coffee shops, Timberyard's branches in Seven Dials and Soho are designed to encourage customers to stay and work: there is fast Wi-Fi with plentiful power sockets, careful regulation of temperature, lots of natural light and attentive design. Many of the chairs have been rescued from skips and reupholstered; the tables are striped like Jim Lambie staircases; the disabled toilet looks like a shipping container.", "In the last couple of months, Timberyard has renting out permanent desks in the basement of its Soho branch and now hosts three companies, one of eight people, one of 12 and one of 20. But Elliott says the shop upstairs will always be open to the street and the public. Typically, workers stay for a couple of hours, but they might be there for 20 minutes or all day. \"We believe this is the way people will work in the future,\" Elliott says, surveying a sea of laptops: \"portable, connected, independent and collaborative, sharing resources and seeking out inspiring spaces.\" Timberyard intends to become a way station for the digital nomad.", "The annual Global Coworking Survey, produced by Deskmag, anticipates that 10,000 new coworking spaces will open worldwide in 2016. In Europe, the estimated number of spaces (though it's hard to keep track) has risen from 3,400 in 2013 to around 7,800 in 2016. According to Cushman & Wakefield's Juliette Morgan, \"Twelve per cent of the uptake in the London market in the last year has been spaces like this. Everyone thinks it's going to continue.\"", "Given that coworking, which after all grew out of hacker culture, is supposed to embody an attitude of resistance to conventional authority, WeWork is curiously corporate, certainly in its approach to communication. I am asked not to quote the community manager who shows me around. There isn't anyone who can speak on the record (or off it, for that matter) in the building. My queries have to be submitted in writing then edited down because there are too many of them. The answers come back, finally, appended: \"All attributable to Eugen Miropolski, Managing Director, Europe\".", "The logical extension of the elision of work and home life is that the same organisations might end up providing both. WeWork is experimenting with micro apartments in two locations: in New York and at Crystal City, outside Washington DC. Second Home is also believed to have Roam, which began in Bali, intends to build a global co-living network, with its offer: \"Sign one lease. Live around the world.\" From its initial base in Ubud, it has expanded into Miami and recently Madrid; Buenos Aires and London are 'coming soon'. Roam isn't simply about a bed for the night: it sells itself partly on the quality of its coworking offer. In Bali, the office space is on the roof, under a palm thatch, with a swimming pool in the courtyard below.", "Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in 2010 in New York to capitalise on this corporate downsizing phenomenon: leasing large spaces, often previous corporate offices, subdividing them, then selling them at a profit. WeWork typically rents its buildings (although it owns its latest London site in Paddington) then subleases the space – with, according to Fast Company, average gross margins of 60 per cent. \n\n The model has proved so successful that WeWork now has 103 locations in 29 cities worldwide. The company will open five new coworking spaces in London this year, bringing the total to 11, with Paddington large enough for 2,100 'members'. The company recently authorised the sale of up to $780m in new stock, giving it a $16bn valuation and making it, on paper, the sixth most valuable private startup in the world.", "This empire of office space has been derided as 'McCoworking'; but another way of looking at it might simply be that it's a sign of natural segmentation as the market matures. Many workspace providers set up because they wanted some office space themselves; they have no desire to be other than local, small-scale and collaborative. But others are starting to take on a role as akind of corporate parent. Canada's Coworking Ontario provides health insurance. WeWork is also reported to be looking at providing discounts on healthcare, payroll and shipping, replicating services that a corporate employer might once have provided.", "We tend not, for example, to view posting on Facebook as labour, even though there are perfectly good economic arguments why we should. The eight hours' work, eight hours' leisure, eight hours' rest fought for so fiercely in the 19th century has become meaningless in an era when we willingly, eagerly, spend 12 hours a day on a laptop. \n\n As work becomes increasingly unpredictable and permeable, in a way that reflects the internet itself, workspaces are imagined more as social landscapes. Increasingly, they are designed for serendipitous encounters, emotional expression, explorations of identity. Of course, you could take the cynical view that the imperative of productivity has now colonised every aspect of our lives, that our private relationships have become 'social capital', that even our intimate interactions have been turned into a kind of labour. Or you could say, as coworking enthusiasts tend to, that work has got a whole lot more fun.", "It is odd, perhaps, to think of the renting of office space as a socially testing business, entailing pre-interview nerves. But acceptance into Second Home, for some, signifies hipness. Juliette Morgan, partner at Cushman & Wakefield, a property consultancy, who works out of Second Home, says: \"I used to joke that there was a cool alarm that went off when people came to look round – but then they let us in.\"", "Meanwhile, the current excitement over coworking may have less to do with a method of office organisation than with a handful of hugely successful connectors. When Iris Lapinski moved out of RBS, she chose the Trampery partly because \"Charles draws in interesting people. He's got links to corporates, government, policymakers.\" One of these connections turned out to be Bob Schukai, head of advanced product innovation at Thomson Reuters, which led directly to £300,000 of sponsorship revenue for Apps for Good. \"Charles is a great connector,\" Lapinsky says, \"and that is really what makes the Trampery so special. Most don't have the same flair.\"\nImages from top: WeWork Moorgate; Second Home; WeWork; The Trampery Old Street, Home of Publicis Drugstore; Timberyard; WeWork\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article." ] ]
test	61243	[ "How did Grunfeld measure the size of Uranus?", "Why did the crew of the Prospero change the colors representing the other four ships?", "Why was there only one ship from Earth navigating space during a period of the First Interstellar War?", "Why did the Space Force leave its initial orbit?", "How did Grunfeld estimate the Prospero could prevent itself from zooming past Uranus into unknown space?", "What important realization did Jackson have thanks to his telepathy?", "What happened when Grunfeld saw the black pillow?" ]	[ [ "He watched it block out stars and moons and used the surrounding light to estimate its depth.", "He took readings as the Prospero flew past the planet at a chilly distance.", "He analyzed the speed of the spinning of the equatorial bands.", "He used known diameters of other stars and moons to determine the diameter of Uranus." ], [ "It revealed their respective skin and cabin temperatures as well as their gravitational pull readings. ", "It indicated that Caliban, Snug, Mother, and Starveling were flying on automatic.", "It represented their readiness to chart a course upon observing rim contact once full occultation was achieved.", "The Enemy ships were bright green, so they changed the indicators to blue." ], [ "An attack by a fission-headed anti-missile left the Combined Fleet in disarray. ", "The Enemy destroyed most Terran spaceships and continued attacking others into retreat.", "The crews of other ships were busy managing groundside and satellite rocketyards.", "The ships were unable to compete with the Enemy ships due to their lack of anti-gravity technology." ], [ "To go to an orbit at a safer distance from the Enemy.", "It was being relentlessly attacked by the nearly invisible Enemy fleet.", "To better position themselves for the task of prospecting and mineral exploitation of Mercury.", "Because the fleet was ready to begin space-to-space flights inside Earth's orbit." ], [ "Once they reached a certain diameter from Uranus, they could better attach to its orbit.", "They could ram the Enemy spaceships to slow their speed.", "They could slow the ship's speed against the planet's thick atmosphere.", "They could use the functioning solar jet to decelerate quickly." ], [ "The Enemy were the ships themselves, not their inhabitants.", "The Enemy had killed the crew from the First Uranus Expedition.", "The Space Force had lost the Battle of Jupiter.", "The Enemy used its anti-gravity capabilities to jettison from the discontinuum." ], [ "He died.", "He was reminded of life on Earth.", "He understood the true purpose of the Enemy.", "The Prospero successfully decelerated. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.", "The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.", "But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'\n frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to\n the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral\n core—\nProspero\nwould have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.\n\n\n Two minutes—at 150 Gs.\n\n\n Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.\n\n\n But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way\n to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to\n one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90\n seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.", "Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,\n which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A\n bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the\n jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into\n their eyes.\n\n\n They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.\n\n\n The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only\n the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the\n monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject\n the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken\n from their max.\n\n\n He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of\n Uranus.\n\n\n But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as\n dark as those of\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.", "\"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.", "There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.", "The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?", "A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.", "He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled", "Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they\n whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small\n as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward\n course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able\n to slow\nProspero\nand her sister ships or turn them back at their 100\n miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly\n distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.\nGrunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were\n too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above", "Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as\n the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy\n air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an\n extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.\n\n\n But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now ... now on Mars ...\n now back on Earth....\n\n\n The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand.\n Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had\n red fringe around it. It grew.\n\n\n There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the\n ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't.", "\"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"", "\"Cute,\" Ness conceded. \"Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same\n we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of\n the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus—Copperhead\n really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a\n sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup\n at our 100 mps—\"\n\n\n Croker shrugged. \"We still could have dropped a couple of us,\" he said.\n\"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet,\" Ness said. \"You're\n beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain\n himself.\"", "\"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"" ], [ "Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.\n\n\n The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one\n each for\nCaliban\n,\nSnug\n,\nMoth\n, and\nStarveling\n, following\nProspero\nin line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia\n had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,\n but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.", "Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite\n useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together\n the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became\n months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At\n least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.", "\"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"", "Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they\n whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small\n as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward\n course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able\n to slow\nProspero\nand her sister ships or turn them back at their 100\n miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly\n distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.\nGrunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were\n too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above", "\"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.", "five-man crew, were essentially Ross-Smith space stations with a solar\n drive, assembled in space and intended solely for space-to-space flight\n inside Earth's orbit. A huge paraboloid mirror, its diameter four times\n the length of the ship's hull, superheated at its focus the hydrogen\n which was ejected as a plasma at high exhaust velocity. Each ship\n likewise mounted versatile radio-radar equipment on dual lattice arms\n and carried as ship's launch a two-man chemical fuel rocket adaptable\n as a fusion-headed torpedo.", "Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.", "But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'\n frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to\n the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral\n core—\nProspero\nwould have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.\n\n\n Two minutes—at 150 Gs.\n\n\n Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.\n\n\n But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way\n to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to\n one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90\n seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.", "Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.", "He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled", "\"If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,\" Croker\n amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the\n hammock. \"Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived.\n At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the\n War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if\n they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon\n or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station that could\n raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing\nProspero\nhasn't heard\n anything ... and we're getting close.\"\n\n\n \"I won't argue,\" Ness said. \"Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be\n hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report.\"", "The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the\n fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The\n five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's\n high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most\n material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal\n hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture\n and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course\n that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a\n hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.\n\n\n In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the\n crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more\n heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be\n only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.", "\"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.", "\"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"" ], [ "When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's\n nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of\n Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard,\n spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England\n and the other mega-powers.", "Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran\n spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great\n caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as\n if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going\n ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore\n line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite\n rocketyards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—with one\n exception.\nAt the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space\n Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up\n satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation\n of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton", "Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite\n useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together\n the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became\n months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At\n least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.", "\"But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do\n the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to\n Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out\n after us.\nIf\nwe've won the War.\"\n\n\n \"But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And\n we've lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself,\" Ness asserted\n owlishly. \"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age\n in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the\n Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest\n star—except we aren't headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand\n years!\"", "Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was\n oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big\n gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as\n if having some way of fueling from them.\n\n\n Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying\n Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though\n sharing its tide-lockedness—a circumstance that led to a sortie by\n Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in\n part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated.\n No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged—except\n for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed\n anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to \"burn,\" meaning that it\n suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling\n rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the \"stupidity\"\n of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their\n allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths\n began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.", "However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the\n fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The\n five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's\n high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most\n material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal\n hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture\n and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course\n that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a\n hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.\n\n\n In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the\n crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more\n heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be\n only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.", "\"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"", "After Far Side, this \"tin can\" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury\n and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because\n that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently\n on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two\n nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the\n relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.", "Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.\n\n\n The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one\n each for\nCaliban\n,\nSnug\n,\nMoth\n, and\nStarveling\n, following\nProspero\nin line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia\n had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,\n but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.", "\"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.", "During the first months the advantage lay wholly with the slim black\n cruisers of the Enemy, who had an antigravity which allowed them\n to hover near planets without going into orbit; and a frightening\n degree of control over light itself. Indeed, their principal weapon\n was a tight beam of visible light, a dense photonic stiletto with an\n effective range of several Jupiter-diameters in vacuum. They also\n used visible light, in the green band, for communication as men use\n radio, sometimes broadcasting it and sometimes beaming it loosely in\n strange abstract pictures that seemed part of their language. Their\n gravity-immune ships moved by reaction to photonic jets the tightness\n of which rendered them invisible except near the sun, where they tended\n to ionize electronically dirty volumes of space. It was probably this", "\"If they're still alive and there ever was a Titania Station,\" Croker\n amended, backing air violently to stop himself as he neared the\n hammock. \"Look, Ness, we know that the First Uranus Expedition arrived.\n At least they set off their flares. But that was three years before the\n War and we haven't any idea of what's happened to them since and if\n they ever managed to set up housekeeping on Titania—or Ariel or Oberon\n or even Miranda or Umbriel. At least if they built a station that could\n raise Earth I haven't been told. Sure thing\nProspero\nhasn't heard\n anything ... and we're getting close.\"\n\n\n \"I won't argue,\" Ness said. \"Even if we raise 'em, it'll just be\n hello-goodby with maybe time between for a battle report.\"", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.", "Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw\n the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering\n brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish\n phosphorescing.\n\"The torps got to 'em,\" Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to\n the right.\n\"I did find out at the end,\" Jackson said quietly from the left, his\n voice at last free of the trance-tone. \"The Enemy ships weren't ships\n at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've\n always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was\n inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues", "Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.", "\"And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per\n man as the station fades.\" Croker frowned and added, \"If Captain had\n cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this\n express train at Uranus.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me how,\" Ness asked drily.\n\n\n \"How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with\n the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it\n between the ship and the launch.\"", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on." ], [ "After Far Side, this \"tin can\" fleet was ordered to bypass Mercury\n and, tacking on the sun, shape an orbit for Uranus, chiefly because\n that remote planet, making its 84-year circuit of Sol, was currently\n on the opposite side of the sun to the four inner planets and the two\n nearer gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. In the empty regions of space the\n relatively defenseless fleet might escape the attention of the Enemy.", "Meanwhile the five-ship fleet sped onward, its solar drive quite\n useless in this twilight region even if it could have scraped together\n the needed boilable ejectant mass to slow its flight. Weeks became\n months. The ships were renamed for the planet they were aimed at. At\n least the fleet's trajectory had been truly set.", "Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.", "\"But if Titania Station's alive, a couple of men dropped off would do\n the fleet some good. Stir Titania up to punch a message through to\n Earth and get a really high-speed retrieve-and-rescue ship started out\n after us.\nIf\nwe've won the War.\"\n\n\n \"But Titania Station's dead or never was, not to mention its jeep. And\n we've lost the Battle of Jupiter. You said so yourself,\" Ness asserted\n owlishly. \"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, so he kills himself fretting and the rest of us die of old age\n in the outskirts of the Solar System. Join the Space Force and See the\n Stars! Ness, do you know how long it'd take us to reach the nearest\n star—except we aren't headed for her—at our 100 mps? Eight thousand\n years!\"", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "\"I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,\"\n Ness said, referring to\nProspero's\npiloting robot. \"Fully fueled, one\n of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per\n second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken 30 from 100. The\n launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a\n second.\"", "Following Far Side, the Enemy burst into activity, harrying Terran\n spacecraft as far as Mercury and Saturn, though still showing great\n caution in maneuver and making no direct attacks on planets. It was as\n if a race of heavily armed marine creatures should sink all ocean-going\n ships or drive them to harbor, but make no assaults beyond the shore\n line. For a full year Earth, though her groundside and satellite\n rocketyards were furiously busy, had no vehicle in deep space—with one\n exception.\nAt the onset of the War a fleet of five mobile bases of the U. S. Space\n Force were in Orbit to Mercury, where it was intended they take up\n satellite positions prior to the prospecting and mineral exploitation\n of the small sun-blasted planet. These five ships, each with a skeleton", "Despite his impressive maneuverability and armament, the Enemy was\n oddly timid about attacking live planets. He showed no fear of the big\n gas planets, in fact hovering very close to their turgid surfaces, as\n if having some way of fueling from them.\n\n\n Near Terra the first tactic of the black cruisers, after destroying\n Lunostrovok and Circumluna, was to hover behind the moon, as though\n sharing its tide-lockedness—a circumstance that led to a sortie by\n Earth's Combined Fleet, England and Sweden excepted.", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "However, while still accelerating into the sun for maximum boost, the\n fleet received information that two Enemy cruisers were in pursuit. The\n five ships cracked on all possible speed, drawing on the solar drive's\n high efficiency near the sun and expending all their hydrogen and most\n material capable of being vaporized, including some of the light-metal\n hydrogen storage tanks—like an old steamer burning her cabin furniture\n and the cabins themselves to win a race. Gradually the curving course\n that would have taken years to reach the outer planet flattened into a\n hyperbola that would make the journey in 200 days.\n\n\n In the asteroid belt the pursuing cruisers turned aside to join in the\n crucial Battle of the Trojans with Earth's largely new-built, more\n heavily and wisely armed Combined Fleet—a battle that proved to be\n only a prelude to the decisive Battle of Jupiter.", "\"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.", "When the First Interstellar War erupted, the pioneer fleets of Earth's\n nations had barely pushed their explorations beyond the orbit of\n Saturn. Except for the vessels of the International Meteor Guard,\n spaceflight was still a military enterprise of America, Russia, England\n and the other mega-powers.", "\"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"", "A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.", "\"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"", "Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw\n the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering\n brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish\n phosphorescing.\n\"The torps got to 'em,\" Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to\n the right.\n\"I did find out at the end,\" Jackson said quietly from the left, his\n voice at last free of the trance-tone. \"The Enemy ships weren't ships\n at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've\n always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was\n inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues", "He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled", "\"Yes, waiting to bushwack us as we whip past on our way to eternity,\"\n Croker chuckled as he crumpled up against the aft port, shedding\n momentum. \"That's likely, isn't it, when they didn't have time for us\n back in the Belt?\" He scowled at the tiny white sun, no bigger a disk\n than Venus, but still with one hundred times as much light as the full\n moon pouring from it—too much light to look at comfortably. He began\n to button the inner cover over the port.\n\n\n \"Don't do that,\" Ness objected without conviction. \"There's not much\n heat in it but there's some.\" He hugged his elbows and shivered. \"I\n don't remember being warm since Mars orbit.\"", "\"And a football score and a short letter from home, ten seconds per\n man as the station fades.\" Croker frowned and added, \"If Captain had\n cottoned to my idea, two of us at any rate could have got off this\n express train at Uranus.\"\n\n\n \"Tell me how,\" Ness asked drily.\n\n\n \"How? Why, one of the ship's launches. Replace the fusion-head with\n the cabin. Put all the chem fuel in the tanks instead of divvying it\n between the ship and the launch.\"" ], [ "Almost on collision course it neared Uranus, a mystery-cored ball\n of frigid gas 32,000 miles wide coasting through space across the\n fleet's course at a lazy four miles a second. At this time the fleet\n was traveling at 100 miles a second. Beyond Uranus lay only the\n interstellar night, into which the fleet would inevitably vanish....\nUnless, Grunfeld told himself ... unless the fleet shed its velocity by\n ramming the gaseous bulk of Uranus. This idea of atmospheric braking\n on a grand scale had sounded possible at first suggestion, half a\n year ago—a little like a man falling off a mountain or from a plane\n and saving his life by dropping into a great thickness of feathery\n new-fallen snow.\n\n\n Supposing her solar jet worked out here and she had the reaction\n mass,\nProspero\ncould have shed her present velocity in five hours,\n decelerating at a comfortable one G.", "But allowing her 12,000 miles of straight-line travel through Uranus'\n frigid soupy atmosphere—and that might be dipping very close to\n the methane seas blanketing the planet's hypothetical mineral\n core—\nProspero\nwould have two minutes in which to shed her velocity.\n\n\n Two minutes—at 150 Gs.\n\n\n Men had stood 40 and 50 Gs for a fractional second.\n\n\n But for two minutes.... Grunfeld told himself that the only surer way\n to die would be to run into a section of the Enemy fleet. According to\n one calculation the ship's skin would melt by heat of friction in 90\n seconds, despite the low temperature of the abrading atmosphere.", "Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.", "There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.", "\"I haven't got the brain for math Copperhead has, but I can subtract,\"\n Ness said, referring to\nProspero's\npiloting robot. \"Fully fueled, one\n of the launches has a max velocity change in free-fall of 30 miles per\n second. Use it all in braking and you've only taken 30 from 100. The\n launch is still going past Uranus and out of the system at 70 miles a\n second.\"", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.", "Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they\n whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small\n as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward\n course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able\n to slow\nProspero\nand her sister ships or turn them back at their 100\n miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly\n distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman.\nGrunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were\n too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above", "The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,\n which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A\n bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the\n jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into\n their eyes.\n\n\n They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.\n\n\n The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only\n the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the\n monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject\n the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken\n from their max.\n\n\n He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of\n Uranus.\n\n\n But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as\n dark as those of\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.", "A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.", "\"Ambush,\" he said. \"At least two cruisers.\"\n\n\n He yielded the eyepiece to the captain. Even without the telescope he\n could see those incredibly brilliant green flickers. He asked himself\n if the Enemy was already gunning for the fleet through Uranus.\n\n\n The blue telltales for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\nbegan to blink.\n\n\n \"They've seen it too,\" the captain said. He snatched up the mike and\n his next words rang through the\nProspero\n.\n\n\n \"Rig ship for the snowbank orbit! Snowbank orbit with stinger! Mr.\n Grunfeld, raise the fleet.\"\n\n\n Aft, Croker muttered, \"Rig our shrouds, don't he mean? Rig shrouds and\n firecrackers mounted on Fourth of July rockets.\"", "\"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.", "\"Cute,\" Ness conceded. \"Especially the jeep. But I'm glad just the same\n we've got 70 per cent of our chem fuel in our ships' tanks instead of\n the launches. We're on such a bull's eye course for Uranus—Copperhead\n really pulled a miracle plotting our orbit—that we may need a\n sidewise shove to miss her. If we slapped into that cold hydrogen soup\n at our 100 mps—\"\n\n\n Croker shrugged. \"We still could have dropped a couple of us,\" he said.\n\"Captain's got to look after the whole fleet,\" Ness said. \"You're\n beginning to agitate, Croker, like you was Grunfeld—or the captain\n himself.\"", "The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.", "\"You didn't hear all my idea,\" Croker said. \"You put piggyback tanks\n on your launch and top them off with the fuel from the other four\n launches. Then you've 100 miles of braking\nand\na maneuvering reserve.\n You only need to shed 90 miles, anyway. Ten miles a second's the close\n circum-Uranian velocity. Go into circum-Uranian orbit and wait for\n Titania to send their jeep to pick you up. Have to start the maneuver\n four hours this side of Uranus, though. Take that long at 1 G to shed\n it.\"", "Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros.\n\n\n The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue—one\n each for\nCaliban\n,\nSnug\n,\nMoth\n, and\nStarveling\n, following\nProspero\nin line astern on slave automatic—though for months inertia\n had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green,\n but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.", "The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?" ], [ "\"I don't want to start a game of three-D with Uranus only 18 hours\n away.\"\n\n\n Jackson stirred in his hammock. His lips worked. \"They....\" he\n breathed. Croker and Ness instantly watched him. \"They....\"\n\n\n \"I wonder if he is really inside the Enemy's mind?\" Ness said.\n\n\n \"He thinks he speaks for them,\" Croker replied and the next instant\n felt a warning touch on his arm and looked sideways and saw\n dark-circled eyes in a skull-angular face under a battered cap with a\n tarnished sunburst. Damn, thought Croker, how does the captain always\n know when Jackson's going to talk?", "\"That's a lot of time to kill,\" Ness said. \"Let's play chess.\"\n\n\n Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face\n above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids.\n Croker said, \"Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Ness said. \"When he talks about them it's as if he was\n their interpreter. How about the chess?\"\n\n\n \"Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.\"\n\n\n \"Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,\" Croker objected.\n\n\n \"That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really\n visualized in my head than the game's over.\"", "\"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows.", "\"And Jackson hears the Enemy think ... and Heimdall hears the grass\n grow,\" Croker commented with a harsh manic laugh. \"Isn't an Enemy for\n a billion miles, Ness.\" He launched aft from the hammock. \"We haven't\n spotted their green since Saturn orbit. There's nowhere for them.\"\n\n\n \"There's the far side of Uranus,\" Ness pointed out. \"That's less than\n ten million miles now. Eight. A bare day. They could be there.\"", "A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.", "\"The sun gets on my nerves,\" Croker said. \"It's like looking at an\n arc light through a pinhole. It's like a high, high jail light in a\n cold concrete yard. The stars are highlights on the barbed wire.\" He\n continued to button out the sun.\n\n\n \"You ever in jail?\" Ness asked. Croker grinned.\nWith the tropism of a fish, Ness began to paddle toward the little\n light at the head of Jackson's hammock, flicking his hands from the\n wrists like flippers. \"I got one thing against the sun,\" he said\n quietly. \"It's blanketing out the radio. I'd like us to get one more\n message from Earth. We haven't tried rigging our mirror to catch radio\n waves. I'd like to hear how we won the battle of Jupiter.\"\n\n\n \"If we won it,\" Croker said.", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "\"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.", "Then in the top of the spacefield, almost out of vision, Grunfeld saw\n the source of the pulsing glow: two sharp-ended ovals flickering\n brightly all colors against the pale starfields, like two dead fish\n phosphorescing.\n\"The torps got to 'em,\" Croker said, pushed forward beside Grunfeld to\n the right.\n\"I did find out at the end,\" Jackson said quietly from the left, his\n voice at last free of the trance-tone. \"The Enemy ships weren't ships\n at all. They were (there's no other word for it) space animals. We've\n always thought life was a prerogative of planets, that space was\n inorganic. But you can walk miles through the desert or sail leagues", "At the wholly disastrous Battle of the Far Side, which was visible in\n part to naked-eye viewers on Earth, the Combined Fleet was annihilated.\n No Enemy ship was captured, boarded, or seriously damaged—except\n for one which, apparently by a fluke, was struck by a fission-headed\n anti-missile and proceeded after the blast to \"burn,\" meaning that it\n suffered a slow and puzzling disintegration, accompanied by a dazzling\n rainbow display of visible radiation. This was before the \"stupidity\"\n of the Enemy with regard to small atomic missiles was noted, or their\n allergy to certain radio wave bands, and also before Terran telepaths\n began to claim cloudy contact with Enemy minds.", "The straight edge of Uranus was getting hazier. Even the fainter\n stars shone through, spangling it. A bell jangled and the pale green\n segment narrowed as the steel meteor panels began to close in front\n of the spaceshield. Soon there was only a narrow vertical ribbon of\n green—\nbright\ngreen as it narrowed to a thread—then for a few\n seconds only blackness except for the dim red and blue beads and\n semi-circles, just beyond the captain, of the board. Then the muted\n interior cabin lights glowed on.\nJackson droned: \"They and their ships come from very far away, from the\n edge. If this is the continuum, they come from the ... discontinuum,\n where they don't have stars but something else and where gravity is\n different. Their ships came from the edge on a gust of fear with the\n other ships, and our brothers came with it though they didn't want\n to....\"", "The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?", "through the sea before you notice life and I guess space is the\n same. Anyway the Enemy was (what else can I call 'em?) space-whales.\n Inertialess space-whales from the discontinuum. Space-whales that ate\n hydrogen (that's the only way I know to say it) and spat light to\n move and fight. The ones I talked to, our brothers, were just their\n parasites.\"", "He could swing his head and eyes just enough to make out the suits of\n Croker and Ness to either side of him and their profiles wavy through\n the jutting misty cheekpieces. Ahead to the left was Jackson—just\n the back of his suit, like a black snowman standing at attention,\n pale-olive-edged by the great glow of Uranus. And to the right the\n captain, his legs suited but his upper body still bent out to the side\n as he checked the monitor of his suit with its glowing blue button and\n the manual controls that would lie under his hands during the maneuver.\nBeyond the captain was the spaceshield, the lower quarter of it\n still blackness and stars, but the upper three-quarters filled with\n the onrushing planet's pale mottled green that now had the dulled", "\"Our telescopes show no more green around Jove,\" Ness reminded him. \"We\n counted 27 rainbows of Enemy cruisers 'burning.' Captain verified the\n count.\"\n\n\n \"Repeat: if we won it.\" Croker pushed off and drifted back toward the\n hammock. \"If there was a real victory message they'd push it through,\n even if the sun's in the way and it takes three hours to catch us.\n People who win, shout.\"\n\n\n Ness shrugged as he paddled. \"One way or the other, we should be\n getting the news soon from Titania station,\" he said. \"They'll have\n heard.\"", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "\"They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a\n little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their\n ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it\n knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than\n passengers....\"\n\n\n The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and\n felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up,\n carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from\n solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction." ], [ "The black pillow came down on him, crushing out sight, crushing out\n thought.\nThe universe was a black tingling, a limitless ache floating in a\n larger black infinity. Something drew back and there was a dry fiery\n wind on numb humps and ridges—the cabin air on his face, Grunfeld\n decided, then shivered and started at the thought that he was alive and\n in free-fall. His body didn't feel like a mass of internal hemorrhages.\n Or did it?\n\n\n He spun slowly. It stopped. Dizziness? Or the suits revolving forward\n again? If they'd actually come through—\n\n\n There was a creaking and cracking. The ship contracting after\n frictional heating?\n\n\n There was a faint stink like ammonia and formaldehyde mixed. A few\n Uranian molecules forced past plates racked by turbulence?", "Grunfeld's ice-mask was tight shut. He felt a small surge of vigor as\n the suit took over his breathing and sent his lungs a gush of high-oxy\n air. Then came a tingling numbness as the suit field went on, adding an\n extra prop against decel to each molecule of his body.\n\n\n But the weight was growing. He was on the moon now ... now on Mars ...\n now back on Earth....\n\n\n The weight was stifling now, crushing—a hill of invisible sand.\n Grunfeld saw a black pillow hanging in the cabin above him aft. It had\n red fringe around it. It grew.\n\n\n There was a whistling and shaking. Everything lurched torturingly, the\n ship's jets roared, everything recovered, or didn't.", "Grunfeld thought, now he can rest.", "Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. The\n captain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker and\n Ness. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionary\n entranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned the\n captain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imagination\n when he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk in\n the dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of the\n worry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearing\n on the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were better\n than one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-six\n minutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,\n stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange how\n he automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked and\n blinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been straining\n them on.", "The star Grunfeld had been waiting for touched the hazy rim of Uranus.\n He drifted back to the eyepiece and began to follow it in as the pale\n planet's hydrogen muted its diamond brilliance.\nIII\n\n\n In the aft cabin, lank hairy-wristed Croker pinned another blanket\n around black Jackson as the latter shivered in his trance. Then Croker\n turned on a small light at the head of the hammock.\n\n\n \"Captain won't like that,\" plump pale Ness observed tranquilly from\n where he floated in womb position across the cabin. \"Enemy can feel\n a candle of\nour\nlight, captain says, ten million miles away.\" He\n rocked his elbows for warmth and his body wobbled in reaction like a\n polly-wog's.", "The black rim of Uranus ahead suddenly brightened along its length,\n which was very slightly bowed, like a section of a giant new moon. A\n bead formed toward the center, brightened, and then all at once the\n jail-yard sun had risen and was glaring coldly through its pinhole into\n their eyes.\n\n\n They looked away from it. Grunfeld turned around.\n\n\n The austere light showed the captain still in his pressure suit, only\n the head fallen out forward, hiding the skull features. Studying the\n monitor box of the captain's suit, Grunfeld saw it was set to inject\n the captain with power stimulants as soon as the Gravs began to slacken\n from their max.\n\n\n He realized who had done the impossible job of piloting them out of\n Uranus.\n\n\n But the button on the monitor, that should have glowed blue, was as\n dark as those of\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.", "He saw dim red specks. The board? Or last flickers from ruined\n retinas? A bell jangled. He waited, but he saw nothing. Blind? Or the\n meteor guard jammed? No wonder if it were. No wonder if the cabin\n lights were broken.\n\n\n The hot air that had dried his sweaty face rushed down the front of his\n body. Needles of pain pierced him as he slumped forward out of the top\n of his opening suit.\n\n\n Then he saw the horizontal band of stars outlining the top of the\n spaceshield and below it the great field of inky black, barely convex\n upward,\nthat must\n, he realized,\nbe the dark side of Uranus\n.\n\n\n Pain ignored, Grunfeld pushed himself forward out of his suit and\n pulled himself past the captain's to the spaceshield.\n\n\n The view stayed the same, though broadening out: stars above, a\n curve-edged velvet black plain below. They were orbiting.", "The suit held Grunfeld erect, his arms at his sides—the best attitude,\n except he was still facing forward, for taking high G, providing the\n ship herself didn't start to tumble. Only the cheekpieces and visor\n hadn't closed in on his face—translucent hand-thick petals as yet\n unfolded. He felt the delicate firm pressure of built-in fingertips\n monitoring his pulses and against his buttocks the cold smooth muzzles\n of the jet hypodermics that would feed him metronomic drugs during the\n high-G stretch and stimulants when they were in free-fall again. When.", "Suddenly Grunfeld jerked his face back toward the spaceshield—so\n violently that his body began very slowly to spin in the opposite\n direction. This time he'd thought he saw the Enemy's green flashing\n near the margin of the planet—bright green, viridian, far vivider than\n that of Uranus herself. He drew himself to the telescope and feverishly\n studied the area. Nothing at all. Nerves again. If the Enemy were much\n nearer than a light-minute, Jackson would esp it and give warning. The\n next star was still three minutes from rim contact. Grunfeld's mind\n retreated to the circumstances that had brought\nProspero\n(then only\nMercury One\n) out here.\nII", "A sudden snarling roar came through his suit from the beams bracing it.\n He lost weight, then regained it and a little more besides. He realized\n it was their torpedo taking off, to skim by Uranus in the top of the\n atmosphere and then curve inward the little their chem fuel would let\n them, homing toward the Enemy. He imaged its tiny red jet over the\n great gray-green glowing plain. Four more would be taking off from the\n other ships—the fleet's feeble sting. Like a bee's, just one, in dying.\n\n\n The cheekpieces and foreheadpiece of Grunfeld's suit began to close on\n his face like layers of pliable ice.\n\n\n Jackson called faintly, \"\nNow\nI understand. Their ship—\" His voice\n was cut off.", "\"They're still welcoming us and grieving for us. I begin to get it a\n little more now. Their ship's one thing and they're another. Their\n ship is frightened to death of us. It hates us and the only thing it\n knows to do is to kill us. They can't stop it, they're even less than\n passengers....\"\n\n\n The captain was in his suit now. Grunfeld sensed a faint throbbing and\n felt a rush of cold air. The cabin refrigeration system had started up,\n carrying cabin heat to the lattice arms. Intended to protect them from\n solar heat, it would now do what it could against the heat of friction.", "Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young and\n the First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was going\n to pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curve\n breaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heat\n and then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking through\nProspero's\nbridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetary\n diameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost in\n pale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep through\n the seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeing\n the star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed with\n the time since rim contact.\n\n\n At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogen\n soup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk for\n the captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.", "And now Grunfeld thought he began to feel it—the first faint thrill,\n less than a cobweb's tug, of\nweight\n.\n\n\n The cabin wall moved sideways. Grunfeld's suit had begun to revolve\n slowly on a vertical axis.\n\n\n For a moment he glimpsed Jackson's dark profile—all five suits were\n revolving in their framework. They locked into position when the men in\n them were facing aft. Now at least retinas wouldn't pull forward at\n high-G decel, or spines crush through thorax and abdomen.\n\n\n The cabin air was cold on Grunfeld's forehead. And now he was sure he\n felt weight—maybe five pounds of it. Suddenly aft was\nup\n. It was as\n if he were lying on his back on the spaceshield.", "Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the\n curving star-bordered forward edge of\nProspero's\nhuge mirror and the\n thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages\n below the spaceshield.\n\n\n Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for\n helium to crawl, if you had some helium.\nProspero's\ninsulation,\n originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in\n reverse.\n\n\n Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of\n Uranus' sun-lit face. Check.\n\n\n Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser\n with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag\n out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus.", "The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge\n spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a\n water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked\n bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna\n seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,\n where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a\n second—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly\n green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.", "richness of watered silk. They were so close that the rim hardly showed\n curvature. The atmosphere must have a steep gradient, Grunfeld thought,\n or they'd already be feeling decel. That stuff ahead looked more like\n water than any kind of air. It bothered him that the captain was still\n half out of his suit.", "\"That's crazy,\" Grunfeld said. \"All of it. A child's picture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure it is,\" Jackson agreed.\n\n\n From beyond Jackson, Ness, punching buttons, said, \"Quiet.\"\n\n\n The radio came on thin and wailing with static: \"Titania Station\n calling fleet. We have jeep and can orbit in to you. The two Enemy are\n dead—the last in the System. Titania Station calling fleet. We have\n jeep fueled and set to go—\"\n\n\n Fleet? thought Grunfeld. He turned back to the board. The first and\n last blue telltales still glowed for\nCaliban\nand\nStarveling\n.\n Breathe a prayer, he thought, for\nMoth\nand\nSnug\n.\n\n\n Something else shone on the board, something Grunfeld knew had to be\n wrong. Three little words: SHIP ON MANUAL.", "\"That's a lot of time to kill,\" Ness said. \"Let's play chess.\"\n\n\n Jackson sighed and they both looked quickly at the dark unlined face\n above the cocoon, but the lips did not flutter again, or the eyelids.\n Croker said, \"Suppose he knows what the Enemy looks like?\"\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" Ness said. \"When he talks about them it's as if he was\n their interpreter. How about the chess?\"\n\n\n \"Suits. Knight to King Bishop Three.\"\n\n\n \"Hmm. Knight to King Knight Two, Third Floor.\"\n\n\n \"Hey, I meant flat chess, not three-D,\" Croker objected.\n\n\n \"That thin old game? Why, I no sooner start to get the position really\n visualized in my head than the game's over.\"", "There should be action and shouted commands, Grunfeld thought, to fill\n up these last tight-stretched minutes. Last orders to the fleet, port\n covers being cranked shut, someone doing a countdown on the firing of\n their torpedo. But the last message had gone to the fleet minutes ago.\n Its robot pilots were set to follow\nProspero\nand imitate, nothing\n else. And all the rest was up to Copperhead. Still....\n\n\n Grunfeld wet his lips. \"Captain,\" he said hesitantly. \"Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Grunfeld.\" He caught the edge of the skull's answering\n grin. \"We\nare\nbeginning to hit hydrogen,\" the quiet voice went on.\n \"Forward skin temperature's up to 9 K.\"\n\n\n Beyond the friendly skull, a great patch of the rim of Uranus flared\n bright green. As if that final stimulus had been needed, Jackson began\n to talk dreamily from his suit.", "\"They are waiting for us on the other side of Uranus,\" Jackson\n breathed. His lips trembled into a smile and his voice grew a little\n louder, though his eyes stayed shut. \"They're welcoming us, they're\n our brothers.\" The smile died. \"But they know they got to kill us, they\n know we got to die.\"\n\n\n The hammock with its tight-swathed form began to move past Croker and\n he snatched at it. The captain had pushed off from him for the hatch\n leading forward.\nGrunfeld was losing the new star at 2200 miles into Uranus when he saw\n the two viridian flares flashing between it and the rim. Each flash was\n circled by a fleeting bright green ring, like a mist halo. He thought\n he'd be afraid when he saw that green again, but what he felt was a\n jolt of excitement that made him grin. With it came a touch on his\n shoulder. He thought, the captain always knows." ] ]
test	50847	[ "What appears to be playing on the \"illuminated panel\" in front of Michael?", "Michael recognizes his impatience when he ", "What is the first \"faux pas\" Micahel makes on his journey?", "In this world, how have the leaders decided to keep the peace amongst all of the universe?", "What is the only universal crime?", "The universal laws may, in fact, prevent wars", "What modern-day city does Michael appear to have landed in?", "Mr. Carpenter tells Michael he cannot have a \"real\" family of his own because", "Why does Michael ultimately decide to return to the Brotherhood?", "Through his journey out into the world away from the Brotherhood, Michael realizes" ]	[ [ "A broadcast declaring him a fugitive.", "An infomercial.", "Some international sport he is unfamiliar with.", "A welcome message from the town he is entering." ], [ "makes a rash decision concerning choosing a family to stay with, and that decision proves fatal. ", "is recognized as a brotherhood member because he did not allow himself time to adjust his physical appearance to blend in.", "realizes he does not have enough money to make the trip safely, but it is too late for him to turn back at that point.", "gets halfway to his destination and realizes that he was not ready to leave the confines of the brotherhood, but he does not have the funds to go home." ], [ "He aligns himself with Ms. Carpenter.", "His replies are not courteous enough.", "He speaks disrespectfully of his mother.", "He admits that he is a member of the Brotherhood." ], [ "Everyone is expected to speak their mind, thus not allowing bottled-up emotions to cause issues.", "Every creature in the universe should abide by the same laws and customs. If no one is offended, wars will be prevented.", "If someone speaks out against the laws of the universe, they must come up with a custom to support their criticism, or they will face death.", "Different species are not to interact with one another for any reason, thus not allowing conflict to arise." ], [ "Not speaking your mind on a particular subject.", "Leaving the Brotherhood without permission of the Wise Ones.", "Thinking about offending any creature in any way.", "Offending any creature in any way." ], [ "because the research put into them is sound.", "and they are easy to maintain and live by.", "because they are simple rules, everyone should live by anyway.", "but they are virtually impossible to follow to the letter because there are so many of them." ], [ "Los Angeles", "San Fransico", "New York City", "Dallas" ], [ "Michael's woman might be wanted by someone else, or Michael might be wanted by someone else. They would be expected to share.", "The Brotherhood is the only family he is allowed to claim.", "Members of the Brotherhood are not allowed to have families.", "Michael's mother is dead, and the family line ends with the mother due to universal law." ], [ "Michael realizes that his place has always been with the Brotherhood.", "Mr. Carpenter convinces him that his place is with the Brotherhood as the \"world\" is not for everyone.", "He cannot remember all of the Universal Laws, and he is bound to end up in jail if he does not return.", "Michael cannot stand the thought of sharing his girl with anyone and refuses to entertain the idea." ], [ "he needed to see what was out there for himself, and he is grateful to be a part of the universe and all it holds.", "\"the grass is not greener on the other side,\" and home is where he belongs.", "love does not exist.", "Mr. Carpenter is a master teacher, and Michael brings him to the Brotherhood to instruct others on the ways of Universal Laws." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.", "Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed,\n translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying\n themselves on\nwemps\n, a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign\n planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres\n prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky\n to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one\n credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.", "Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was\n still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out\n from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire\n about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to\n bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are\n becoming so popular....\"\n\"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play\nBeautiful Blue\n Deneb\njust once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard\n this before.\"\n\n\n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what\n a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the\n wasteful sea.\"\n\n\n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike\n manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"", "After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and\n was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork,\n the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the\n most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as\n its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall\n helical edifices of the Venusians.\n\n\n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached\n architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the\n Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n\n\n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from\n gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid\n condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n\n\n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment\n to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at\n the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n\n\n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of\n great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n\n\n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined\n up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of\n the tour he offered:\n\n\n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n\n\n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas\n displays.\"\n\n\n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It\n came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels\n bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth,\n good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe\n as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the\n cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n\n\n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an\n expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called\n Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—\"\n\n\n \"Listen, could we—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—\"", "Tea Tray in the Sky\nBy EVELYN E. SMITH\n\n\n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nVisiting a society is tougher than being born\n \ninto it. A 40 credit tour is no substitute!\nThe picture changed on the illuminated panel that filled the forward\n end of the shelf on which Michael lay. A haggard blonde woman sprawled\n apathetically in a chair.\n\n\n \"Rundown, nervous, hypertensive?\" inquired a mellifluous voice. \"In\n need of mental therapy? Buy Grugis juice; it's not expensive. And they\n swear by it on Meropé.\"", "\"Sirians are always sad,\" the salesman told him. \"Listen.\"\nMichael strained his ears past the racket of the advideo. Sure enough,\n he could make out words: \"Our wings were unfurled in a far distant\n world, our bodies are pain-racked, delirious. And never, it seems, will\n we see, save in dreams, the bright purple swamps of our Sirius....\"\n\n\n Carpenter brushed away a tear. \"Poignant, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Very, very touching,\" Michael agreed. \"Are they sick or something?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no; they wouldn't have been permitted on the bus if they were.\n They're just homesick. Sirians love being homesick. That's why they\n leave Sirius in such great numbers.\"" ], [ "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from\n gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid\n condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n\n\n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment\n to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at\n the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n\n\n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of\n great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n\n\n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined\n up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of\n the tour he offered:\n\n\n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n\n\n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"", "The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"" ], [ "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"", "\"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"", "\"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"", "A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was\n still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out\n from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire\n about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to\n bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are\n becoming so popular....\"\n\"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play\nBeautiful Blue\n Deneb\njust once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard\n this before.\"\n\n\n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what\n a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the\n wasteful sea.\"\n\n\n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike\n manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped." ], [ "Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?", "\"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty\n two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n \"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all\n passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into\n the Union early this morning.\"\n\n\n All the passengers cheered.\n\n\n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to\n appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in\n public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n\n\n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching\n their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n\n\n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in\n piercingly bright green.\n\"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n \"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"", "\"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew,\n floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him\n curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of\n those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n\n\n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from\n Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to\n compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed\n tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded\n alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others\n whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.", "\"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"", "\"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"", "After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and\n was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork,\n the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the\n most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as\n its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall\n helical edifices of the Venusians.\n\n\n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached\n architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the\n Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n\n\n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.", "\"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive,\n for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use\n oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub\n with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick\n themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it\n away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are\n than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that\n works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n\"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we\n must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious,\n but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself\n beneath your station.\"", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "\"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "\"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "He twisted himself around—it was boiling hot inside the jet bus\n and his damp clothes were clinging uncomfortably—and struck his\n head against the bottom of the shelf above. \"Awfully inconvenient\n arrangement here,\" he commented. \"Wonder why they don't have seats.\"\n\n\n \"Because this arrangement,\" Carpenter said stiffly, \"is the one that\n has proved suitable for the greatest number of intelligent life-forms.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I see,\" Michael murmured. \"I didn't get a look at the other\n passengers. Are there many extraterrestrials on the bus?\"\n\n\n \"Dozens of them. Haven't you heard the Sirians singing?\"\n\n\n A low moaning noise had been pervading the bus, but Michael had thought\n it arose from defective jets.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes!\" he agreed. \"And very beautiful it is, too! But so sad.\"", "\"Izarians,\" Carpenter explained \"They're much in demand for Christmas\n displays.\"\n\n\n The small mouths opened and clear soprano voices filled the air: \"It\n came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels\n bending near the Earth to tune their harps of gold. Peace on Earth,\n good will to men, from Heaven's All-Celestial. Peace to the Universe\n as well and every extraterrestrial.... Beat the drum and clash the\n cymbals; buy your Christmas gifts at Nimble's.\"\n\n\n \"This beautiful walk you see before you,\" Carpenter said, waving an\n expository arm, \"shaded by boogil trees from Dschubba, is called\n Broadway. To your left you will be delighted to see—\"\n\n\n \"Listen, could we—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"—Forty-second Street, which is now actually the forty-second—\"", "Carpenter and Michael shared an elevator with a group of sad-eyed,\n translucent Sirians, who were singing as usual and accompanying\n themselves on\nwemps\n, a cross between a harp and a flute. \"Foreign\n planets are strange and we're subject to mange. Foreign atmospheres\n prove deleterious. Only with our mind's eye can we sail through the sky\n to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The cost of the compartment was half that of the feeding station; one\n credit in the slot unlocked the door. There was an advideo here, too:" ], [ "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?", "\"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "\"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "\"Friend, do you clean yourself each day? Now, let's not be evasive,\n for each one has his favored way. Some use an abrasive and some use\n oil. Some shed their skins, in a brand-new hide emerging. Some rub\n with grease put up in tins. For others there's deterging. Some lick\n themselves to take off grime. Some beat it off with rope. Some cook it\n away in boiling lime. Old-fashioned ones use soap. More ways there are\n than I recall, and each of these will differ, but the only one that\n works for all is Omniclene from Kiffa.\"\n\"And now,\" smiled Carpenter as the two humans left the building, \"we\n must see you registered for a nice family. Nothing too ostentatious,\n but, on the other hand, you mustn't count credits and ally yourself\n beneath your station.\"", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"", "\"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home." ], [ "Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?", "\"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"Fasten your suction disks, please,\" the stewardess, a pretty\n two-headed Denebian, ordered as she walked up and down the gangway.\n \"We're coming into Portyork. I have an announcement to make to all\n passengers on behalf of the United Universe. Zosma was admitted into\n the Union early this morning.\"\n\n\n All the passengers cheered.\n\n\n \"Since it is considered immodest on Zosma,\" she continued, \"ever to\n appear with the heads bare, henceforward it will be tabu to be seen in\n public without some sort of head-covering.\"\n\n\n Wild scrabbling sounds indicated that all the passengers were searching\n their packs for headgear. Michael unearthed a violet cap.\n\n\n The salesmen unfolded what looked like a medieval opera hat in\n piercingly bright green.\n\"Always got to keep on your toes,\" he whispered to the younger man.\n \"The Universe is expanding every minute.\"", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "\"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"", "\"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "\"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"", "The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"", "\"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "\"This,\" said Carpenter, \"is Times Square. Once it wasn't really square,\n but it is contrary to Nekkarian custom to do, say, imply, or permit\n the existence of anything that isn't true, so when Nekkar entered the\n Union, we had to square off the place. And, of course, install the\n clocks. Finest clock museum in the Union, I understand.\"\n\n\n \"The pictures in my history books—\" Michael began.\n\n\n \"Did I hear you correctly, sir?\" The capes of a bright blue cloak\n trembled with the indignation of a scarlet, many-tentacled being. \"Did\n you use the word\nhistory\n?\" He pronounced it in terms of loathing. \"I\n have been grossly insulted and I shall be forced to report you to the\n police, sir.\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square." ], [ "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "After a time, Michael got more or less used to Tpiu Number Five and\n was able to take some interest in the passing landscape. Portyork,\n the biggest spaceport in the United Universe, was, of course, the\n most cosmopolitan city—cosmopolitan in its architecture as well as\n its inhabitants. Silver domes of Earth were crowded next to the tall\n helical edifices of the Venusians.\n\n\n \"You'll notice that the current medieval revival has even reached\n architecture,\" Carpenter pointed out. \"See those period houses in the\n Frank Lloyd Wright and Inigo Jones manner?\"\n\n\n \"Very quaint,\" Michael commented.", "The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew,\n floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him\n curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of\n those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n\n\n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from\n Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to\n compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed\n tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded\n alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others\n whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.", "Great floating red and green balls lit the streets, even though it was\n still daylight, and long scarlet-and-emerald streamers whipped out\n from the most unlikely places. As Michael opened his mouth to inquire\n about this, \"We now interrupt the commercials,\" the advideo said, \"to\n bring you a brand new version of one of the medieval ballads that are\n becoming so popular....\"\n\"I shall scream,\" stated Carpenter, \"if they play\nBeautiful Blue\n Deneb\njust once more.... No, thank the Wise Ones, I've never heard\n this before.\"\n\n\n \"Thuban, Thuban, I've been thinking,\" sang a buxom Betelgeusian, \"what\n a Cosmos this could be, if land masses were transported to replace the\n wasteful sea.\"\n\n\n \"I guess the first thing for me to do,\" Michael began in a businesslike\n manner, \"is to get myself a room at a hotel.... What have I said now?\"", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.", "A ferret-eyed Yeddan appeared on the advideo. \"Do you suffer from\n gastric disorders? Does your viscera get in your hair? A horrid\n condition, but swift abolition is yours with Al-Brom from Altair.\"\n\n\n Michael finished his meal in fifteen minutes and left the compartment\n to find Carpenter awaiting him in the lobby, impatiently glancing at\n the luminous time dial embedded in his wrist.\n\n\n \"Let's go to the Old Town,\" he suggested to Michael. \"It will be of\n great interest to a student and a newcomer like yourself.\"\n\n\n A few yards away from the feeding station, the travel agents were lined\n up in rows, each outside his spaceship, each shouting the advantages of\n the tour he offered:\n\n\n \"Better than a mustard plaster is a weekend spent on Castor.\"\n\n\n \"If you want to show you like her, take her for a week to Spica.\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "Michael gazed at the Empire State Building with interest. It was in a\n remarkable state of preservation and looked just like the pictures in\n his history—in his books, except that none of them showed the huge\n golden sign \"Public-Washport\" riding on its spire.\nAttendants directed traffic from a large circular desk in the lobby.\n \"Mercurians, seventy-eighth floor.\nA\ngroup Vegans, fourteenth floor\n right.\nB\ngroup, fourteenth floor left.\nC\ngroup, fifteenth floor\n right.\nD\ngroup, fifteenth floor left. Sirians, forty-ninth floor.\n Female humans fiftieth floor right, males, fiftieth floor left.\n Uranians, basement....\"", "\"Not at all. Those rules might seem just as ridiculous to a Theemimian.\n But the Theemimians have accepted our customs just as we have accepted\n the Theemimians'. How would you like it if a Theemimian violated\n one of our tabus in public? You must consider the feelings of the\n Theemimians as equal to your own. Observe the golden rule: 'Do unto\n extraterrestrials as you would be done by.'\"\n\n\n \"But I'm still hungry,\" Michael persisted, modulating his voice,\n however, to a decent whisper. \"Do the proprieties demand that I starve\n to death, or can I get something to eat somewhere?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" the salesman whispered back. \"Portyork provides for all\n bodily needs. Numerous feeding stations are conveniently located\n throughout the port, and there must be some on the field.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air." ], [ "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "Michael gazed pensively at two slender, snakelike Difdans writhing\n \"Only 99 Shopping Days Till Christmas\" across an aquamarine sky.\n\n\n \"They won't be permanent?\" he asked. \"The family, I mean?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not. You merely hire them for whatever length of time you\n choose. But why are you so anxious?\"\n\n\n The young man blushed. \"Well, I'm thinking of having a family of my own\n some day. Pretty soon, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\n Carpenter beamed. \"That's nice; you're being adopted! I do hope it's\n an Earth family that's chosen you—it's so awkward being adopted by\n extraterrestrials.\"", "\"The word\nhotel\n,\" Carpenter explained through pursed lips, \"is\n not used in polite society any more. It has come to have unpleasant\n connotations. It means—a place of dancing girls. I hardly think....\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not,\" Michael agreed austerely. \"I merely want a lodging.\"\n\n\n \"That word is also—well, you see,\" Carpenter told him, \"on Zaniah it\n is unthinkable to go anywhere without one's family.\"\n\n\n \"They're a sort of ant, aren't they? The Zaniahans, I mean.\"", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square.", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "\"That has nothing whatsoever to do with it.\"\nCarpenter gently urged the young man into the Algedian cab ... which\n reeked. Michael held his nose, but his mentor shook his head. \"No, no!\n Tpiu Number Five is the most esteemed aroma on Algedi. It would break\n the driver's heart if he thought you didn't like it. You wouldn't want\n to be had up for ego injury, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Michael whispered weakly.\n\n\n \"Brunettes are darker and blondes are fairer,\" the advideo informed\n him, \"when they wash out their hair with shampoos made on Chara.\"", "\"More like bees. So those creatures who travel—\" Carpenter lowered his\n voice modestly \"—\nalone\nhire a family for the duration of their stay.\n There are a number of families available, but the better types come\n rather high. There has been talk of reviving the old-fashioned price\n controls, but the Wise Ones say this would limit free enterprise as\n much as—if you'll excuse my use of the expression—tariffs would.\"\nThe taxi let them off at a square meadow which was filled with\n transparent plastic domes housing clocks of all varieties, most of\n the antique type based on the old twenty-four hour day instead of the\n standard thirty hours. There were few extraterrestrial clocks because\n most non-humans had time sense, Michael knew, and needed no mechanical\n devices.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.", "\"Shh, not so loud! There are females present.\" Carpenter drew the\n youth to a secluded corner. \"Don't you know that on Theemim it's\n frightfully vulgar to as much as speak of eating in public?\"\n\n\n \"But why?\" Michael demanded in too loud a voice. \"What's wrong with\n eating in public here on Earth?\"\n\n\n Carpenter clapped a hand over the young man's mouth. \"Hush,\" he\n cautioned. \"After all, on Earth there are things we don't do or even\n mention in public, aren't there?\"\n\n\n \"Well, yes. But those are different.\"", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "The gaily colored costumes and bodies of these beings rendered\n kaleidoscopic a field already brilliant with red-and-green lights and\n banners. The effect was enhanced by Mr. Carpenter, whose emerald-green\n cloak was drawn back to reveal a chartreuse tunic and olive-green\n breeches which had apparently been designed for a taller and somewhat\n less pudgy man.\nCarpenter rubbed modestly gloved hands together. \"I have no immediate\n business, so supposing I start showing you the sights. What would you\n like to see first, Mr. Frey? Or would you prefer a nice, restful movid?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly,\" Michael admitted, \"the first thing I'd like to do is get\n myself something to eat. I didn't have any breakfast and I'm famished.\"\n Two small creatures standing close to him giggled nervously and\n scuttled off on six legs apiece.", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "\"All honor be laid at the feet of free trade, but, whatever your race\n or your birth, each passenger curls up with two dancing girls who rides\n in the taxi from Earth.\"\n\n\n \"Couldn't we—couldn't we walk? At least part of the way?\" Michael\n faltered.\n\n\n Carpenter stared. \"Walk! Don't you know it's forbidden to walk more\n than two hundred yards in any one direction? Fomalhautians never walk.\"\n\n\n \"But they have no feet.\"" ], [ "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?", "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.", "The other man smiled. \"If there were, my boy, do you think anybody\n would watch it? Furthermore, turning it off would violate the spirit of\n free enterprise. We wouldn't want that, would we?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" Michael agreed hastily. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\n \"And it might hurt the advertiser's feelings, cause him ego injury.\"\n\n\n \"How could I ever have had such a ridiculous idea?\" Michael murmured,\n abashed.\n\n\n \"Allow me to introduce myself,\" said his companion. \"My name is\n Pierce B. Carpenter. Aphrodisiacs are my line. Here's my card.\" He\n handed Michael a transparent tab with the photograph of Mr. Carpenter\n suspended inside, together with his registration number, his name, his\n address, and the Universal seal of approval. Clearly he was a character\n of the utmost respectability.", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped.", "\"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"", "\"I should have told you,\" Carpenter reproached himself as the Meropian\n swirled off. \"Never mention the word 'history' in front of a Meropian.\n They rose from barbarism in one generation, and so they haven't any\n history at all. Naturally, they're sensitive in the extreme about it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" Michael said. \"Tell me, Mr. Carpenter, is there some\n special reason for everything being decorated in red and green? I\n noticed it along the way and it's all over here, too.\"\n\n\n \"Why, Christmas is coming, my boy,\" Carpenter answered, surprised.\n \"It's July already—about time they got started fixing things up. Some\n places are so slack, they haven't even got their Mother's Week shrines\n cleared away.\"\nA bevy of tiny golden-haired, winged creatures circled slowly over\n Times Square." ], [ "Michael rubbed his fingers ruefully over the blond stubble on his scalp\n and wished he had waited until his tonsure were fully grown before\n he had ventured out into the world. But he had been so impatient to\n leave the Lodge, so impatient to exchange the flowing robes of the\n Brotherhood for the close-fitting breeches and tunic of the outer world\n that had seemed so glamorous and now proved so itchy.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he replied courteously, for he knew the first rule of universal\n behavior, \"I have been a Brother.\"\n\n\n \"Now why would a good-looking young fellow like you want to join a\n Brotherhood?\" his shelf companion wanted to know. \"Trouble over a\n female?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head, smiling. \"No, I have been a member of the\n Angeleno Brotherhood since I was an infant. My father brought me when\n he entered.\"", "Michael was too preoccupied to be disturbed by this threat. \"You mean\n if I bring my girl here, I'd have to share her?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. And she'd have to share you. If somebody wanted you, that\n is.\"\n\n\n \"Then I'm not staying here,\" Michael declared firmly, ashamed to admit\n even to himself how much relief his decision was bringing him. \"I don't\n think I like it, anyhow. I'm going back to the Brotherhood.\"\n\n\n There was a short cold silence.\n\n\n \"You know, son,\" Carpenter finally said, \"I think you might be right.\n I don't want to hurt your feelings—you\npromise\nI won't hurt your\n feelings?\" he asked anxiously, afraid, Michael realized, that he might\n call a policeman for ego injury.\n\n\n \"You won't hurt my feelings, Mr. Carpenter.\"", "\"Well, I believe that there are certain individuals who just cannot\n adapt themselves to civilized behavior patterns. It's much better for\n them to belong to a Brotherhood such as yours than to be placed in one\n of the government incarceratoriums, comfortable and commodious though\n they are.\"\n\n\n \"Much better,\" Michael agreed.\n\n\n \"By the way,\" Carpenter went on, \"I realize this is just vulgar\n curiosity on my part and you have a right to refuse an answer without\n fear of hurting my feelings, but how do you happen to have a—er—girl\n when you belong to a Brotherhood?\"\n\n\n Michael laughed. \"Oh, 'Brotherhood' is merely a generic term. Both\n sexes are represented in our society.\"\n\n\n \"On Talitha—\" Carpenter began.", "\"My name's Michael Frey,\" the young man responded, smiling awkwardly.\n \"I'm afraid I don't have any cards.\"\n\n\n \"Well, you wouldn't have had any use for them where you were. Now,\n look here, son,\" Carpenter went on in a lowered voice, \"I know you've\n just come from the Lodge and the mistakes you'll make will be through\n ignorance rather than deliberate malice. But the police wouldn't\n understand. You know what the sacred writings say: 'Ignorance of The\n Law is no excuse.' I'd be glad to give you any little tips I can. For\n instance, your hands....\"\n\n\n Michael spread his hands out in front of him. They were perfectly good\n hands, he thought. \"Is there something wrong with them?\"\n\n\n Carpenter blushed and looked away. \"Didn't you know that on Electra it\n is forbidden for anyone to appear in public with his hands bare?\"", "The Father Superior had smiled. \"You are not yet a fully fledged\n Brother, Michael. You cannot enter your novitiate until you've achieved\n your majority, and you won't be thirty for another five years. Why\n don't you spend some time outside and see how you like it?\"\n\n\n Michael had agreed, but before leaving he had spent months studying\n the ways of the United Universe. He had skimmed over Earth, because\n he had been so sure he'd know its ways instinctively. Remembering his\n preparations, he was astonished by his smug self-confidence.\nA large scarlet pencil jumped merrily across the advideo screen. The\n face on the eraser opened its mouth and sang: \"Our pencils are finest\n from point up to rubber, for the lead is from Yed, while the wood comes\n from Dschubba.\"\n\"Is there any way of turning that thing off?\" Michael wanted to know.", "\"I know,\" Michael interrupted him, like the crude primitive he was and\n always would be. \"But our females don't mind being generic.\"\nA group of Sirians was traveling on the shelf above him on the slow,\n very slow jet bus that was flying Michael back to Angeles, back to the\n Lodge, back to the Brotherhood, back to her. Their melancholy howling\n was getting on his nerves, but in a little while, he told himself, it\n would be all over. He would be back home, safe with his own kind.\n\n\n \"When our minds have grown tired, when our lives have expired, when our\n sorrows no longer can weary us, let our ashes return, neatly packed in\n an urn, to the bright purple swamps of our Sirius.\"\n\n\n The advideo crackled: \"The gown her fairy godmother once gave to\n Cinderella was created by the haute couture of fashion-wise Capella.\"", "Future events had proved them to be correct. For five hundred years\n there had been no war in the United Universe, and there was peace and\n plenty for all. Only one crime was recognized throughout the solar\n systems—injuring a fellow-creature by word or deed (and the telepaths\n of Aldebaran were still trying to add\nthought\nto the statute).\n\n\n Why, then, Michael had questioned the Father Superior, was there any\n reason for the Lodge's existence, any reason for a group of humans to\n retire from the world and live in the simple ways of their primitive\n forefathers? When there had been war, injustice, tyranny, there had,\n perhaps, been an understandable emotional reason for fleeing the\n world. But now why refuse to face a desirable reality? Why turn one's\n face upon the present and deliberately go back to the life of the\n past—the high collars, vests and trousers, the inefficient coal\n furnaces, the rude gasoline tractors of medieval days?", "The ancient taxi was there, the one that Michael had taken from the\n Lodge, early that morning, to the little Angeleno landing field, as if\n it had been waiting for his return.\n\n\n \"I see you're back, son,\" the driver said without surprise. He set the\n noisy old rockets blasting. \"I been to Portyork once. It's not a bad\n place to live in, but I hate to visit it.\"\n\n\n \"I'm back!\" Michael sank into the motheaten sable cushions and gazed\n with pleasure at the familiar landmarks half seen in the darkness. \"I'm\n back! And a loud sneer to civilization!\"\n\n\n \"Better be careful, son,\" the driver warned. \"I know this is a rural\n area, but civilization is spreading. There are secret police all over.\n How do you know I ain't a government spy? I could pull you in for\n insulting civilization.\"", "A disembodied pair of hands administered a spoonful of Grugis juice to\n the woman, whereupon her hair turned bright yellow, makeup bloomed on\n her face, her clothes grew briefer, and she burst into a fast Callistan\n clog.\n\n\n \"I see from your hair that you have been a member of one of the\n Brotherhoods,\" the passenger lying next to Michael on the shelf\n remarked inquisitively. He was a middle-aged man, his dust-brown hair\n thinning on top, his small blue eyes glittering preternaturally from\n the lenses fitted over his eyeballs.", "The elderly black and white advideo flickered, broke into purring\n sound: \"Do you find life continues to daze you? Do you find for a quick\n death you hanker? Why not try the new style euthanasia, performed by\n skilled workmen from Ancha?\"\n\n\n Not any more, Michael thought contentedly. He was going home.", "\"Please don't!\" Carpenter begged. \"This youth has just come from one of\n the Brotherhoods and is not yet accustomed to the ways of our universe.\n I know that, because of the great sophistication for which your race is\n noted, you will overlook this little gaucherie on his part.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the red one conceded, \"let it not be said that Meropians are\n not tolerant. But, be careful, young man,\" he warned Michael. \"There\n are other beings less sophisticated than we. Guard your tongue, or you\n might find yourself in trouble.\"\n\n\n He indicated the stalwart constable who, splendid in gold helmet and\n gold-spangled pink tights, surveyed the terrain haughtily from his\n floating platform in the air.", "The bus settled softly on the landing field and the passengers flew,\n floated, crawled, undulated, or walked out. Michael looked around him\n curiously. The Lodge had contained no extraterrestrials, for such of\n those as sought seclusion had Brotherhoods on their own planets.\n\n\n Of course, even in Angeles he had seen other-worlders—humanoids from\n Vega, scaly Electrans, the wispy ubiquitous Sirians—but nothing to\n compare with the crowds that surged here. Scarlet Meropians rubbed\n tentacles with bulging-eyed Talithans; lumpish gray Jovians plodded\n alongside graceful, spidery Nunkians. And there were countless others\n whom he had seen pictured in books, but never before in reality.", "\"No, no,\nno\n!\" Michael almost shrieked. It would be horrible for him\n to be arrested before he even had time to view Portyork. \"I have lots\n of gloves in my pack,\" he babbled. \"Lots and lots. I'll put some on\n right away.\"\nWith nervous haste, he pressed the lever which dropped his pack down\n from the storage compartment. It landed on his stomach. The device had\n been invented by one of the Dschubbans who are, as everyone knows,\n hoop-shaped.\n\n\n Michael pushed the button marked\nGloves A\n, and a pair of yellow\n gauntlets slid out.\n\n\n Carpenter pressed his hands to his eyes. \"Yellow is the color of death\n on Saturn, and you know how morbid the Saturnians are about passing\n away! No one\never\nwears yellow!\"", "\"Sorry,\" Michael said humbly. The button marked\nGloves B\nyielded a\n pair of rose-colored gloves which harmonized ill with his scarlet tunic\n and turquoise breeches, but he was past caring for esthetic effects.\n\n\n \"The quality's high,\" sang a quartet of beautiful female humanoids,\n \"but the price is meager. You\nknow\nwhen you buy Plummy Fruitcake from\n Vega.\"\n\n\n The salesman patted Michael's shoulder. \"You staying a while in\n Portyork?\" Michael nodded. \"Then you'd better stick close to me for a\n while until you learn our ways. You can't run around loose by yourself\n until you've acquired civilized behavior patterns, or you'll get into\n trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, sir,\" Michael said gratefully. \"It's very kind of you.\"", "The other man clucked sympathetically. \"No doubt he was grieved over\n the death of your mother.\"\n\n\n Michael closed his eyes to shut out the sight of a baby protruding its\n fat face at him three-dimensionally, but he could not shut out its\n lisping voice: \"Does your child refuse its food, grow wizened like a\n monkey? It will grow plump with oh-so-good Mealy Mush from Nunki.\"\n\n\n \"No, sir,\" Michael replied. \"Father said that was one of the few\n blessings that brightened an otherwise benighted life.\"\n\n\n Horror contorted his fellow traveller's plump features. \"Be careful,\n young man!\" he warned. \"Lucky for you that you are talking to someone\n as broad-minded as I, but others aren't. You might be reported for\n violating a tabu. An Earth tabu, moreover.\"\n\n\n \"An Earth tabu?\"", "\"Certainly. Motherhood is sacred here on Earth and so, of course, in\n the entire United Universe. You should have known that.\"\nMichael blushed. He should indeed. For a year prior to his leaving the\n Lodge, he had carefully studied the customs and tabus of the Universe\n so that he should be able to enter the new life he planned for himself,\n with confidence and ease. Under the system of universal kinship, all\n the customs and all the tabus of all the planets were the law on all\n the other planets. For the Wise Ones had decided many years before\n that wars arose from not understanding one's fellows, not sympathizing\n with them. If every nation, every planet, every solar system had the\n same laws, customs, and habits, they reasoned, there would be no\n differences, and hence no wars.", "\"Oh, no! I'm planning to have my own. That is, I've got a—a girl,\n you see, and I thought after I had secured employment of some kind in\n Portyork, I'd send for her and we'd get married and....\"\n\n\n \"\nMarried!\n\" Carpenter was now completely shocked. \"You\nmustn't\nuse\n that word! Don't you know marriage was outlawed years ago? Exclusive\n possession of a member of the opposite sex is slavery on Talitha.\n Furthermore, supposing somebody else saw your—er—friend and wanted\n her also; you wouldn't wish him to endure the frustration of not having\n her, would you?\"\n\n\n Michael squared his jaw. \"You bet I would.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself away slightly, as if to avoid contamination.\n \"This is un-Universal. Young man, if I didn't have a kind heart, I\n would report you.\"", "\"By the way—\"\n\n\n \"It is extremely rude and hence illegal,\" Carpenter glared, \"to\n interrupt anyone who is speaking.\"\n\n\n \"But I would like,\" Michael whispered very earnestly, \"to get washed.\n If I might.\"\n\n\n The other man frowned. \"Let me see. I believe one of the old landmarks\n was converted into a lavatory. Only thing of suitable dimensions.\n Anyhow, it was absolutely useless for any other purpose. We have to\n take a taxi there; it's more than two hundred yards. Custom, you know.\"\n\n\n \"A taxi? Isn't there one closer?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, impatient youth! There aren't too many altogether. The\n installations are extremely expensive.\"\n\n\n They hailed the nearest taxi, which happened to be one of the variety\n equipped with dancing girls. Fortunately the ride was brief.", "\"Of course I know that,\" Michael said impatiently. \"But what's that got\n to do with me?\"\n\n\n The salesman was wide-eyed. \"But if it is forbidden on Electra, it\n becomes automatically prohibited here.\"\n\n\n \"But Electrans have eight fingers on each hand,\" Michael protested,\n \"with two fingernails on each—all covered with green scales.\"\n\n\n Carpenter drew himself up as far as it was possible to do so while\n lying down. \"Do eight fingers make one a lesser Universal?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Is he inferior to you then because he has sixteen fingernails?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not, but—\"\n\n\n \"Would you like to be called guilty of—\" Carpenter paused before the\n dreaded word—\"\nintolerance\n?\"", "After gazing furtively over his shoulder to see that no females were\n watching, Carpenter approached a large map of the landing field and\n pressed a button. A tiny red light winked demurely for an instant.\n\n\n \"That's the nearest one,\" Carpenter explained.\nInside a small, white, functional-looking building unobtrusively\n marked \"Feeding Station,\" Carpenter showed Michael where to insert a\n two-credit piece in a slot. A door slid back and admitted Michael into\n a tiny, austere room, furnished only with a table, a chair, a food\n compartment, and an advideo. The food consisted of tabloid synthetics\n and was tasteless. Michael knew that only primitive creatures waste\n time and energy in growing and preparing natural foods. It was all a\n matter of getting used to this stuff, he thought glumly, as he tried to\n chew food that was meant to be gulped." ] ]
test	51241	[ "What is the relationship between Molly and Roddie?", "How does the relationship between Ida and Roddie change over the course of the passage?", "Of the following traits, which best describe Roddie?", "What was Ida's primary goal going into the passage?", "What was Roddie's primary goal going into the passage?", "What is not a described element of the world in this story?", "Based on the information in this passage, how do Roddie and Ida feel about space travel?", "Why does Roddie eat baby food?", "In your opinion, do you think this story has a happy ending?" ]	[ [ "They're lovers wanting to get married when things calm down", "They're partners in work and life", "They're like siblings to each other, Roddie's almost Molly's older brother", "Molly is Roddie's caretaker" ], [ "They start out as lovers and end as rivals", "They start out as strangers and end up as potential friends/lovers", "They start out as friends and love develops", "They start out as strangers and end as rivals" ], [ "Adventurous, skeptical, kindhearted", "Ignorant, rude, athletic", "Bold, independent, brutish", "Athletic, brave, generous" ], [ "To relay an important message to Roddie", "To adventure into the city and help", "To chase after a guy she likes as he goes into the city", "To help Roddie escape the city" ], [ "To receive a message that's coming in from outside the city walls", "To escape the city", "To prove himself to the robots", "To disarm as many robots as possible" ], [ "Guarded cities", "Advanced robotic technology", "Bullet trains", "Long-distances sensors" ], [ "We have no reason/evidence to know their opinions on space travel", "Roddie is indifferent, Ida hates it", "Neither of them feels strongly in favor or against space travel", "Roddie hates it, Ida is indifferent" ], [ "It's the only thing he can access in the city; all the other food and supplies have expired.", "It's what he's accustomed to in his cultural landscape", "It's the only thing he can access in the city; all the other food was taken.", "It's what he's accustomed to because it's presumably what he's always been given" ], [ "The ending was very happy, there was a lot of excitement", "The ending was relatively happy", "It does not, the ending was sad", "It does not, the ending was unsettling" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.", "\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.", "There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"", "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "Boat? What was a boat? \"How would I know?\" he repeated, voice tight\n with fear of discovery.\n\n\n If she noticed the tension, she didn't show it. Certainly her whisper\n was friendly enough. \"Oh, you're one of the fellows from Bodega, then.\n They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn't\n it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn't\n have to use boats.... But, say, how are we going to get away from here?\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't know,\" Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and\n rising. \"How did you get in?\"\n\n\n \"Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the\n dust and they led me here. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"Scouting around,\" Roddie said vaguely. \"How did you know I was a man\n when I came back?\"", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam." ], [ "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....", "In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.", "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"", "But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.", "\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.", "\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"", "It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"" ], [ "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.", "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.", "He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"" ], [ "He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "But Ida didn't seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she\n dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved\n steel surface.\n\n\n For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the\n ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or\n handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.\n\n\n Except it wouldn't be\nhis\nsolution. Her death wouldn't prove him to\n his friends.\n\n\n He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog\n that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along\n the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve\n steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.\n\n\n Blood was on the cable where she'd passed. More blood stained it when\n he'd followed.", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....", "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.", "\"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.", "\"Well, I guess the boats have gone,\" Ida said. \"You could swim the\n Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn't. You'll\n think it's crazy, but I've given this some thought, and even looked it\n over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!\"\n\n\n Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even\n her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there\nwere\na way over the bridge....\n\n\n \"It's broken,\" he said. \"How in the world can we cross it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you'll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don't want to be\n alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?\"\n\n\n Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed\n her—\nif\nnothing happened when she saw him.", "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"" ], [ "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.", "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"", "The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.", "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.", "\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....", "But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge." ], [ "But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was,\n though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger,\n thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his\n friends. Like the growth he'd been undergoing till recently, these were\n things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring\n eyes. Cold as it was, he'd have to hide.\n\n\n Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite\n complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light\n on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off,\n an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and\n rustle as they scampered.", "The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.", "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "\"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of\n gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small\n portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed\n to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its\n color.\n\n\n Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no\n interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes,\n Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.\n\n\n Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which\n Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins\n of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable\n over the bridge's gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was\n the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on\n the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need\n to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.", "It was lucky he did. The left arm's pair of hands suddenly writhed off\n the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached\n at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught\n and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another\n harmlessly.\nMeanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another\n casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the\n time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie\n swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces\n of the other to make a whole one.\n\n\n To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was\n new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the\n soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed\n him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders\n repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.", "He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.", "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"", "\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.", "He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"", "He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"", "There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.", "Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came." ], [ "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of\n his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder\n at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for\n this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.\nHe'd never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to\n look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of\n concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the\n unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked\n girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.\n\n\n Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads\n made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.\n\n\n Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.\n\n\n \"What are you trying to do?\" he demanded.", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "\"It's awful,\" Ida said. \"So few young men are left, so many\n casualties....\n\n\n \"But why do you—we—keep up the fight?\" Roddie asked. \"I mean, the\n soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and\n they\ncan't\nleave, so they won't attack. Let them alone, and there'll\n be plenty of young men.\"\n\n\n \"Well!\" said Ida, sharply. \"You need indoctrination! Didn't they ever\n tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep\n us out? Don't you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our\n tools and things?\"\n\n\n She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance.\n But she wasn't standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too\n close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder\n every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....", "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "\"I'm Ida, naturally! Just how many girls\nare\nthere in this raiding\n party?\"\n\n\n His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!\n\n\n Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused\n suddenly. This girl—whatever\nthat\nwas—seemed to think him one of\n her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn\n delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he\n killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!\n\n\n He stalled, seeking a gambit. \"How would\nI\nknow how many girls there\n are?\"\n\n\n Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. \"I'm sorry,\" the girl\n said. \"I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either.\n Roddie.... Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?\"", "In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.", "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"" ], [ "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "Ida's grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie\n turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to\n his. He grimaced and turned away his head.\n\n\n Ida's response was quick. \"Forgive me,\" she breathed, and slipped from\n his arms, but she held herself erect. \"I was so scared. And then we've\n had no sleep, no food or water.\"\n\n\n Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to\n deny his own humiliating needs.\n\n\n \"I guess you're not as strong as me,\" he said smugly. \"I'll take care\n of you. Of course we can't sleep now, but I'll get food and water.\"", "\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "\"I'm\nnot\na little boy!\" Roddie suddenly shouted. \"I'm full-grown and\n I've never even\nseen\nan Invader. Why won't you let me go and fight?\"\n\n\n Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly's shoulder.\n She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\n \"A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—\" she chanted.\n\n\n Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had\n helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the\n kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.\n\n\n \"Wuzzums hungry?\" Molly cooed, still rocking.\n\n\n Utterly disgusted, Roddie ripped her head off her neck.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"", "It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body\n heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!\nQuickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready\n for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the\n darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over\n that curving surface for identifying features.\n\n\n While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly\n seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage\n kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an\n unexpected voice.\n\n\n \"Get your filthy hands off me!\" it whispered angrily. \"Who do you think\n you are?\"\n\n\n Startled, he dropped his hammer. \"I'm Roddie,\" he said, squatting to\n fumble for it. \"Who do you think\nyou\nare?\"", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would\n admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at\n every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only\n his holds, till he rammed Ida's rear with his head.\nShe had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her\n and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced\n by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in\n sight.\n\n\n Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier\n had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he'd told Ida, never left\n the city, were not built to do so. But\nhe\nwas here; with luck, he\n could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.\n\n\n \"Go on!\" he ordered hoarsely. \"Move!\"", "But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the\n supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as\n Ida herself. Roddie didn't think, in any case, that her death would\n satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he\n might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this\n enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly's knitting needles could protect\n him.", "\"Oh, not at all,\" Ida replied quickly. \"Different, yes, but I wouldn't\n say odd.\"\nWhen they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie's\n assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if\n she felt some of the doubt he'd tried to conceal, shared his visions of\n what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an\n Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.\n\n\n Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.\n\n\n For that very reason, because he didn't know what precautions would do\n any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most\n direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida's fears, and\n she began to talk.\n\n\n Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless\n to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had\n been.", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.\n\n\n A giggle broke the pause. \"It's nice of you to wait and let me go first\n up the ladder,\" the girl said. \"But where the heck is the rusty old\n thing?\"\n\n\n \"I'll go first,\" said Roddie. He might need the advantage. \"The\n ladder's right behind me.\"\n\n\n He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from\n street level to grasp and neutralize the girl's right. Then, nervously\n fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.\n\n\n She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her\n shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet\n that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.\n\n\n Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that\n would make things easy when the time came.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and\n concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over\n the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they\n could see the beginning of the bridge approach.\n\n\n A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and\n clung to Roddie's arm.\n\n\n \"Behind me!\" he whispered urgently. \"Get behind me and hold on!\"\n\n\n He felt Ida's arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back\n below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a\n soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.\n\"It's all right,\" Roddie said, his voice breaking.\n\n\n There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned\n and walked away.", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn't dead; it merely lurked. And as\n an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even\n in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the\n One who'd built him must have been an apprentice.\n\n\n For just such reasons he'd developed the hideout toward which he now\n walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of\n how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock\n itself a difference to be hidden.\n\n\n His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A\n weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover's slotted rim, was\n the levering key that opened its door.\nEverything\nwas wrong tonight! He couldn't even find the bar. Of\n course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to\n move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for\n ventilation." ], [ "There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened\n wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.\n\n\n Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted.\n Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar\n non-mechanical construction.\n\n\n Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling\n as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling\n body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.\n\n\n He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare's end, the fog\n thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last\n hundred feet to sanctuary.", "She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her\n teeth into his throat. \"Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the\n courage.\"\n\n\n It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face,\n but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He\n compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought\n for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.\n\n\n \"It isn't reasonable to kill you now,\" he said. \"Too dark. You can't\n possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let's see how I\n feel in the morning.\"\n\n\n Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.\n\n\n And by morning he knew he was a Man.", "He wasn't worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the\n cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks;\n what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he\n peered was fire-proof.\n\n\n But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke\n in from the north, he'd been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while\n the soldiers went out to fight.\n\n\n And nowadays Molly's presence wasn't the comfort it used to be. He felt\n almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in\n that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, \"The soldiers\n don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The soldiers don't\nwant\nlittle boys. The\n soldiers don't—\"", "\"I'm taking you with me,\" Ida said firmly. \"Taking you where you\n belong!\"\n\n\n \"No!\" he blurted, drawing his hammer. \"I can't go, nor let you go. I\n belong here!\"\n\n\n Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.\n\n\n She wasn't so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and\n out among the trees, leaped to the bridge's underpinnings where they\n thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.\n\n\n Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable\n anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling\n support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was\n trapped.\n\n\n He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly\n would, to finish the job....", "But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry\n out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all\n obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against\n everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even\nhim\nout\n when he was aflame....\n\n\n Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling.\n He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the\n street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.\n\n\n Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but\n saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could\n have entered through the iron cover?\n\n\n He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.", "\"It\ncan't\nbe,\" Roddie objected. \"The city surely belongs to those\n who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to\n me. Each of\nus\nhas a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be\n aimless. Each of\nus\nhelps preserve the city; you only try to rob and\n end it by destroying it.\nMy\npeople must be the true Men, because\n they're so much more rational than yours.... And it isn't rational to\n let you escape.\"\n\n\n Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.\n\n\n \"Rational! What's rational about murdering a defenseless girl in\n cold blood? Don't you realize we're the same sort of being, we two?\n Don't—don't you remember how we've been with each other all day?\"", "She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet\n somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said\n nothing.\n\n\n \"Never mind!\" Ida said viciously. \"You can't make me beg. Go ahead and\n kill—see if it proves you're superior. My people will take over the\n city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack\n friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!\"\nScornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was\n Roddie's turn to stand and stare.\n\n\n \"Purpose!\" Ida flung at him over her shoulder. \"Logic! Women hear so\n much of that from men! You're a man, all right! Men\nalways\ncall it\n logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness,\n affection—all emotional, aren't they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is\n for creating, and it's so much more logical to destroy, isn't it?\"", "He went on with his questioning. \"Why are\nyou\nhere? I mean, sure, the\n others are after tools and things, but what's\nyour\npurpose?\"\n\n\n Ida shrugged. \"I'll admit no girl has ever done it before,\" she said,\n \"but I thought I could help with the wounded. That's why I have no\n weapon.\"\n\n\n She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of\n words. \"It's the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored\n and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the\n boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was\n being silly?\"\n\n\n \"No, but you do seem a little purposeless.\"", "He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when\n heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on\n the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.\n\n\n Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new\n idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled\n with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out\n the sparks in his uncut blond mane.\n\n\n As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense\n firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide\n foam.", "Soon there would be nothing left of the\nPrivate Property Keep Out\nthat, according to Molly's bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to\n them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves\n would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed\n servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.\n\n\n And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He\n might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn't know. And\n Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with\n Invaders twenty years before, couldn't or wouldn't say.\n\n\n Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he'd do his duty as\n the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might\n accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first\n aid was useful to them.", "He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a\n full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he\n looked too long.\n\n\n Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of\n fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst\n into sudden laughter.\n\n\n \"Diapers!\" she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. \"My big,\n strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and\n carrying only a hammer to fight with! You're the most unforgettable\n character I have ever known!\"\n\n\n He'd passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath,\n and said, \"I think you'll find me a little odd, in some ways.\"", "\"This watch,\" he said, touching the radium dial. \"It's a talisman.\"\n\n\n But Ida's eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She\n was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can\n with rain-water. She didn't finish her own portion, but lay back in the\n rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her\n strength.\n\n\n And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed\n plainly that he'd given himself away.", "\"Because you couldn't see me, silly! You know perfectly well these\n androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!\"\n\n\n Indeed he did know! Many times he'd felt ashamed that Molly could find\n him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the\n manhole would help him now to redeem himself....\n\"I'd like to get a look at you,\" he said.\n\n\n The girl laughed self-consciously. \"It's getting gray out. You'll see\n me soon enough.\"\n\n\n But she'd see\nhim\n, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.\n\n\n \"What'll we do when it's light?\" he asked.", "Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he\n had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting\n a pace Ida couldn't match. By the time she caught up with him, he had\n grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose.\n Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed\n an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained\n spinach or squash.\n\n\n \"Baby food!\" she muttered. \"Maybe it's just what we need, but to eat\n baby food with a man wearing a diaper.... Tell me, Roddie, how did you\n happen to know where to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, this is the northern end of the city,\" he answered, shrugging.\n \"I've been here before.\"\n\n\n \"Why did the soldier let us go?\"", "Roddie took the hammer from his waist.\n\n\n \"Don't! Oh, don't!\" Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her\n face with scratched and bloodied hands.\n\n\n Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and,\n weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends.\n Ida's tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.\n\n\n \"Why should you cry?\" he asked comfortingly. \"You know your people will\n come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.\"\n\n\n \"But—but my people are your people, too,\" Ida wailed. \"It's so\n senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don't you see? Your\n friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the\n city is ours, not theirs!\"", "\"You aren't being very nice to my baby,\" she murmured, and thrust her\n knitting needles into his eyes.\n\n\n Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft\n spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.\nRoddie salvaged and returned Molly's needles. Then he examined the\n patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.", "Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they\n were unbearably wearing.\nIn the street, even before he'd wiped off the foam, he regretted\n his flight. The fire was back home. And here in the cold of this\n fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble,\n the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His\n cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the\n diaper's top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from\n a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood\n irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more\n familiar bedlam.", "They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within\n the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and\n slept for several hours.\nRoddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip.\n Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings\n they looked out on a strange and isolated world.\n\n\n To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount\n Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy\n white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons\n on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding,\n tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.", "There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight\n extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands\n touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an\n angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.\n\n\n \"Sir,\" they chorused, \"we have met the enemy and he is ours.\"\n\n\n He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular\n seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.\n\n\n \"Come here, fellow,\" Roddie said. \"Let's see if I can fix that.\"\n\n\n The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped\n out a bayonet.\n\n\n \"Death to Invaders!\" he yelled, and charged crazily.\nMolly stepped in front of him.", "It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had\n cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn't made him a\n mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.\nHe was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up\n along the wall, he put Molly's head back on her neck.\n\n\n She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. \"Hello, boys,\" she simpered.\n \"Looking for a good time?\"\n\n\n Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many\n things he didn't know about Molly. But there was work to be done.\n Carefully he framed the ritual words she'd taught him: \"Soldiers, come\n to attention and report!\"" ] ]
test	20052	[ "What is a potential moral to this passage?", "What is the overall structure of the passage?", "Which of the following is not a pickup strategy discussed in this article?", "Did any of the partners of these men forgive them for their infidelity?", "Does the article reflect positively about any of the mens' character?", "Which man is described as having a very young girlfriend?", "Which man is described as being particularly talkative in a romantic encounter?", "Were all of Clinton's sexual encounters consensual?", "What does the article show that Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Clinton have in common?" ]	[ [ "Cheating and womanizing can be overcome when you mature as a person", "Cheating as a famous person will likely secure the attention of the tabloids for an extended period", "Usually for infidelity stories one tabloid will always (usually successfully) try to take point on the story", "Tabloids only focus on infidelity for so long before they pick up on another topic" ], [ "An in-depth analysis of Jerry Springer's sex life", "An in-depth analysis of Leo DiCaprio's sex life", "A focus on Clinton and somewhat on Leonardo, followed by some mentions of Springer and Gifford", "An equally in-depth deep dive into 4 men with womanizing scandals" ], [ "Asking women how they're feeling about their jobs", "Taking women on planes", "Getting assistants to approach women for them", "The use of a pickup-line" ], [ "The article shows that all of them did", "The article shows that at least one of them did", "We don't have enough information to tell", "The article shows that none of them did" ], [ "Honestly most of them seem pretty respectful", "Not really, they all seem pretty terrible to women", "The article describes all of them positively in other areas of their livelihood", "They don't seem that disrespectful, they all at least care about consent" ], [ "Leonardo", "Bill", "Frank", "Jerry" ], [ "Leonardo", "Frank", "Jerry", "Bill" ], [ "We know that the majority of them were not", "We don't really know at all", "Yes they were", "We know that some of them were not" ], [ "Both like to have sex on planes", "Both like to have ice cream before sex", "Both want to exclusively sleep with much younger women", "Both prefer to have sex in their homes" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House" ], [ "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"" ], [ "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor." ], [ "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House" ], [ "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor." ], [ "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"" ], [ "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "she left, Nelvis told McGrath, he went into the study, where he found towels smeared with lipstick on the floor.", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told" ], [ "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "minutes later, she let McGrath out. Schiff told the Star the story was \"absolutely not true.\" McGrath also solves the mystery of the account of the stained Kleenex reportedly found by another steward, Bayani Nelvis. McGrath says Nelvis told", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up" ], [ "In the world of the tabloids, Clinton's exploits are just an appetizer for someone whose sex life they really care about: Titanic star DiCaprio, who has obviously chosen Clinton as a role", "DiCaprio is like his mentor, Clinton. The Star 's story on the depositions of the Arkansas state troopers who acted as Clinton's bodyguards says of his liaisons, \"[S]ome [were] on-going affairs, others just stands of one night or even", "All these high jinks have the Globe worried that DiCaprio could end up with the same medical condition for which the Star says Clinton is receiving treatment. (\"Clinton has secretly begun therapy for sexual addiction in a bid to save his presidency,\" the publication reports.) According to the Globe , DiCaprio is still only a sex addict in training. To avoid this fate, a \"pal\" warns, the actor \"needs to settle down and find out what real love is all about.\"", "The Wright brothers probably never anticipated their contribution to priapism but, like Clinton, DiCaprio is also an advocate of airborne sex. For one woman, according to the Globe , he hired a jet. He \"served her champagne with fresh strawberries and ice cream, and they made love while looking at the stars.\" The publication does not mention if any oranges were involved. \n\n And both DiCaprio and Clinton have found themselves in a few cock-ups over their sexual escapades. This week the Enquirer reports that while in Cuba, DiCaprio ran into model Naomi Campbell, and the two swam naked at a Havana hotel. But Campbell became outraged when she found out DiCaprio was simultaneously dating an 18-year-old Cuban model. Later, however, DiCaprio and Campbell were seen together in Paris and London, although the New York Post quotes a Campbell representative who says the two are just \"good friends.\"", "a blonde waiting to get on the same plane. He has been on a \"date-a-day spree\" for almost a year, friends tell the publication. Though DiCaprio has gone out with a string of models and actresses, including Liv Tyler, Claire", "This month the tabs explore the sexual gambits of famous men. Chief among them is the commander in chief. The Star breaks news this week with an account by a flight attendant on Clinton's 1992 campaign plane of an alleged sexual assault by him. The plane was called Longhorn One (Clinton had to settle for this name; Long Dong Silver and Monkey Business were already taken) and is described by the National Enquirer as the \"lust-crazed Bill Clinton campaign jet.\" The plane has figured prominently in the tabloid universe in recent weeks. The Enquirer quotes an \"insider\" as saying, \"Bill Clinton had his own 'Mile-High Club' up in the front of the plane.\" And the Star last week ran pictures of Clinton arm in arm with, and with his hand on the leg of, flight attendant Debra Schiff, who later went on to become a White House receptionist.", "The Pickup Artists \n\n Sometimes when a man and woman first meet, the man speaks words so true, so stirring, that the woman is helpless to resist. See if you can identify the world-class smooth operators who spoke these opening lines: \n\n 1) \"I could get lost in those blue eyes.\" \n\n 2) \"You've got eyes like Julia Roberts'--they're so big.\" [If this fails, follow with:] \"Your eyes haunt me.\" \n\n 3) \"You're really beautiful, you know that? ... Call me, it'll be fun.\" \n\n 4) \"You're as pretty as my wife.\" \n\n Sure, you were tempted to guess Bill Clinton for all four, but the answers are: 1) Clinton; 2) Leonardo DiCaprio; 3) Jerry Springer; 4) Frank Gifford.", "There is yet another DiCaprio love triangle, the Star reports this week. According to the publication, DiCaprio was smitten with actress Elizabeth Berkley, but in a strange Cyrano-like move, he had a friend conduct a phone romance for him. During one phone call, Berkley's boyfriend picked up the receiver and became furious. DiCaprio's friend told the boyfriend to meet him in front of the New York hotel where DiCaprio and his pals were staying. A brawl ensued, although DiCaprio emerged from the hotel bar only after the fight, to smoke a cigarette. As for the black eye DiCaprio is now sporting, the Globe reports that the actor was accidentally hit by a men's room door at another New York bar.", "No one is worrying about the fate of talk show host Jerry Springer. The Star labels his lines as \"dumb and dumber\" in an account of how he tried to pick up a \"Los Angeles lovely\" with an offer to fly her to Chicago and give her tickets to his show. \"I burst out laughing--he just looked so desperate,\" the woman says. Springer does have one thing in common with Clinton: He likes to use staffers to approach women for him. The Star reports that Clinton, while governor, would spot women in the audience while he was speaking. According to one trooper, he would then say: \"The lady in the red dress, the lady in the green dress ... would you go get me her name and phone number? She has that come-hither look.\" Springer's approach is similar, says the publication. \"He peeks at the audience before the show to pick out pretty girls, then sends crew members to get their phone numbers,\" says an ex-staffer.", "Finally, there's the orange incident. Clinton got a fruit basket that contained an orange that was, in Zercher's words, \"shrivelled and deformed--it looked like a woman's sexual organ.\" Clinton brought it to the galley to show the flight attendants. He said: \"I'm going to keep this. This is so great because I haven't been getting any of this lately.\" He carried it around and flashed it at Zercher for the next two weeks, until someone finally had to take the deformed orange away from the future leader of the free world.", "On another occasion, Zercher says, she pushed open an unlocked lavatory door to find Clinton standing there, unzipped. She says he said to her, \"Well, why don't you come in and shut the door?\" Then there was the time he saw the flight attendants reading Gennifer Flowers' interview in Penthouse . Zercher says Clinton kept asking them what the best part was. Schiff finally said that it was Flowers' comment that he was good at giving oral sex. \"That's pretty accurate,\" Zercher recalls him saying. \"It's one of my favorite things.\" \n\n He also told them that one thing he was afraid of reporters uncovering was a story about a couple who were friends of his. They were getting divorced because the wife found the husband cheating on her with barnyard animals. Zercher recalls her reaction: \"My God, can you imagine if he becomes president that we were sitting here talking about farm animals--and he's the one that brought it up.\"", "But it is the account of flight attendant Cristy Zercher that fleshes out the Clinton seduction style. His opening comment to her was Answer 1, above. And Zercher claims that late one night, while almost everyone was sleeping--including Hillary, who was about six feet from Zercher's jump seat--Clinton came over to talk. He laid his head on Zercher's shoulder, asked her to talk about herself and, for 40 minutes, on and off, rubbed the side of her left breast. \"I thought, 'Is he really doing what I think he's doing?' \" she recalls. While feeling her breast, he also wanted to feel her pain. When she mentioned she was divorced, Clinton began asking repeatedly of the marriage, \"Was the sex at least good?\"", "Danes, Juliette Lewis, and Kate Moss, a friend says he is no snob and that a woman doesn't have to be famous to merit his advances. \"Leo's motto is, 'So many girls, so little time.' \" In this, too,", "Schiff has also appeared recently in the tabs. The Star has an account from Clinton's former chief White House steward Mike McGrath--who has testified before the grand jury investigating the current White House", "him he saw Monica Lewinsky emerge from the president's study looking \"shaky\" and \"in shock\" in late 1995. Like some of the other women who reportedly emerge from the study, her hair was mussed and her clothes askew. After", "model and who, at only 23, has a good chance of surpassing the president's accomplishments. According to the Globe , after he sorrowfully bid adieu at the airport to his latest love, singer Alanis Morissette, he began chatting up", "This isn't the first time Zercher's name has surfaced. In a 1994 Washington Post story she says that after being contacted by reporter Michael Isikoff, who wanted to know about events on the Clinton plane, she relayed news of the phone call to Debra Schiff, who, in turn, relayed it to Clinton aide Bruce Lindsey. Zercher says Lindsey called her and urged her to say \"all positive things\" about her experiences. It's become a pattern in reports of Clinton's sexual advances that friends of the women in question confirm the advance but often say it wasn't unwelcome. Sure enough, a Zercher friend tells the New York Daily News that Zercher, who is now an executive assistant in New Jersey, told her several years ago that Clinton groped her and grabbed her breasts. But instead of finding his behavior \"humiliating,\" as she now tells the Star was the case, the friend says she laughed it off.", "Perhaps no one's opening line is lamer than Frank Gifford's. \"You're as pretty as my wife\" was his pathetic, yet successful, approach with Suzen Johnson, the former flight attendant with whom the Globe taped him having sex. (Perhaps the lesson here is that guys with sex problems should take Amtrak.) But now the Enquirer reports there's hope for men who stray in even the most public ways. After being wooed back for almost a year, Gifford's wife and talk show hostess Kathie Lee has told a friend, she forgives him. \"At first I thought I'd die. But now I've come to love Frank more than ever,\" Kathie Lee told the friend who told the Enquirer . \"And I know our love will last forever!\"", "one hour. The women named included aides, wives of major supporters, executives, reporters, beauty queens, barflies, and even a judge.\"", "scandal--about the Saturday that Schiff locked him in the pantry off the Oval Office and reportedly said, \"We don't want to be disturbed for 20 minutes.\" He said he heard Schiff go into the study, where the president was. Twenty" ] ]
test	20045	[ "What is \"spillover\" as it relates to free-speech law?", "Why does the author believe the CDA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court?", "What was the result of Sable and the Denver Consortium?", "Why is it difficult to shield children from sexually explicit materials without simultaneously denying adults the ability to view them?", "Why was the Pacifica decision limited?", "Why did the Supreme Court overrule a Michigan state law banning the distribution of materials that might be unsuitable for minors?", "Why is spillover a persistent legal problem?", "What seems to be the most effective resolution to the spillover problem according to the article's author?" ]	[ [ "There are psychological and philosophical repercussions for participating in free speech that is harmful to the character of another individual or entity.", "Some speech is very harmful to others and therefore can be restricted.", "There is no right to broadcast falsehoods because such lies may cause harm to a person's character or be used to sell products.", "When a law is enacted in an effort to protect one party, the free speech of another might be adversely affected." ], [ "The technological alternatives to the law offer significant benefits, even though the burden of the law is admittedly small.", "It doesn't have many more benefits than content blocking technology and creates too much spillover on the free speech of adults.", "There is too much pressure from free speech advocates.", "They will rule in favor of protecting the children from obscene material over the rights of adults to view such material." ], [ "They both protected indecent speech and made specific recommendations for alternatives to banning Internet porn.", "The court would not allow laws that venture too far into restricting free speech for adults in the name of protecting children unless there were no other options for protecting them.", "They would not tolerate any unnecessary spillover onto adults even in the scenario that the burden on children was impossible to correct.", "The government recommended a less restrictive alternative in the form of computer software that blocks specific sites." ], [ "It is very difficult, if not impossible, to monitor the ages of people accessing specific material in many cases.", "The law prevents any company from doing so because of the First Amendment.", "The technology has not yet been invented to restrict access to specific websites based on a person's age.", "Children will find a way to access material that they want to view no matter what the law says." ], [ "It seemed to only refer to radio and television broadcasts. ", "It only restricted adult access to indecent materials during specific hours of the day.", "It did not make specific provisions for protecting children, only limiting what the adults could consume.", "It neglected to include magazines and books in its findings." ], [ "They felt that a total ban was without precedent and argued that state legislatures could not make that sort of decision independently.", "They felt the law was tantamount to allowing perceived harm to come to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "The Court found that doing so would essentially restrict the material adults were allowed to consume to child-appropriate only.", "They felt that the law did not go far enough in protecting minors and therefore should be reconsidered before implemented." ], [ "The courts are constantly overwhelmed by cases related to free speech, obscenity, profanity, and indecency.", "Protecting children against obscenity is a very touchy subject, and courts have issued differing opinions on the matter over the years.", "Legally speaking, one cannot simultaneously protect all speech that has value while prohibiting all speech that does not and may be considered harmful.", "The legal precedent is so vast and varied that there is little consistent groundwork to follow in terms of constitutionality. " ], [ "Free speech should never be protected if it has any potential expose a child to material deemed harmful by the courts.", "Free speech must be protected at all costs, even if it means potential and occasional harm to children.", "Courts ought to order websites to utilize new technologies that ban access for individuals under a certain age by labelling its contents as \"clean\" or \"dirty.\"", "The answer lies somewhere between laws protecting free speech for adults and utilizing new technology that restricts access to objectionable material as decided by parents." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed." ], [ "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards." ], [ "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"" ], [ "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character." ], [ "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed.", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards." ], [ "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed." ], [ "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed." ], [ "Speech and Spillover \n\n The Supreme Court probably will overturn the notorious Communications Decency Act. But the issues are not as cut-and-dried as some might suggest. \n\n By Eugene Volokh \n\n (1,777 words; posted Thursday, July 18; to be composted Thursday, July 25) \n\n One of the great recurring problems in free-speech law is spillover. Free speech, the Supreme Court has held, has limits: Some speech is so harmful and so lacking in redeeming value that it may be restricted. Threats, blackmail, and false advertising are obvious examples. There's no right to say, \"Your money or your life\" to a stranger in a dark alley; there's no right to spread intentional falsehoods about your product or your enemy's character.", "This spillover problem is a recurring question in First Amendment law. The law cannot restrict all harmful, valueless speech and at the same time protect all valuable speech. A classic illustration of the spillover problem is the Communications Decency Act, passed earlier this year in an attempt to stop \"indecency\" on the Internet. A three-judge federal court was probably correct in striking down the CDA June 11. But the judges' opinions don't squarely face the spillover problem. Perhaps--contrary to the suggestions of some Supreme Court cases--spillover questions should always be resolved in favor of free speech. Perhaps children's increased vulnerability is a price worth paying for extra freedom for adults. But it's important to confront honestly both what's being lost and gained in the process. \n\n The most controversial part of the CDA prohibits anyone from \n\n \"us[ing] an interactive computer service\" \n\n \"to display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age\"", "The Supreme Court likewise has held, rightly or wrongly, that minors have no right to see very sexually explicit material, and that people (except, perhaps, the minors' parents) have no right to distribute such material to them. Psychologists and philosophers can debate this, but as a constitutional matter, the question is settled. \n\n But it's often impossible to keep such materials from children without also denying them to adults. Bookstores can check customers' ages, but TV broadcasters, muralists, or people who post things on the Internet can't. The law can allow public display of this material, protecting adults' access but also making it available to children; or the law can prohibit public display, insulating children but also restricting adults. Either way there's spillover. Either the restriction spills over onto speech that should be free, or the freedom spills over onto speech that, in the judgment of most legislators, voters, and judges, should be restricted.", "The purely technological fix, then, is less restrictive than the CDA, but it's also less effective. The CDA, of course, won't be perfect, either--many will flout it, and Web sites in other countries won't be bound by it--but the ban plus the technological fix probably will shield children better than the technological fix alone. Does this extra protection justify the considerable spillover? The precedents don't answer this. \n\n There's a hybrid technological and legal approach that might be more effective, and thus more likely to be the sort of \"less restrictive alternative\" that would make the total ban invalid. The law might demand that online material be rated--that any sufficiently sexually explicit text or image be marked \"dirty\" in a way that computers can easily recognize. Parents could then set up their children's computers to block access to these pages. Alternatively, the software could assume that any page is dirty unless it's labeled \"clean,\" with the law making it illegal to falsely mark \"clean\" a page that's actually dirty.", "Sable and Denver Consortium make clear that the court won't tolerate unnecessary spillover onto adults. But on the tough question--what happens if it's impossible to shield minors without burdening adults?--there's an unresolved tension. Butler says that the speech must be allowed. Pacifica , Sable , and now Denver Consortium suggest that the speech may be restricted.", "Another important, though somewhat ambiguous, precedent is Sable Communications vs. FCC (1990), in which the court struck down a ban on dial-a-porn. The government argued the ban was needed to protect children. But the court pointed out that there might be \"less restrictive alternatives\" that would insulate children without entirely banning the medium. For example, the court said, the government could require services to take credit-card numbers, or require phone companies to let parents block area-code-900 phone calls. \n\n Still, the court was willing to tolerate some spillover; after all, even the alternatives it suggested would deny access to some adults. And it also hinted that it might even allow a total ban if such alternatives could be shown to be inadequate. Denver Consortium followed the same pattern: It struck down a restriction on indecent speech because there were other effective alternatives available; but it suggested that such a restriction might be constitutional if it were, in fact, the only effective way to shield children.", "But in some recent cases, the court has taken a different approach. One such case is the oft-criticized FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation (1978). The Pacifica court upheld a ban on \"indecency\"--George Carlin's \"Seven Dirty Words\" monologue--on radio and television broadcasts \"when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.\" The spillover was clear: Adults were deprived of access to certain materials on certain media (radio and television) during most hours. But the justices were willing to allow such a restriction of adults' access to speech in order to shield children.", "Many people, of course, might misrate their material--intentionally or accidentally. But the CDA will be intentionally or accidentally violated, too. In fact, a rating requirement might be more effective than a total ban. People may be more willing to comply with the rating law, since it would let them continue selling their wares or expressing their views. Still, ratings won't shield children using computers that don't have the rating software turned on. And no one knows how often this will happen. \n\n The CDA is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Some say the justices should simply rule that sexually explicit material isn't as dangerous for children as it's cracked up to be, and therefore, free speech should prevail. But many people, probably including the justices, are willing to accept that sexually explicit material is indeed harmful to children. Other CDA critics assert that the technological alternatives will shield children every bit as well as a total ban would, and that the CDA therefore is entirely unnecessary. But that too will be hard to prove.", "Ultimately, then, the justices will have to make a hard choice: sacrifice some shielding of children in order to protect the freedom of grownups, or sacrifice some access by grownups in order to shield children. My guess is that the marginal benefit of the CDA over the technological alternatives is small enough, and the burden that the law creates is large enough, that the CDA will be overturned. But it's a closer question than many might think.", "The Supreme Court precedents are unclear. In a 1957 case called Butler vs. Michigan , a state law barred distribution of material that might be unsuitable for minors. The court concluded that such a ban was unconstitutional. The law, it said, \"reduce[d] the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. ... Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig.\" The court agreed that the state could bar distribution of such stuff directly to children. But clearly, such limited restrictions don't work as well as a total ban. The court apparently was willing to tolerate some perceived harm to children in order to protect the freedom of adults.", "On the Internet, is it possible to shield children without restricting adults? Parents can get software--SurfWatch is one popular brand--that keeps their computers from accessing any place that's on a list of \"dirty\" locations, a list selected and frequently updated by the software designers. If the government wanted to, it could buy SurfWatch (for a fraction of what it would cost to enforce the CDA) and give it away to parents. Could this be the \"less restrictive alternative\" that the government could use instead of CDA's total ban? Well, it depends on how much shielding of children you're willing to sacrifice. The SurfWatch solution is limited by the software designers' ability to keep up with the latest \"dirty\" places. Dozens of Web sites are being added daily, and you never know what will get posted tomorrow even on existing sites or newsgroups. Some things will inevitably be missed.", "The CDA, though ostensibly intended to protect children, clearly has a spillover effect on adults. Adults generally have the right to see material that's \"patently offensive.\" There are two exceptions to this: child pornography (sexually explicit pictures made using child models) and \"obscenity\"--but both are much smaller categories than the CDA's \"indecency.\" May the government, in its quest to shield children, restrict the online choices of grownups? Or to look at it the other way: Must the courts, in order to protect the freedom of grownups, restrict the government's ability to shield children?", "And \"patently offensive\" can cover a lot of territory. Many profanities might be considered \"patently offensive\" descriptions of \"sexual or excretory activities or organs,\" especially under the standards of some conservative communities. Putting a David Mamet play on your Web site, thus, might be a crime. The term \"patently offensive\" is vague enough that no one knows for sure, but the wise user will take a conservative approach. Given some recent Supreme Court decisions, it seems unlikely that the vagueness alone would make the act unconstitutional. But there's no doubt that the law's vagueness does indeed make it more likely to stifle someone's freedom of expression.", "\"any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication\" \n\n \"that, in context, depicts or describes,\" \n\n \"in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards,\" \n\n \"sexual or excretory activities or organs.\" \n\n Virtually any sort of speech in the public areas of cyberspace is available to minors, so the law really applies to all such areas, including Web sites, Internet newsgroups, e-mail discussion lists, chat rooms, and bulletin boards.", "Pacifica is a narrow decision, and there's language in it suggesting that it only applies to over-the-air broadcasting. But in this year's cable indecency case, known as Denver Consortium , four Supreme Court justices were willing to use Pacifica as a guide for cable television as well as over-the-air broadcasting. (The CDA court's decision was written before Denver Consortium was handed down.) And during the last 10 years, some lower courts have upheld bans on public display of sexually explicit material that's not technically \"obscene\" on the grounds that the law may shield children even if this keeps, say, a would-be muralist from communicating to adults. The Supreme Court hasn't spoken on these specific statutes." ] ]
test	50571	[ "How did Green become a slave?", "Which of Amra's six children had been fathered by Alan?", "Other than the mere fact of being a slave, what did Alan hate about living on this planet?", "How does the duchess' reaction to news of the captured \"demons\" differ from that of the men around her?", "Identify two twists on society in the story compared to society as the average reader knows it that are intended to draw attention to customs outside the world of the story.", "What benefits and perils did Green face, being the duchess' current favorite?", "What plan did Green come up with for escaping slavery and hooking up with the \"demons\" and their spaceship?", "What happened to Green as everyone was getting up and leaving dinner?", "How does the merchant-captain react to Green's proposal?", "What did Green idly dream about in his spare moments?" ]	[ [ "He was made a slave because he was tall, blonde and could not speak the local tongue, and it was determined that if he wasn't a slave, he should be.", "On this planet, people who could not pay their debts were routinely enslaved, and this was his unfortunate circumstance.", "He was blending in with local townsfolk when the Duchess took a fancy to him and since it would be immoral to have an affair with a freeman, she made him a slave.", "He had fought as a soldier in the north, and when his army lost a critical battle, he was taken as a prisoner of war and brought south as a slave." ], [ "He had fathered the second-to-last, but Amra's sexual appetites were enormous, and she took another lover for the last child while he was servicing the duchess.", "He was proud biological father to all six.", "Only the last one.", "The last two children were his." ], [ "He hated dogs and on this planet, dogs and slaves were the main beasts of burden, so he was constantly surrounded by them.", "It really grated on him that his wife was unfaithful to him.", "The inhabitants were smelly, superstitious, violent and dirty.", "He had very fair skin, unlike the inhabitants and the heat and aridity wreaked havoc on his skin. He was always uncomfortable." ], [ "She insists that the Estoryans must follow the law, keeping the demons in prison for two years to see if their human forms convert back to their demon forms, while the men are ready to kill them immediately, preferably after torturing them.", "She is bored by the subject and makes eyes at Alan, and a beckoning motion with her finger, while the men discuss why the demons' captors hate Tropatians.", "She is entirely interested in what violence may have been done to them, while the merchant-captain and the priest give all appearances of being frightened.", "She is completely undone and faints, while the duke tosses back a goblet of wine and the merchant-captain makes the warding sign against evil." ], [ "In the story, sexual freedom is absolute within the bounds of appearances, and priests have no power whatsoever.", "In the story, space ships and a pre-steam engine society are juxtaposed. The other important detail is that no one is interested in money in the story.", "In the story, women are in charge of government while men are ornaments, and large quantities of perfume are used to douse body odors.", "In the story, dark-skinned people enslave tall, white people with blond hair and free men and women wear rings in their noses, while slaves do not." ], [ "By being the assistant majordomo and serving the duchess at table, he had power and wealth among slaves, but the duke was also attracted to him, and it was exhausting and humiliating to service both.", "Green had been salting away coins he stole from his mistress, the duchess so that he could try to escape but ironically, the visibility of his position gave him less chance to escape unnoticed.", "His position in the slave hierarchy offered him as much comfort as he could hope for, but exposed him to the danger of being shivved by another slave or put into a compromising position by the priest.", "He had the opportunity to be a house slave, which was easier physically and gave him the chance to have a better and more prosperous life than as a run of the mill slave, but he had to be ready to constantly please the duchess and he was exhausted trying to service both his wife and the duchess." ], [ "His escape capsule was still hidden in the wilderness where he landed. Now that he knew his way around, he decided it was time to sneak away and reactivate it and fly it to the location of the spaceship that had just landed with two other marooned spacemen.", "He finally decided that there was no alternative but to just leave and take his chances walking through the desert to Estorya.", "He decided to make the merchant-captain an offer that would appeal to his greed and get him to agree to take Green with his next caravan north.", "He was now confident enough of the duchess' affections that he decided to offer to go to Estorya to get some of her favorite perfume for her. While there, he would just disappear and find the spacemen." ], [ "The court jester jumped up from below the table and grabbed his leg and pulled him off balance to make everyone laugh.", "Amra saw him walking in front of the duchess and could not contain her jealousy and shouted insults at him.", "The duchess' dog grabbed his leg and pulled him down and he had to pretend it was funny.", "The Eye of the Sun happened to shine on one of the buttons of his uniform and it left a smoking hole which startled him and he tripped and fell." ], [ "The proposal ignites his greed, but he is cautious about listeners and proposes a later meeting.", "The merchant-captain realizes instantly that Green wants to escape. However, the merchant has had his eye on Amra for a long time, and helping Green escape might be a way to get her.", "He laughs in Green's face and tells him to go back to the duchess and thank his lucky stars he is a well-off slave.", "The merchant-captain immediately sees through the ruse and proposes a later meeting so that he can have the duke's guards ready to capture Green." ], [ "He dreamed about businesses he could start that involved technology not presently used on the planet, but the Duke always refused in favor of tradition.", "He dreamed night and day about getting back to Earth.", "He daydreamed about Amra's flawless skin, russet eyes, auburn hair and ripe, red mouth.", "He dreamed over and over - more of a nightmare, really - about his crash landing on the planet two years ago." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been\n freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But\n his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had\n convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far\n northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.", "But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.", "And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.", "\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"", "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent." ], [ "Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you", "The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.", "\"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "The captain of a ship had purchased her, but here again the law came\n to her rescue. He could not take her out of the country, and she again\n refused to leave. By now she had purchased several businesses—slaves\n were allowed to hold property and even have slaves of their own—and\n she knew that her two boys by the Duke would be valuable later on, when\n they'd go to live with him.\n\n\n The temple sculptor had used her as his model for his great marble\n statue of the goddess of Fertility. Well he might, for she was a\n magnificent creature, a tall woman with long, richly auburn hair, a\n flawless skin, large russet brown eyes, a mouth as red and ripe as a\n plum, breasts with which neither child nor lover could find fault, a\n waist amazingly slender considering the rest of her curved body and her\n fruitfulness. Her long legs would have looked good on an Earthwoman and\n were even more outstanding among a population of club-ankled females.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.", "Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"", "\"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!\"", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.", "She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"" ], [ "And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.", "So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.", "This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect", "How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.", "times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.", "The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent." ], [ "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.", "\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"", "\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"", "She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"", "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.", "He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.", "a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.", "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "\"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"", "Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.", "The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North." ], [ "The streets were alive with the short, dark, stocky natives and the\n taller, lighter-complexioned slaves. The former wore their turbans of\n various colors, indicating their status and trade. The latter wore\n their three-cornered hats. Occasionally a priest in his high conical\n hat, hexagonal spectacles and goatee rode by. Wagons and rickshaws\n drawn by men or by big, powerful dogs went by. Merchants stood at the\n fronts of their shops and hawked their wares in loud voices. They sold\n cloth, grixtr nut, parchment, knives, swords, helmets, drugs, books—on\n magic, on religion, on travel—spices, perfumes, ink, rugs, highly\n sugared drinks, wine, beer, tonic, paintings, everything that went to\n make up their civilization. Butchers stood before open shops where\n dressed fowl, deer and dogs hung. Dealers in birds pointed out the\n virtues of their many-colored and multi-songed pets.", "He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "There was a big difference between reading about such people and\n actually living among them. A history or a romantic novel could\n describe how unwashed and diseased and formula-bound primitives were,\n but only the too-too substantial stench and filth could make your gorge\n rise.\n\n\n Even as he stood there Zuni's powerful perfume rose and clung in heavy\n festoons about him and slithered down his nostrils. It was a rare and\n expensive perfume, brought back by Miran from his voyages and given to\n her as a token of the merchant's esteem. Used in small quantities it\n would have been quite effective to express feminine daintiness and to\n hint at delicate passion. But no, Zuni poured it like water over her,\n hoping to cover up the stale odor left by\nnot\ntaking a bath more than\n once a month.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "Miran cleared his throat, adjusted his violet turban and yellow robes,\n pulled gently at the large gold ring that hung from his nose and said,\n \"It took me a month to get back from Estorya, and that is very good\n time indeed, but then I am noted for my good luck, though I prefer to\n call it skill plus the favor given by the gods to the truly devout.\n I do not boast, O gods, but merely give you tribute because you have\n smiled upon my ventures and have found pleasing the scent of my many\n sacrifices in your nostrils!\"", "Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.", "a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"", "\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"", "How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "\"Diamonds, emeralds, rubies!\" cried Miran, kissing his hand and rolling\n his eye ecstatically. \"I tell you, the Estoryans are rich beyond our\n dreams! Jewels flow in their marketplaces like drops of water in a\n cataract! Ah, if only the Emperor could be induced to organize a great\n raiding fleet and storm its walls!\"\n\n\n \"He remembers too well what happened to his father's fleet when he\n tried it,\" growled the Duke. \"The storm that destroyed his thirty ships\n was undoubtedly raised by the priests of the Goddess Hooda. I still\n think that the expedition would have succeeded, however, if the late\n Emperor had not ignored the vision that came to him the night before\n they set sail. It was the great god Axoputqui, and he said....\"", "She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible." ], [ "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.", "But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "a wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague.\n She had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she\n was fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed\n her in the palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and\n eleven, who would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's\n household as free and petted servants.", "The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his\n liaison with Amra began and her jealousy had forced him to get rid of\n Amra. Back to the Pens she had gone; perhaps the Duke had not been\n too sad to see her go, for living with her was like living with a\n hurricane, and he liked peace and quiet too well.\n\n\n Then, in accordance with the custom, she had been recommended by the\n Duke to a visiting prince; the prince had overstayed his leave from\n his native country because he hated to part with her, and the Duke had\n wanted to give her as a present. But here he'd overstepped his legal\n authority. Slaves had certain rights. A woman who had borne a citizen a\n child could not be shipped away or sold unless she gave her permission.\n Amra didn't choose to go, so the sorrowing prince had gone home, though\n not without leaving a memento of his visit behind him.", "She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "He got down out of the rickshaw, told the boy to wait, said, \"Hello,\n honey,\" and kissed her. He was glad she was a slave, because she didn't\n wear a nose-ring. When he kissed the Duchess he was always annoyed\n by hers. She refused to take it off when with him because that would\n put her on his level, and he mustn't ever forget he was a slave. It\n was perfectly moral for her to take a bondsman as a lover but not a\n freeman, and she was nothing if not moral.", "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "Amra's return kiss was passionate, part of which was the vigor of\n asperity. \"You're not fooling me,\" she said. \"You meant to ride right\n by. Kiss the children! What's the matter, are you getting tired of me?\n You told me you only accepted the Duchess's offer because it meant\n advancement, and you were afraid that if you turned her down she'd\n find an excuse to kill you. Well, I believed you—half-believed you,\n anyway. But I won't if you try sneaking by without seeing me. What's\n the matter? Are you a man or not? Are you afraid to face a woman? Don't\n shake your head. You're a liar! Don't forget to kiss Grizquetr; you", "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.", "Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control." ], [ "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope.", "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "\"These two demons were very tall, like your slave Green, here,\" said\n Miran, \"and they could not speak a word of Estoryan. Or at least they\n claimed they couldn't. When King Raussmig's soldiers tried to capture\n them they brought from the folds of their strange clothes two pistols\n that only had to be pointed to send silent and awesome and sure death.\n Everywhere men dropped dead. Panic overtook many, but there were brave\n soldiers who kept on charging, and eventually the magical instruments\n became exhausted. The demons were overpowered and put into the Tower\n of Grass Cats from which no man or demon has yet escaped. And there\n they will be until the Festival of the Sun's Eye. Then they will be\n burnt....\"", "\"Men? Demons, rather! Can men fly in an iron ship through the air?\n These two claimed to have come from the stars, and you know what that\n means. Remember Oixrotl's prophecy:\nA demon will come, claiming\n to be an angel\n. No doubt about these two! Just to show you their\n subtlety, they claim to be neither demon nor angels, but men! Now,\n there's devilish clever thinking. Confusing to anybody but the most\n clear-headed. I'm glad the King of Estorya wasn't taken in.\"\n\n\n Eagerly Zuni leaned forward, her large brown eyes bright, and her\n red-painted mouth open and wet. \"Oh, has he burned them already? What a\n shame! I should think he'd at least torture them for a while.\"", "How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "The trouble was, he thought, that if the two imprisoned men at Estorya\n were to die before he got to them he'd still be lost. He had no idea\n of how to pilot or navigate a spaceship. He'd been a passenger on a\n freighter when it had unaccountably blown up, and he'd been forced to\n leave the dying vessel in one of those automatic castaway emergency\n shells. The capsule had got him down to the surface of this planet and\n was, as far as he knew, still up in the hills where he'd left it. After\n wandering for a week and almost starving to death he'd been picked up\n by some peasants. They had turned him in to the soldiers of a nearby\n garrison, thinking he must be a runaway slave on whom they'd collect", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.", "This is an original novel—not a reprint—published\n by Ballantine\n Books, Inc.\nTo Nan Gerding\nDANGER! THRILLS! ADVENTURE!\n\n\n Alan Green was not exactly a hero. In fact he liked peace just as\n well as the next man. Not that he was really afraid of that crazy,\n hot-blooded hound-dog Alzo, or even of the hound's gorgeous owner, the\n Duchess Zuni—who was also hot-blooded (to say nothing of the Duke).\n After all, these things were understood on this backward, violent\n planet, and a man could manage, provided he was alert twenty-four hours\n a day.\n\n\n And as a matter of fact, Alan was only normally apprehensive of his\n Junoesque, tempestuous (but altogether lovable) wife Amra. Delightful,\n demanding Amra—and her five uproarious kids. The trouble was, he was\n tired. And homesick.", "a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been\n freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But\n his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had\n convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far\n northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be." ], [ "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.", "Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "Alzo was the Duchess's watchdog, a mastiff-like monster with shaggy\n red-gold hair. The dog hated Green with a vindictiveness that Green\n could only account for by supposing that the animal knew, perhaps from\n his body-odor, that he was not a native of this planet. Alzo rumbled\n a warning deep in his chest every time Green bent over the Duchess or\n made a too-sudden movement. Occasionally he rose to his four feet and\n nuzzled the man's leg. When that happened Green could not keep from\n breaking out into a sweat, for the dog had twice bitten him, playfully,\n so to speak, and severely lacerated his calf. As if that weren't bad\n enough, Green had to worry that the natives might notice that his scars\n healed abnormally fast, almost overnight. He'd been forced to wear\n bandages on his legs long after the new skin had come in.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish." ], [ "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "Miran glanced at his clansmen, standing there patiently, apparently\n oblivious of what was going on. He had power of life and death over\n them, but he didn't trust them. He said, \"Perhaps it would be better if\n I thought about this before making such a drastic oath. Could you meet\n me tonight at the Hour of the Wineglass at the House of Equality? And\n could you perhaps give me a slight hint of what you have in mind?\"\n\n\n \"The answer to both is yes. My proposal has to do with the dried fish\n that you carry as cargo to the Estoryans. There is another thing, too,\n but I may not even hint at it until I have your oath.\"\n\n\n \"Very well then. At the agreed hour. Fish, eh? I must be off. Time is\n money, you know. Get going boys, full sails.\"", "But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2", "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.", "a reward. Taken to the capital city of Quotz, Green had almost been\n freed because there was no record of his being anybody's property. But\n his tallness, blondness and inability to speak the local language had\n convinced his captors that he must have wandered down from some far\n northern country. Therefore if he wasn't a slave he should be.", "Miran, the merchant-captain, said, \"Your pardon, gracious lady, but the\n King of Estorya has done no such thing. The Estoryan law demands that\n all suspected demons should be kept in prison for two years. Everybody\n knows that a devil can't keep his human disguise more than two years.\n At the end of that time he reverts to his natural flesh and form, a\n hideous sight to behold, blasphemous, repulsive, soul-shaking.\"\n\n\n Miran rolled his one good eye so that only the white showed and made\n the sign to ward off evil, the index finger held rigidly out from a\n clenched fist. Jugkaxtr, the household priest, dived under the table,\n where he crouched praying, secure in the knowledge that demons couldn't\n touch him while he knelt beneath the thrice-blessed wood. The Duke\n swallowed a whole glass of wine, apparently to calm his nerves, and\n belched.", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy,\n grinning, did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew\n Amra and was familiar with her relations with Green. She held their\n one-year-old daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent\n bosom. Behind her stood her other five children, her two sons by the\n Duke, her daughter by a visiting prince, her son by the captain of a\n Northerner ship, her daughter by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall\n and slow rise again was told in the children around her; the tableau\n embodied an outline of the structure of the planet's society.\n3\nHer mother had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman,", "How long, O Lord, how long? The situation was intolerable; even if he'd\n not heard of the spaceship he would have plotted to escape. Better a\n quick death while trying to get away than a slow, torturous one by\n exhaustion.\n\n\n He bowed good-by to the Duke and Duchess, then followed the violet\n turban and yellow robes of Miran through the courtyard, through the\n thick stone walls, over the bridge of the broad moat, and into the\n narrow winding streets of the city of Quotz. Here the merchant-captain\n got into his silver-and-jewel-decorated rickshaw. The two long-legged\n men between its shafts, sailors and clansmen from Miran's vessel, the\nBird of Fortune\n, began running through the crowd. The people made way\n for them, as two other sailors preceded them calling out Miran's name\n and cracking whips in the air.", "So when he heard of two other downed spacemen, he hitched a ride with\n a piratical merchant-captain on a windroller destined to carry him to\n the spaceship and thence to the peaceful green hills of Earth. But\n he had reckoned without the vagaries of the windroller, pirates, the\n \"traveling islands,\" the rascally Captain, and various flora and fauna\n peculiar to this planet—all of which, it now seemed, regarded Alan\n with unnerving malevolence.", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "She looked so beautiful, he thought. And stank so terribly. At least\n she had at first. Now she looked less beautiful because he knew how\n stupid she was, and didn't stink quite so badly because his nostrils\n had become somewhat adjusted. They'd had to.\n\n\n \"I intend to be back in Estorya by the time of the festival,\" said\n Miran. \"I've never seen the Eye of the Sun burn demons before. It's a\n giant lens, you know. There will be just time enough to make a voyage\n there and get back before the rainy season. I expect to make even\n greater profits than the last time, because I've established some\n highly placed contacts. O gods, I do not boast but merely praise your\n favor to your humble worshiper, Miran the Merchant of the Clan of\n Effenycan!\"\n\n\n \"Please bring me some more of this perfume,\" said the Duchess, \"and I\n just love the diamond necklace you gave me.\"", "\"What was a ship doing in your cellar?\" he said, and he whooped with\n laughter. \"By all the gods, Amra, I know it's been two days since I've\n seen you, but don't try to crowd forty-eight hours' conversation into\n ten minutes, especially your kind of conversation. And quit scolding me\n in front of the children. You know it's bad for them. They might pick\n up your attitude of contempt for the head of the house.\"\n\n\n \"I? Contempt? Why, I worship the ground you walk on! I tell them\n continually what a fine man you are, though it's rather hard to\n convince them when you do show up and they see the truth. Still....\"", "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider." ], [ "Green hailed a passing rickshaw and seated himself comfortably in it.\n As assistant majordomo he had plenty of money. Moreover, the Duke and\n Duchess would have been outraged if he had lowered their prestige by\n walking through the city's streets. His vehicle made good time, too,\n because everybody recognized his livery: the scarlet and white tricorn\n hat and the white sleeveless shirt with the Duke's heraldic arms on its\n chest—red and green concentric circles pierced by a black arrow.\n\n\n The street led always downward, for the city had been built on the\n foothills of the mountains. It wandered here and there and gave Green\n plenty of time to think.", "Green, after looking to make certain that nobody from the castle was\n around to see him, ran until he was even with the rickshaw. Miran\n halted it and asked what he wanted.\n\n\n \"Your pardon, Your Richness, but may a humble slave speak and not be\n reprimanded?\"\n\n\n \"I presume it is no idle thought you have in mind,\" said Miran, looking\n Green over his one eye narrow in its fat-folds.\n\n\n \"It has to do with money.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, despite your foreign accent you speak with a pleasing voice; you\n are the golden trumpet of Mennirox, my patron god. Speak!\"\n\n\n \"First Your Richness must swear by Mennirox that you will under no\n circumstances divulge my proposal.\"\n\n\n \"There is wealth in this? For me?\"\n\n\n \"There is.\"", "Green lowered his eyelids to conceal the expression of disgust which he\n felt must be shining from them. At the same time, he saw Zuni's shoe\n tapping impatiently. Inwardly he groaned, because he knew she would\n divert the conversation to something more interesting to her, to her\n clothes and the state of her stomach and/or complexion. And there would\n be nothing that anybody could do about it, because the custom was that\n the woman of the house regulated the subject of talk during breakfast.\n If only this had been lunch or dinner! Then the men would theoretically\n have had uncontested control.", "There was a lengthy conversation which did not hold Green's attention.\n He was too busy trying to think of a plan whereby he could get\n to Estorya and to the demons' iron vessel, which was obviously a\n spaceship. This was his only chance. Soon the rainy season would start\n and there would be no vessels leaving for at least three months.\n\n\n He could, of course, just walk away and hope to get to Estorya on foot.\n Thousands of miles through countless perils, and he had only a general\n idea of where the city was ... no, Miran was his only hope.", "The Duke sat at the other end of the table. He ignored the by-play,\n just as he ignored the so-called secret passage inside the walls of the\n castle, which Green used to get to the Duchess's apartments. Custom\n demanded this, just as custom demanded that he should play the outraged\n husband if she got tired of Green or angry at him and accused him\n publicly of amorous advances. This was enough to make Green jittery,\n but he had more than the Duke to consider. There was Alzo.", "Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more\n efficient method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of\n tradition and custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods\n accepted it. The gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests\n clutched the status quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its\n mother's breast or an old man clings to his property.\n\n\n Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it\n was worth while to become a martyr.\n\n\n He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.\n\n\n \"Alan! Alan!\"\n\n\n He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought\n desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a\n woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had\n already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard\n it.", "Even now, the nauseating canine was sniffing around Green's quivering\n hide in the hope of putting the fear of the devil in him. At that\n moment the Earthman resolved that, come the headsman's ax, rack, wheel,\n or other hellish tortures, he was going to kill that hound. It was just\n after he made that vow that the Duchess caused him to forget altogether\n the beast.\n\n\n \"Dear,\" said Zuni, interrupting the Duke in the midst of his\n conversation with a merchant-captain, \"what is this I hear about two\n men who have fallen from the sky in a great ship of iron?\"\n\n\n Green quivered, and he held his breath as he waited for the Duke's\n reply.\n\n\n The Duke, a short, dark many-chinned man with white hair and very thick\n bristly salt-and-pepper eyebrows, frowned.", "times when he would not particularly have cared if he left this planet\n via the death route, he could not now make a false move. Not when\n escape was so near!", "There was more to her than beauty. She radiated a something that struck\n every male at first sight; to Green she sometimes seemed to be a\n violent physical event, perhaps even a principle of Nature herself.\n\n\n There were times when Green felt proud because she had picked him as\n her mate, chosen him when he was a newly imported slave who could say\n only a few words in the highly irregular agglutinative tongue. But\n there were times when he felt that she was too much for him, and those\n times had been getting too frequent lately. Besides, he felt a pang\n whenever he saw their child, because he loved it and dreaded the moment\n when he would have to leave it. As for deserting Amra, he wasn't sure\n how that would make him feel. Undeniably, she did affect him, but then\n so did a blow in the teeth or wine in the blood.", "From beneath the table rose the babble of the priest, Jugkaxtr,\n as he blessed everyone in the house, down to the latest-born pup,\n and the fleas living thereoff, and cursed all those who were\n possessed by even the tiniest demon. The Duke, growing impatient at\n the noise, kicked under the table. Jugkaxtr yelped and presently\n crawled out. He sat down and began gnawing the meat from a bone,\n a well-done-thou-good-and-faithful-servant expression on his fat\n features. Green also felt like kicking him, just as he often felt\n like kicking every single human being on this planet. It was hard to\n remember that he must exercise compassion and understanding for them,\n and that his own remote ancestors had once been just as nauseatingly\n superstitious, cruel and bloody.", "So he grinned sheepishly and again preceded the Duchess, while the\n others followed her out. When they reached the bottom of the broad\n stone staircase that led to the upper floors of the castle, Zuni told\n Green that he was to go to the marketplace and buy tomorrow's food. As\n for her, she was going back to bed and sleep until noon.\n\n\n Inwardly Green groaned. How long could he keep up this pace? He was\n expected to stay up half the night with her, then attend to his\n official duties during the day. She slept enough to be refreshed by\n the time he visited her, but he never had a chance for any real rest.\n Even when he had his free hours in the afternoon he had to go to his\n house in the pens, and there he had to stay awake and attend to all\n his familial duties. And Amra, his slave-wife, and her six children\n demanded much from him. They were even more tyrannical than the\n Duchess, if that were possible.", "For the thousandth time Green wondered at this strange planet where\n the only large animals were men, dogs, grass cats, a small deer and\n a very small equine. In fact, there was a paucity of any variety of\n animal life, except for the surprisingly large number of birds. It was\n this scarcity of horses and oxen, he supposed, that helped perpetuate\n slavery. Man and dog had to provide most of the labor.\n\n\n No doubt there was an explanation for all this, but it must be buried\n so deep in this people's forgotten history that one would never know.\n Green, always curious, wished that he had time and means to explore.\n But he didn't. He might as well resign himself to keeping a whole skin\n and to getting out of this mess as fast as he could.\n\n\n There was enough to do merely to make his way through the narrow and\n crowded streets. He had to display his baton often to clear a path,\n though when he approached the harbor area he had less trouble because\n the streets were much wider.", "Here great wagons drawn by gangs of slaves carried huge loads to or\n from the ships. The thoroughfares had to be broad, else the people\n would have been crushed between wagon and house. Here also were the\n so-called Pens, where the dock-slaves lived. Once the area had actually\n been an enclosure where men and women were locked up for the night. But\n the walls had been torn down and new houses built in the old Duke's\n time. The closest Earthly parallel Green could think of for these\n edifices was a housing project. Small cottages, all exactly alike, set\n in military columns.\n\n\n For a moment he considered stopping off to see Amra, then decided\n against it. She'd get him tied up in an argument or something, and\n he'd spend too much time trying to soothe her, time that should be\n spent at the marketplace. He hated scenes, whereas Amra was a born\n self-dramatist who reveled in them, almost wallowed, one might say.", "The Duke rose, and everybody followed his example. Jugkaxtr chanted the\n formula of dismissal, then sat down to finish gnawing on the bone. The\n others filed out. Green walked in front of Zuni in order to warn her\n of any obstacles in her path and to take the brunt of any attempted\n assassination. As he did so he was seized by the ankle and tripped\n headlong. He did not fall hard because he was a quick man, in spite\n of his six-foot-two and hundred ninety pounds. But he rose red-faced\n because of the loud laughter and from repressed anger at Alzo, who had\n again repeated his trick of grabbing Green's leg and upsetting him.\n He wanted to grab a spear from a nearby guard and spit Alzo. But that\n would be the end of Green. And whereas up to now there had been many", "Hope came to him a month after he'd been made foreman of the kitchen\n slaves of the Duke of Tropat. It came to him as he was standing behind\n the Duchess during a meal and directing those who were waiting upon her.\n\n\n It was the Duchess Zuni who had not so subtly maneuvered him from the\n labor pens to his coveted, if dangerous, position. Why dangerous?\n Because she was very jealous and possessive, and the slightest hint of\n lack of attention from him could mean he'd lose his life or one limb\n or another. The knowledge of what had happened to his two predecessors\n kept him extremely sensitive to her every gesture, her every wish.", "But how...? He didn't think that stowing away would work. There was\n always a careful search for slaves who might try just that very plan.\n He looked at Miran, the short, fat, big-stomached, hook-nosed, one-eyed\n fellow with many chins and a large gold ring in his nose. The fellow\n was shrewd, shrewd, and he would not want to offend the Duchess by\n helping her official gigolo escape. Not, that is, unless Green could\n offer him something that was so valuable that he couldn't afford not to\n take the risk. Miran boasted that he was a hard-headed businessman, but\n it was Green's observation that there was always a large soft spot in\n that supposedly impenetrable cranium: the Fissure of Cupiditas.\n2", "Miran wiped his face and said, \"Of course, I wasn't able to find\n out much, because we merchants are regarded with deep suspicion and\n scarcely dare to move outside the harbor or the marketplace. The\n Estoryans worship a female deity—ridiculous, isn't it?—and eat fish.\n They hate us Tropatians because we worship Zaxropatr, Male of Males,\n and because they must depend on us to bring them fish. But they aren't\n close-mouthed. They babble on and on to us, especially when one has\n given them wine for nothing.\"\n\n\n Green finally released his breath in a sigh of relief. How glad he\n was that he had never told these people his true origin! So far as\n they knew he was merely one of the many slaves who came from a distant\n country in the North.", "He averted his eyes from the Pens and looked at the other side of\n the street, where the walls of the great warehouses towered. Workmen\n swarmed around them, and cranes, operated by gangs pushing wheels like\n a ship's capstan, raised or lowered big bundles. Here, he thought, was\n a business opportunity for him.\n\n\n Introduce the steam engine. It'd be the greatest thing that ever hit\n this planet. Wood-burning automobiles could replace the rickshaws.\n Cranes could be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have\n their wheels powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be\n laid across the Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete.\n\n\n No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that\n roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from\n them.", "That fateful morning he was standing behind her as she sat at one end\n of the long breakfast table. In one hand he held his foreman's wand,\n a little white baton topped by a large red ball. With it he gestured\n at the slaves who served food, who poured wine and beer, who fanned\n away the flies, who carried in the household god and sat it on the god\n chair, who played something like music. Now and then he bent over the\n Duchess Zuni's long black hair and whispered phrases from this or that\n love poem, praising her beauty, her supposed unattainability, and his\n burning, if seemingly hopeless, passion for her. Zuni would smile, or\n repeat the formula of thanks—the short one—or else giggle at his\n funny accent.", "And worst of all, Amra was determined that he should be a hero. Amra\n won.\n1\nFor two years Alan Green had lived without hope. From the day the\n spaceship had crashed on this unknown planet he had resigned himself\n to the destiny created for him by accident and mathematics. Chances\n against another ship landing within the next hundred years were a\n million to one. Therefore it would do no good to sit around waiting\n for rescue. Much as he loathed the idea, he must live the rest of his\n life here, and he must squeeze as much blood as he could out of this\n planet-sized turnip. There wasn't much to squeeze. In fact, it seemed\n to him that he was the one losing the blood. Shortly after he'd been\n cast away he'd been made a slave.\n\n\n Now, suddenly, he had hope." ] ]
test	50827	[ "What clue does Steffens pick up on that initially leads him to believe that no humans inhabit the planet they land on?", "Why does Bal speculate that it has probably taken over 10,000 years to cause the marks they find on the rocks?", "What frightens Steffens and Ball in regards to the structures that they discover on the planet?", "What is Steffens's crew looking for on the planet they land on?", "What makes the ship's crew speechless?", "What is Steffens's initial reaction regarding the robots?", "How does Steffens believe he can get around the law in regards to making contact with the robots?", "What is the internal conflict that Steffens faces in regards to making contact with the robots?", "Once the men land, how do the robots seem to change?", "What seems to make the robots feel sadness?" ]	[ [ "He notices that the air is hard to breathe, but there are no airlocks on any of the buildings, making it impossible for anyone to live there.", "He was warned of a plague that broke out there some time ago that killed all of civilization.", "He knew that the planet had been bombed, and all of the people perished. ", "There is no source of water on the planet." ], [ "It takes water that long to wear rock down to the point those are.", "It takes rocks rubbing against one another that long to wear down that far.", "It takes fire that long to wear rock down to the point those are. ", "It takes wind that long to wear rock down the point those are" ], [ "They are proof that man has inhabited the planet for thousands of years, and they have no record of man living there.", "There are no structures to house their spacecraft in order to make the necessary repairs to return home.", "They had heard old wive's tales their whole lives about the structures being haunted, and they believed that they were sure to encounter spirits while there.", "They realize that who (or what) ever built the structures had been traveling space for thousands of years longer than man, making them uneasy about what they might encounter, as that civilization had to be much more advanced than man." ], [ "A source of water for the rest of the human race", "A planet that can be inhabited by humans.", "A refuge where humans can escape the terrible conditions they are currently required to live under.", "A source of food for the rest of the human race." ], [ "They are found exactly what they were looking for on this planet, and they did not have words to express their joy and gratitude.", "They noticed an alien race that had never been discovered to their knowledge, and they were in awe.", "They realized that they were doomed to die on that planet, and they were all devastated.", "They saw that the planet appeared to have been devastated by war, and that was something that mankind had not experienced in many hundred years." ], [ "They are inferior to the other robots he's encountered. ", "they were clearly the cause of the devastation on that planet.", "The robots will be helpful guides to understanding the planet.", "They were perfectly engineered. " ], [ "He was the person in charge of making the laws and changing them. ", "The law enforcers will never know.", "Even though they are forbidden to make contact with other races, he didn't think robots would fall under the category of being \"a race.\"", "His father was the person in charge of making the laws and changing them." ], [ "He is afraid to put the lives of his crew in danger because of all of the unknown factors surrounding the planet and the robots.", "He is afraid if he does, then he will be punished for breaking the law, but if he doesn't make contact, he will be punished for neglecting his duties.", "He is afraid if he does, then Ball will be punished for breaking the law and not reporting him for making contact, or Ball will be punished because he does report Steffens because that would have discouraged him from doing his duty.", "He is afraid if he does, everyone on the ship will be punished for breaking the law, but if they don't make contact, everyone will be punished for neglecting their duties." ], [ "They seem disinterested in the men.", "They suddenly do not know how to communicate with the men.", "They become afraid of the men.", "They become hostile towards the men. " ], [ "When they find out the humans are planning to leave.", "When they discuss how long The Makers have been away.", "When they discuss the death of the makers.", "When they became aware that they were robots and not human." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it\n go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black\n midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n\n\n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n\n\n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The\n third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but\nit\nhas a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n\n\n \"How about moons?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\nThe third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,\n and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,\n in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the\n clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the\n misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight\n zone.", "The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a\n hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors\n had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,\n but he had to try.\n\n\n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,\n moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark\n outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n\n\n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n\n\n After a while he saw a city.\n\n\n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and\n they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when\n he saw that the city was dead.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.", "It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.", "The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.", "No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n\n\n \"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your\n planet.\"\nSteffens had not realized that there were so many.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.", "Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone." ], [ "Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n\n\n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n\n\n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled\n wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n\n\n Steffens whistled.\n\n\n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell\n from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind\nat least\nseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a\n fraction of that force.\"\n\n\n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in\n interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first\n uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was\n an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.", "Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great\n age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old—\ntoo\nold.\n He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone\n ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed\n that the buildings had no airlocks.\n\n\n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n\n\n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These\n things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And\n you can see that the rock itself is native—\" he indicated the ledge\n beneath their feet—\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n\n\n \"How long?\"", "He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they\n now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n \"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n\n\n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized\n now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n\n\n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last?\n There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need\n to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left\nsomething\nbehind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—\"\n\n\n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"", "Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"", "Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.", "The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.", "Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built\n these had been in space for thousands of years.\n\n\n Which ought to give\nthem\n, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of\n a good head-start.\nWhile the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens\n remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly\n at the walls.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n\n\n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was\n roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears\n at each other,\nthat\nlong ago. And this planet is only a parsec from\n Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these\n get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"", "\"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.", "He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.", "\"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—\" another pause for\n a word—\"by the\nFactory\n.\"\n\n\n \"The Factory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n\n\n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n\n\n \"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.", "It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen.\n The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of\n the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the\n metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the\n chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued\n in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the\n base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was\n a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on\n the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude\n that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at\n that, although the answer seemed illogical.", "Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had\n surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n\n\n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then.\n But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n\n\n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else\n would we have been built?\"\n\n\n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to\n Elb, was no question at all.\n\n\n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have\n known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a\n long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the\n back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a\n faith.", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave." ], [ "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"", "Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.", "The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it\n go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black\n midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n\n\n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n\n\n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The\n third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but\nit\nhas a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n\n\n \"How about moons?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\nThe third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,\n and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,\n in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the\n clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the\n misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight\n zone.", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built\n these had been in space for thousands of years.\n\n\n Which ought to give\nthem\n, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of\n a good head-start.\nWhile the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens\n remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly\n at the walls.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n\n\n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was\n roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears\n at each other,\nthat\nlong ago. And this planet is only a parsec from\n Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these\n get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"", "Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n\n\n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n\n\n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled\n wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n\n\n Steffens whistled.\n\n\n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell\n from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind\nat least\nseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a\n fraction of that force.\"\n\n\n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in\n interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first\n uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was\n an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.", "Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great\n age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old—\ntoo\nold.\n He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone\n ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed\n that the buildings had no airlocks.\n\n\n Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: \"Want to set up shop, Skipper?\"\n\n\n Steffens paused. \"All right, if you think it will do any good.\"\n\n\n \"You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These\n things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And\n you can see that the rock itself is native—\" he indicated the ledge\n beneath their feet—\"and was cut out a long while back.\"\n\n\n \"How long?\"", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.", "The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a\n hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors\n had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,\n but he had to try.\n\n\n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,\n moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark\n outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n\n\n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n\n\n After a while he saw a city.\n\n\n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and\n they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when\n he saw that the city was dead.", "He kicked at the sand distractedly. \"And most important, where are they\n now? A race with several thousand years....\"\n\n\n \"Fifteen thousand,\" Ball said. When Steffens looked up, he added:\n \"That's what the geology boys say. Fifteen thousand, at the least.\"\n\n\n Steffens turned to stare unhappily at the buildings. When he realized\n now how really old they were, a sudden thought struck him.\n\n\n \"But why buildings? Why did they have to build in stone, to last?\n There's something wrong with that. They shouldn't have had a need\n to build, unless they were castaways. And castaways would have left\nsomething\nbehind. The only reason they would need a camp would be—\"\n\n\n \"If the ship left and some of them stayed.\"", "It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "\"I must tell you,\" the thing went on, \"that we ourselves are—curious.\"\n It stopped suddenly, struggling with a word it could not comprehend.\n Steffens waited, listening with absolute interest. It said at length:\n\n\n \"We know of only two types of living structure. Ours, which is largely\n metallic, and that of the\nMakers\n, which would appear to be somewhat\n more like yours. I am not a—doctor—and therefore cannot acquaint you\n with the specific details of the Makers' composition, but if you are\n interested I will have a doctor brought forward. It will be glad to be\n of assistance.\"\n\n\n It was Steffens' turn to struggle, and the robot waited patiently while\n Ball and the second robot looked on in silence. The Makers, obviously,\n were whoever or whatever had built the robots, and the \"doctors,\"\n Steffens decided, were probably just that—doctor-robots, designed\n specifically to care for the apparently flesh-bodies of the Makers.", "\"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.", "He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring." ], [ "Steffens nodded. \"But then the ship must have come back. Where did it\n go?\" He ceased kicking at the sand and looked up into the blue-black\n midday sky. \"We'll never know.\"\n\n\n \"How about the other planets?\" Ball asked.\n\n\n \"The report was negative. Inner too hot, outer too heavy and cold. The\n third planet is the only one with a decent temperature range, but\nit\nhas a CO\n 2\n atmosphere.\"\n\n\n \"How about moons?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"We could try them and find out.\"\nThe third planet was a blank, gleaming ball until they were in close,\n and then the blankness resolved into folds and piling clouds and dimly,\n in places, the surface showed through. The ship went down through the\n clouds, falling the last few miles on her brakers. They came into the\n misty gas below, leveled off and moved along the edge of the twilight\n zone.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "The moons of this solar system had yielded nothing. The third planet, a\n hot, heavy world which had no free oxygen and from which the monitors\n had detected nothing, was all that was left. Steffens expected nothing,\n but he had to try.\n\n\n At a height of several miles, the ship moved up the zone, scanning,\n moving in the familiar slow spiral of the Mapping Command. Faint dark\n outlines of bare rocks and hills moved by below.\n\n\n Steffens turned the screen to full magnification and watched silently.\n\n\n After a while he saw a city.\n\n\n The main screen being on, the whole crew saw it. Someone shouted and\n they stopped to stare, and Steffens was about to call for altitude when\n he saw that the city was dead.", "No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n\n\n \"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your\n planet.\"\nSteffens had not realized that there were so many.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered.", "It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.", "Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?", "Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"", "Man had been in space for only three hundred years. Whatever had built\n these had been in space for thousands of years.\n\n\n Which ought to give\nthem\n, thought Steffens uncomfortably, one hell of\n a good head-start.\nWhile the excav crew worked steadily, turning up nothing, Steffens\n remained alone among the buildings. Ball came out to him, looked dryly\n at the walls.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"whoever they were, we haven't heard from them since.\"\n\n\n \"No? How can you be sure?\" Steffens grunted. \"A space-borne race was\n roaming this part of the Galaxy while men were still pitching spears\n at each other,\nthat\nlong ago. And this planet is only a parsec from\n Varius II, a civilization as old as Earth's. Did whoever built these\n get to Varius? Or did they get to Earth? How can you know?\"", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do." ], [ "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "He looked down on splintered walls that were like cloudy glass pieces\n rising above a plain, rising in a shattered circle. Near the center\n of the city, there was a huge, charred hole at least three miles in\n diameter and very deep. In all the piled rubble, nothing moved.\n\n\n Steffens went down low to make sure, then brought the ship around and\n headed out across the main continent into the bright area of the sun.\n The rocks rolled by below, there was no vegetation at all, and then\n there were more cities—all with the black depression, the circular\n stamp that blotted away and fused the buildings into nothing.\n\n\n No one on the ship had anything to say. None had ever seen a war, for\n there had not been war on Earth or near it for more than three hundred\n years.", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought\n opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an\n outpost?\nAn outpost!\nHe turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was\n lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and\n stirred up trouble....\n\n\n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away.\n A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n\n\n \"\nGreetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our\n desire is only to serve....\n\"\n\"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously\n through shocked lips.\n\n\n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens\n was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.", "When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?", "Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. \"I wouldn't like to say off-hand.\"\n\n\n \"Make a rough estimate.\"\n\n\n Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled\n wryly and said: \"Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know.\"\n\n\n Steffens whistled.\n\n\n Ball pointed again at the wall. \"Look at the striations. You can tell\n from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind\nat least\nseveral thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a\n fraction of that force.\"\n\n\n The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in\n interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first\n uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was\n an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to\n scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit.\n\n\n \"Looks like a temporary camp,\" Ball said. \"Very few buildings, and all\n built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways,\n maybe?\"\n\n\n Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered\n stone jutted out of the sand before him.\n\n\n \"No inscriptions,\" he pointed out.\n\n\n \"They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's\n not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it\n much of a civilization.\"\n\n\n \"You don't think these are native?\"\n\n\n Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded.", "No, it was his responsibility; he had to go on:\n\n\n \"We request—we respectfully request permission to land upon your\n planet.\"\nSteffens had not realized that there were so many.", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "\"No, we do not build ourselves. We are made by the—\" another pause for\n a word—\"by the\nFactory\n.\"\n\n\n \"The Factory?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. It was built by the Makers. Would you care to see it?\"\n\n\n Both of the Earthmen nodded dumbly.\n\n\n \"Would you prefer to use your—skiff? It is quite a long way from here.\"", "The ship circled around to the dark side of the planet. When they were\n down below a mile, the radiation counters began to react. It became\n apparent, from the dials, that there could be nothing alive.\n\n\n After a while Ball said: \"Well, which do you figure? Did our friends\n from the fourth planet do this, or were they the same people as these?\"\n\n\n Steffens did not take his eyes from the screen. They were coming around\n to the daylight side.\n\n\n \"We'll go down and look for the answer,\" he said. \"Break out the\n radiation suits.\"\n\n\n He paused, thinking. If the ones on the fourth planet were alien to\n this world, they were from outer space, could not have come from one\n of the other planets here. They had starships and were warlike. Then,\n thousands of years ago. He began to realize how important it really was\n that Ball's question be answered." ], [ "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the\n structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat\n or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens\n mentioned God.\n\n\n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n\n\n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "\"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.", "When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?", "\"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone." ], [ "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.", "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "\"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you\n were the Makers returning—\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the\n seeming disappointment he had sensed—\"but then we probed your minds\n and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being,\n unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—\" Elb caught\n himself—\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled\n over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology,\n but it seemed to have a peculiar—\" Elb paused for a long while—\"an\n untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n\n\n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n\n\n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The\n Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them\n who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "\"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.", "Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly\n at Steffens.\n\n\n \"Well, what do we do now?\"\n\n\n Steffens shrugged. \"They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite\n possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and\n see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV.\"\n\n\n \"\nCan\nwe go down?\"\n\n\n \"Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot\n constitute a race. But there's another possibility.\" He tapped his\n fingers on the screen confusedly. \"They don't have to be robots at all.\n They could be the natives.\"\n\n\n Ball gulped. \"I don't follow you.\"", "Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had\n surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n\n\n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then.\n But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n\n\n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else\n would we have been built?\"\n\n\n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to\n Elb, was no question at all.\n\n\n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have\n known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a\n long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the\n back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a\n faith." ], [ "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "When the picture vanished, he knew that the others had seen it. He\n waited for a while; there was no further contact, but the feeling of\n the robot's urging was still strong within him. He had an idea that, if\n they wanted to, the robots could control his mind. So when nothing more\n happened, he began to lose his fear.\n\n\n While the crew watched in fascination, Steffens tried to talk back.\n He concentrated hard on what he was saying, said it aloud for good\n measure, then held his own hand extended in the robot manner of shaking\n hands.\n\n\n \"Greetings,\" he said, because it was what\nthey\nhad said, and\n explained: \"We have come from the stars.\"\n\n\n It was overly dramatic, but so was the whole situation. He wondered\n baffledly if he should have let the Alien Contact crew handle it. Order\n someone to stand there, feeling like a fool, and\nthink\na message?", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the\n structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat\n or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens\n mentioned God.\n\n\n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n\n\n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:", "He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.", "\"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.", "\"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you\n were the Makers returning—\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the\n seeming disappointment he had sensed—\"but then we probed your minds\n and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being,\n unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—\" Elb caught\n himself—\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled\n over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology,\n but it seemed to have a peculiar—\" Elb paused for a long while—\"an\n untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n\n\n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n\n\n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The\n Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them\n who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms." ], [ "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "\"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "\"They must remain with the ship,\" Steffens said aloud, trusting to the\n robot's formality not to ask him why. Although, if they could read his\n mind, there was no need to ask.\n\n\n For a long while, neither spoke, long enough for Steffens to grow tense\n and uncomfortable. He could not think of a thing to say, the robot was\n obviously waiting, and so, in desperation, he signaled the Aliencon men\n to come on out of the skiff.\n\n\n They came, wonderingly, and the ring of robots widened. Steffens heard\n the one robot speak again. The voice was now much more friendly.\n\n\n \"We hope you will forgive us for intruding upon your thought. It is\n our—custom—not to communicate unless we are called upon. But when we\n observed that you were in ignorance of our real—nature—and were about\n to leave our planet, we decided to put aside our custom, so that you\n might base your decision upon sufficient data.\"", "It was indeed a long way, even by skiff. Some of the Aliencon crew went\n along with them. And near the edge of the twilight zone, on the other\n side of the world, they saw the Factory outlined in the dim light of\n dusk. A huge, fantastic block, wrought of gray and cloudy metal, lay in\n a valley between two worn mountains. Steffens went down low, circling\n in the skiff, stared in awe at the size of the building. Robots moved\n outside the thing, little black bugs in the distance—moving around\n their birthplace.\nThe Earthmen remained for several weeks. During that time, Steffens was\n usually with Elb, talking now as often as he listened, and the Aliencon\n team roamed the planet freely, investigating what was certainly the\n strangest culture in history. There was still the mystery of those\n buildings on Tyban IV; that, as well as the robots' origin, would have\n to be cleared up before they could leave.", "He stopped in the center of the deck. A whole new line of thought\n opened up. If the robots were armed and ready ... could this be an\n outpost?\nAn outpost!\nHe turned and raced for the bridge. If he went in and landed and was\n lost, then the League might never know in time. If he went in and\n stirred up trouble....\n\n\n The thought in his mind was scattered suddenly, like a mist blown away.\n A voice was speaking in his mind, a deep calm voice that seemed to say:\n\n\n \"\nGreetings. Do not be alarmed. We do not wish you to be alarmed. Our\n desire is only to serve....\n\"\n\"Greetings, it said! Greetings!\" Ball was mumbling incredulously\n through shocked lips.\n\n\n Everyone on the ship had heard the voice. When it spoke again, Steffens\n was not sure whether it was just one voice or many voices.", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "\"They could be the original inhabitants of this planet—the brains of\n them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway,\" he added,\n \"they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen.\"\n\n\n Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the\n screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking.\n\n\n The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed\n to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking\n for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of\n human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very\n clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this\n robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the\n other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of\n duty.\n\n\n And there was also the possibility, which abruptly occurred to him,\n that the robots might well be prepared to blow his ship to hell and\n gone.", "He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring.", "It was not very tall, being at least a foot shorter than the Earthmen.\n The most peculiar thing about it, except for the circling eye-band of\n the head, was a mass of symbols which were apparently engraved upon the\n metal chest. Symbols in row upon row—numbers, perhaps—were upon the\n chest, and repeated again below the level of the arms, and continued\n in orderly rows across the front of the robot, all the way down to the\n base of the trunk. If they were numbers, Steffens thought, then it was\n a remarkably complicated system. But he noticed the same pattern on\n the nearer robots, all apparently identical. He was forced to conclude\n that the symbols were merely decoration and let it go tentatively at\n that, although the answer seemed illogical.", "Steffens replied haltingly that he appreciated their action.\n\n\n \"We perceive,\" the robot went on, \"that you are unaware of our complete\n access to your mind, and would perhaps be—dismayed—to learn that\n we have been gathering information from you. We must—apologize.\n Our only purpose was so that we could communicate with you. Only\n that information was taken which is necessary for communication\n and—understanding. We will enter your minds henceforth only at your\n request.\"\n\n\n Steffens did not react to the news that his mind was being probed\n as violently as he might have. Nevertheless it was a shock, and he\n retreated into observant silence as the Aliencon men went to work." ], [ "The robot which seemed to have been doing the speaking was in no way\n different from any of the others in the group. Since each of the robots\n was immediately aware of all that was being said or thought, Steffens\n guessed that they had sent one forward just for appearance's sake,\n because they perceived that the Earthmen would feel more at home. The\n picture of the extended hand, the characteristic handshake of Earthmen,\n had probably been borrowed, too, for the same purpose of making him and\n the others feel at ease. The one jarring note was the robot's momentary\n lapse, those unexplainable few seconds when the things had seemed\n almost disappointed. Steffens gave up wondering about that and began to\n examine the first robot in detail.", "It wasn't until he was on his way home that Steffens remembered the\n symbols again. And only then did he realized what they were.\nAfter a while, convinced that there was no danger, Steffens had the\n ship brought down. When the crew came out of the airlock, they were met\n by the robots, and each man found himself with a robot at his side,\n humbly requesting to be of service. There were literally thousands of\n the robots now, come from all over the barren horizon. The mass of them\n stood apart, immobile on a plain near the ship, glinting in the sun\n like a vast, metallic field of black wheat.\n\n\n The robots had obviously been built to serve. Steffens began to\nfeel\ntheir pleasure, to sense it in spite of the blank, expressionless\n faces. They were almost like children in their eagerness, yet they were\n still reserved. Whoever had built them, Steffens thought in wonder, had\n built them well.", "The efficiency of the things continued to amaze him, but the question\n he had been waiting to ask came out now with a rush:\n\n\n \"Can you tell us where the Makers are?\"\n\n\n Both robots stood motionless. It occurred to Steffens that he couldn't\n really be sure which was speaking. The voice that came to him spoke\n with difficulty.\n\n\n \"The Makers—are not here.\"\n\n\n Steffens stared in puzzlement. The robot detected his confusion and\n went on:\n\n\n \"The Makers have gone away. They have been gone for a very long time.\"\n\n\n Could that be\npain\nin its voice, Steffens wondered, and then the\n spectre of the ruined cities rose harsh in his mind.\n\n\n War. The Makers had all been killed in that war. And these had not been\n killed.", "Steffens, embarrassed, spoke quickly to the nearest mechanical: \"I hope\n you will forgive us our curiosity, but—yours is a remarkable race. We\n have never before made contact with a race like yours.\" It was said\n haltingly, but it was the best he could do.\n\n\n The robot made a singularly human nodding motion of its head.\n\n\n \"I perceive that the nature of our construction is unfamiliar to you.\n Your question is whether or not we are entirely 'mechanical.' I am\n not exactly certain as to what the word 'mechanical' is intended to\n convey—I would have to examine your thought more fully—but I believe\n that there is fundamental similarity between our structures.\"\n\n\n The robot paused. Steffens had a distinct impression that it was\n disconcerted.", "Ball came to join Steffens, staring at the robots through the clear\n plastic of his helmet with baffledly widened eyes. A robot moved out\n from the mass in the field, allied itself to him. The first to speak\n had remained with Steffens.\n\n\n Realizing that the robot could hear every word he was saying, Ball\n was for a while apprehensive. But the sheer unreality of standing and\n talking with a multi-limbed, intelligent hunk of dead metal upon the\n bare rock of a dead, ancient world, the unreality of it slowly died.\n It was impossible not to like the things. There was something in their\n very lines which was pleasant and relaxing.\n\n\n Their builders, Steffens thought, had probably thought of that, too.\n\n\n \"There's no harm in them,\" said Ball at last, openly, not minding if\n the robots heard. \"They seem actually glad we're here. My God, whoever\n heard of a robot being glad?\"", "He had a vague idea of the robot's history—more, perhaps, then they\n knew themselves—but he refrained from forming an opinion until\n Aliencon made its report. What fascinated him was Elb's amazing\n philosophy, the only outlook, really, that the robot could have had.\n\"What do you\ndo\n?\" Steffens asked.\n\n\n Elb replied quickly, with characteristic simplicity: \"We can do very\n little. A certain amount of physical knowledge was imparted to us at\n birth by the Makers. We spend the main part of our time expanding that\n knowledge wherever possible. We have made some progress in the natural\n sciences, and some in mathematics. Our purpose in being, you see, is\n to serve the Makers. Any ability we can acquire will make us that much\n more fit to serve when the Makers return.\"\n\n\n \"When they return?\" It had not occurred to Steffens until now that the\n robots expected the Makers to do so.", "But it created a problem in him. He had begun to picture for Elb the\n structure of human society, and the robot—a machine which did not eat\n or sleep—listened gravely and tried to understand. One day Steffens\n mentioned God.\n\n\n \"God?\" the robot repeated without comprehension. \"What is God?\"\n\n\n Steffens explained briefly, and the robot answered:", "\"No, not yet,\" he said, \"thank you.\" He swallowed hard as the robots\n continued waiting patiently.\n\n\n \"Could you tell me,\" he said at last, \"how old you are? Individually?\"\n\n\n \"By your reckoning,\" said his robot, and paused to make the\n calculation, \"I am forty-four years, seven months, and eighteen days of\n age, with ten years and approximately nine months yet to be alive.\"\n\n\n Steffens tried to understand that.\n\n\n \"It would perhaps simplify our conversations,\" said the robot, \"if\n you were to refer to me by a name, as is your custom. Using the\n first—letters—of my designation, my name would translate as Elb.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" Steffens mumbled.", "Elb regarded him out of the band of the circling eye. \"I see you had\n surmised that the Makers were not coming back.\"\n\n\n If the robot could have laughed, Steffens thought it would have, then.\n But it just stood there, motionless, its tone politely emphatic.\n\n\n \"It has always been our belief that the Makers would return. Why else\n would we have been built?\"\n\n\n Steffens thought the robot would go on, but it didn't. The question, to\n Elb, was no question at all.\n\n\n Although Steffens knew already what the robot could not possibly have\n known—that the Makers were gone and would never come back—he was a\n long time understanding. What he did was push this speculation into the\n back of his mind, to keep it from Elb. He had no desire to destroy a\n faith.", "Surprisingly, Steffens did not think about the future. Whenever he came\n near a robot, he sensed such a general, comfortable air of good feeling\n that it warmed him, and he was so preoccupied with watching the robots\n that he did little thinking.\n\n\n Something he had not realized at the beginning was that he was as\n unusual to the robots as they were to him. It came to him with a great\n shock that not one of the robots had ever seen a living thing. Not a\n bug, a worm, a leaf. They did not know what flesh was. Only the doctors\n knew that, and none of them could readily understand what was meant by\n the words \"organic matter.\" It had taken them some time to recognize\n that the Earthmen wore suits which were not parts of their bodies, and\n it was even more difficult for them to understand why the suits were\n needed.\n\n\n But when they did understand, the robots did a surprising thing.", "\"Welcome,\" the robot said, speaking again to his mind, and now\n Steffens detected a peculiar alteration in the robot's tone. It was\n less friendly now, less—Steffens could not understand—somehow less\ninterested\n, as if the robot had been—expecting someone else.\n\n\n \"Thank you,\" Steffens said. \"We are deeply grateful for your permission\n to land.\"\n\n\n \"Our desire,\" the robot repeated mechanically, \"is only to serve.\"\n\n\n Suddenly, Steffens began to feel alone, surrounded by machines. He\n tried to push the thought out of his mind, because he knew that they\nshould\nseem inhuman. But....\n\n\n \"Will the others come down?\" asked the robot, still mechanically.\n\n\n Steffens felt his embarrassment. The ship lay high in the mist above,\n jets throbbing gently.", "At first, because of the excessive radiation, none of the Earthmen\n could remain outside the ship for long, even in radiation suits. And\n one morning, when Steffens came out of the ship, it was to discover\n that hundreds of the robots, working through the night, had effectively\n decontaminated the entire area.\n\n\n It was at this point that Steffens asked how many robots there were.\n He learned to his amazement that there were more than nine million.\n The great mass of them had politely remained a great distance from the\n ship, spread out over the planet, since they were highly radioactive.\n\n\n Steffens, meanwhile, courteously allowed Elb to probe into his mind.\n The robot extracted all the knowledge of matter that Steffens held,\n pondered over the knowledge and tried to digest it, and passed it on to\n the other robots. Steffens, in turn, had a difficult time picturing the\n mind of a thing that had never known life.", "\"We await your coming,\" it said gravely, and repeated: \"Our desire is\n only to serve.\"\n\n\n And then the robots sent a\npicture\n.\n\n\n As perfect and as clear as a tridim movie, a rectangular plate took\n shape in Steffens' mind. On the face of the plate, standing alone\n against a background of red-brown, bare rocks, was one of the robots.\n With slow, perfect movement, the robot carefully lifted one of the\n hanging arms of its side, of its\nright\nside, and extended it toward\n Steffens, a graciously offered hand.\n\n\n Steffens felt a peculiar, compelling urge to take the hand, realized\n right away that the urge to take the hand was not entirely his. The\n robot mind had helped.", "\"You are called 'Stef,'\" said the robot obligingly. Then it added,\n pointing an arm at the robot near Ball: \"The age of—Peb—is seventeen\n years, one month and four days. Peb has therefore remaining some\n thirty-eight years.\"\n\n\n Steffens was trying to keep up. Then the life span was obviously about\n fifty-five years. But the cities, and the carbon dioxide? The robot,\n Elb, had said that the Makers were similar to him, and therefore oxygen\n and plant life would have been needed. Unless—\n\n\n He remembered the buildings on Tyban IV.\n\n\n Unless the Makers had not come from this planet at all.\n\n\n His mind helplessly began to revolve. It was Ball who restored order.\n\n\n \"Do you build yourselves?\" the exec asked.\n\n\n Peb answered quickly, that faint note of happiness again apparent, as\n if the robot was glad for the opportunity of answering.", "When the ship had gone very low, looking for a landing site, Steffens\n was still by the screen. It was Steffens, then, who saw the thing move.\n\n\n Down far below, it had been a still black shadow, and then it moved.\n Steffens froze. And he knew, even at that distance, that it was a robot.\nTiny and black, a mass of hanging arms and legs, the thing went gliding\n down the slope of a hill. Steffens saw it clearly for a full second,\n saw the dull ball of its head tilt upward as the ship came over, and\n then the hill was past.\nQuickly Steffens called for height. The ship bucked beneath him and\n blasted straight up; some of the crew went crashing to the deck.\n Steffens remained by the screen, increasing the magnification as the\n ship drew away. And he saw another, then two, then a black gliding\n group, all matched with bunches of hanging arms.", "He tried to grasp it, but he couldn't. There were robots here in the\n midst of a radiation so lethal that\nnothing\n,\nnothing\ncould live;\n robots on a dead planet, living in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide.\n\n\n The carbon dioxide brought him up sharp.\n\n\n If there had been life here once, there would have been plant life as\n well, and therefore oxygen. If the war had been so long ago that the\n free oxygen had since gone out of the atmosphere—good God, how old\n were the robots? Steffens looked at Ball, then at the silent robots,\n then out across the field to where the rest of them stood. The black\n wheat. Steffens felt a deep chill.\n\n\n Were they immortal?\n\"Would you like to see a doctor?\"\n\n\n Steffens jumped at the familiar words, then realized to what the robot\n was referring.", "\"It is a matter which has troubled us. We thought at first that you\n were the Makers returning—\" Steffens remembered the brief lapse, the\n seeming disappointment he had sensed—\"but then we probed your minds\n and found that you were not, that you were another kind of being,\n unlike either the Makers or ourselves. You were not even—\" Elb caught\n himself—\"you did not happen to be telepaths. Therefore we troubled\n over who made you. We did detect the word 'Maker' in your theology,\n but it seemed to have a peculiar—\" Elb paused for a long while—\"an\n untouchable, intangible meaning which varies among you.\"\n\n\n Steffens understood. He nodded.\n\n\n The Makers were the robots' God, were all the God they needed. The\n Makers had built them, the planet, the universe. If he were to ask them\n who made the Makers, it would be like their asking him who made God.", "The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden\n under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race?\n The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The\n building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any\n rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already.\n\n\n While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first\n time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly.\n From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the\n sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise.\n\n\n \"What were they?\" he said blankly. \"Lord, they looked like robots!\"\n\n\n \"They were.\"\n\n\n Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion\n of dots in the mist.\n\n\n \"Almost humanoid,\" Steffens said, \"but not quite.\"", "Nothing alive but robots, he thought,\nrobots\n. He adjusted to full\n close up as quickly as he could and the picture focused on the screen.\n Behind him he heard a crewman grunt in amazement.\n\n\n A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head—it would be the\n eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a\n single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined,\n he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now\n almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of\n the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the\n most perfect robots he had ever seen.\n\n\n The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight\n of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the\n alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He\n tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do.", "They had been gathering since his ship was first seen, and now there\n were hundreds of them clustered upon the hill. Others were arriving\n even as the skiff landed; they glided in over the rocky hills with\n fantastic ease and power, so that Steffens felt a momentary anxiety.\n Most of the robots were standing with the silent immobility of metal.\n Others threaded their way to the fore and came near the skiff, but none\n touched it, and a circle was cleared for Steffens when he came out.\nOne of the near robots came forward alone, moving, as Steffens now\n saw, on a number of short, incredibly strong and agile legs. The black\n thing paused before him, extended a hand as it had done in the picture.\n Steffens took it, he hoped, warmly; felt the power of the metal through\n the glove of his suit." ] ]
test	51194	[ "Society's attitude towards women seems to be", "What is Joe's motivation for opting to enter a relationship with his new wife?", "Joe builds Alice to ensure", "What seems to be everyone's opposition to Joe's creation?", "Joe designs Alice to be unable to smile. Why is this an issue?", "After Alice becomes a part of his life", "Joe's boss is a \"sentimentalist\" because", "According to Joe what sets his new wife apart from others of her kind?", "The first time he openly admits that he misses Vera's presence, even slightly is", "Joe feels the obvious solution to make Alice truly perfect is to " ]	[ [ "if they speak out against their husbands, they should be detained and reprogramed for their insurance.", "if a man is unhappy with a woman, if he has allowed for enough time, he should have the ability to \"trade her in.\"", "that they should be revered.", "every man deserves the perfect woman, and she should be \"made to order\" to achieve that goal." ], [ "She is wealthy, and he knows money will be nothing they ever have to concern themselves with.", "She is beautiful, and he wants to be able to finally have that \"trophy wife\" he has always dreamed of.", "He has designed her to be the perfect woman, custom-made for him.", "His former wife hates this new woman, and he can think of no better way to get back at his former wife for the way she treated him." ], [ "she is the most aesthetically pleasing woman in existence.", "she will never leave him.", "she is smart and lacks sentimentality and the ability to be deceitful.", "she can defend herself physically against any other human." ], [ "His wife was a good woman, and he did her so wrong that nothing he could create will be close to her.", "He does too much for personal gain.", "Playing \"God\" always comes with dire consequences.", "Joe misses the point that \"perfection\" is not a quality a human can or should possess." ], [ "Not every reaction warrants a smile.", "She is not always happy, and that is confusing to others who see a smile when she is actually angry, which she normally is.", "Her smile is not pretty enough for her face, and this makes Joe dislike her.", "She cannot show others she is serious. " ], [ "Joe admits that he made a mistake by creating her.", "Joe becomes world-famous for his invention.", "Joe opens a company that creates the perfect woman for any man who has the money to buy her.", "Joe longs for Vera." ], [ "he expresses that he really liked Vera and he will miss spending time with her.", "he misses when Joe was a child.", "he misses his own wife by meeting Joe's new wife.", "he misses the simpler times when a man could meet a woman naturally rather than have her built." ], [ "The warmth she possesses.", "She is far more intelligent.", "Her physical strength is beyond other women.", "She is far more beautiful." ], [ "When she is not there to pick him up from work.", "When he wants to have his first social interaction with another couple, and he does not feel Alice can ever learn social graces.", "When he sees her with another man.", "When he wakes up and sees she is not there." ], [ "make it to where she knows exactly what he knows.", "send her to training where she can hone her skills that are slightly lacking.", "pull the plug on Alice. Perfection cannot be achieved.", "make sure she has ONLY the qualities of Vera that he enjoyed." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.", "Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.", "\"You've done as well as you could,\" Joe agreed in an argumentative way.\n \"You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among\n women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established\n a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it\n completely.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sam said. \"That's a very small knife you've inserted between\n my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned.\" He took a deep breath.\n \"What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science\n Director, was the\nbig\njob?\"\n\n\n Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, \"The big\n job is too big for a sociologist.\"\n\n\n Sam seemed to flinch. \"I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the\n knife. I underestimated you.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a\n person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him\n or her or it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so\n much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural\n tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to\n sociologists all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When\n you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the\n Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "\"You're being very unreasonable.\"\n\n\n \"Am I?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel.\"\n\n\n \"Weren't you?\"\n\n\n His voice rose. \"Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you\n a human being, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I am,\" she said, \"and that's why I'm going back to the\n Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find\n a\nman\n.\"\n\n\n She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her\n shoulder. \"Vera, you—\"", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.", "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews.\n He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a\n Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the\n huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a\n disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps\n by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the\n camera.\n\n\n He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette\n was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was\n food on his plate, none on Vera's.\nHe went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to\n the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed.\n\n\n \"You don't have to leave tonight, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"" ], [ "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "\"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.", "Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, \"Sam's a\n timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing\n game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her\n oversacrifice.\"\n\n\n Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride\n in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride.\n\n\n They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It\n was more like a seance than a game.\n\n\n They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined\n look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she\n figured to make the next bid a costly one.\n\n\n She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam\n started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's\n anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility.", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.", "\"You've done as well as you could,\" Joe agreed in an argumentative way.\n \"You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among\n women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established\n a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it\n completely.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sam said. \"That's a very small knife you've inserted between\n my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned.\" He took a deep breath.\n \"What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science\n Director, was the\nbig\njob?\"\n\n\n Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, \"The big\n job is too big for a sociologist.\"\n\n\n Sam seemed to flinch. \"I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the\n knife. I underestimated you.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "\"From Vera? At the Center?\"\n\n\n Sam shook his head. \"Vera's been too busy to have much time for the\n director. She's our most popular number.\" Sam paused. \"About the new\n one. Hear she's something to see.\"\n\n\n \"You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a\n man needs at home.\" His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the\n enthusiasm he should have felt.\n\n\n Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. \"Why not bring her over, say,\n tonight? We'll play some bridge.\"\n\n\n That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized,\n working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. \"We'll be there. At\n eight-thirty.\"" ], [ "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What\n are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted\n one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches\n high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she\n should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile.\n\n\n He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh,\n circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made\n naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own,\n with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits.", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "He went down to the basement. The mold was 98.6. He watched the\n knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the\n mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic\n pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot\n of the mold.\n\n\n On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents\n to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the\n organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power,\n the box would cool, and there would be his—Alice. Well, why not Alice?\n She had to have a name, didn't she?\nWarmth, that was the difference between a human and a robot, just\n warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth\n was—it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though.", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "The rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood\n on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she\n wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that\n every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait.\n\n\n Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. The\n synthetic nerves were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo\n heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under\n pneumatic massage for muscle tone.\nHe'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would\n ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and\n would not be active.\n\n\n And the mind?", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.", "\"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"", "Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"" ], [ "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.", "Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.", "Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "\"You've done as well as you could,\" Joe agreed in an argumentative way.\n \"You've given some reason and order to the marital competition among\n women. You've almost eliminated illicit relations. You've established\n a basic security for the kids. But the big job? You've missed it\n completely.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" Sam said. \"That's a very small knife you've inserted between\n my shoulder blades, but I'm thin-skinned.\" He took a deep breath.\n \"What, in the opinion of the Junior Assistant to the Adjutant Science\n Director, was the\nbig\njob?\"\n\n\n Joe looked for some scorn in Sam's words, found it, and said, \"The big\n job is too big for a sociologist.\"\n\n\n Sam seemed to flinch. \"I didn't think that axe would fit alongside the\n knife. I underestimated you.\"", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What\n are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted\n one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches\n high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she\n should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile.\n\n\n He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh,\n circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made\n naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own,\n with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits.", "\"You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, Joe.\"\n\n\n So she had tact.\n\n\n He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring\n in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally.\n\n\n At the office, there was a note on his desk:\nMr. Behrens wants to see\n you immediately.\nIt bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the\n Chief.\n\n\n He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been\n told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit\n of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's\n account of the interview with Burke.\n\n\n When Joe had finished, the Chief's smile was tolerant. \"Ribbing him,\n were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe.\"", "\"Go to hell.\"\nJoe went back to his desk and burned. He started with a low flame and\n fed it with the grievances of the past weeks. When it began to warm his\n collar, he picked up his hat and left.\n\n\n Click, burr, click went the airlocks. Very few riders, this time of\n the afternoon. The brain would go in, intact, and then the knowledge\n instiller would work during the incubation period, feeding the\n adolescent memories to the retentive circuits. She would really spend\n her mental childhood in the mold, while the warmth sent the human spark\n through her body.\n\n\n Robot? Huh! What did they know? A human being, a product of science, a\nflawless\nhuman being." ], [ "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "\"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "The rise, the big hiss of the final airlock, and Inglewood. Joe stood\n on the platform a second, looking for his car, and then realized she\n wasn't there. She hadn't been there for a week, and he'd done that\n every night. Silly thing, habit. Human trait.\n\n\n Tonight, he'd know. The flesh had been in the mold for two days. The\n synthetic nerves were plump and white under the derma-ray, the fluxo\n heart was pumping steadily, the entire muscular structure kept under\n pneumatic massage for muscle tone.\nHe'd thought of omitting the frowning muscles, but realized it would\n ruin the facial contours. They weren't, however, under massage and\n would not be active.\n\n\n And the mind?", "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "Well, naturally it would be tuned to his. She'd know everything he\n knew. What room was there for disagreement if the minds were the same?\n Smiling, as she agreed, because she couldn't frown. Her tenderness, her\n romanticism would have an intensity variable, of course. He didn't want\n one of these grinning simperers.\n\n\n He remembered his own words: \"Is this love something you can turn\n on and off like a faucet?\" Were his own words biting him, or only\n scratching him? Something itched. An intensity variable was not a\n faucet, though unscientific minds might find a crude, allegorical\n resemblance.\n\n\n To hell with unscientific minds." ], [ "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.", "Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.", "\"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.", "The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.", "Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.", "He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews.\n He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a\n Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the\n huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a\n disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps\n by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the\n camera.\n\n\n He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette\n was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was\n food on his plate, none on Vera's.\nHe went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to\n the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed.\n\n\n \"You don't have to leave tonight, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, \"Sam's a\n timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing\n game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her\n oversacrifice.\"\n\n\n Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride\n in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride.\n\n\n They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It\n was more like a seance than a game.\n\n\n They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined\n look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she\n figured to make the next bid a costly one.\n\n\n She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam\n started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's\n anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility.", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "He went down to the basement. The mold was 98.6. He watched the\n knowledge instiller send its minute current to the head end of the\n mold. The meter read less than a tenth of an amp. The slow, plastic\n pulse of the muscle tone massage worked off a small pump near the foot\n of the mold.\n\n\n On the wall, the big master operating clock sent the minute currents\n to the various bodily sections, building up the cells, maintaining the\n organic functions. In two hours, the clock would shut off all power,\n the box would cool, and there would be his—Alice. Well, why not Alice?\n She had to have a name, didn't she?\nWarmth, that was the difference between a human and a robot, just\n warmth, just the spark. Funny he'd never thought of it before. Warmth\n was—it had unscientific connotations. It wasn't, though.", "\"You're being very unreasonable.\"\n\n\n \"Am I?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel.\"\n\n\n \"Weren't you?\"\n\n\n His voice rose. \"Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you\n a human being, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I am,\" she said, \"and that's why I'm going back to the\n Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find\n a\nman\n.\"\n\n\n She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her\n shoulder. \"Vera, you—\"" ], [ "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "\"You need just a touch of deception, just a wee shade of it.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, Joe.\"\n\n\n So she had tact.\n\n\n He went to the office with very little of the absurdity mood stirring\n in him. He'd had a full breakfast, naturally.\n\n\n At the office, there was a note on his desk:\nMr. Behrens wants to see\n you immediately.\nIt bore his secretary's initials. Mr. Behrens was the\n Chief.\n\n\n He was a fairly short man with immense shoulders and what he'd been\n told was a classical head. So he let his hair grow, and had a habit\n of thrusting his chin forward when he listened. He listened to Joe's\n account of the interview with Burke.\n\n\n When Joe had finished, the Chief's smile was tolerant. \"Ribbing him,\n were you? Old Burke hasn't much sense of humor, Joe.\"", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a\n person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him\n or her or it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so\n much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural\n tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to\n sociologists all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When\n you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the\n Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number.\"", "Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.", "The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler\n clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his\n wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They\n looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities.\n Unscientific people.\n\n\n Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job?\n Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The\n Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would\n certainly have been Senior Assistant.", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.", "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.", "He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food." ], [ "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "\"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "Sam, who was riding with him, looked over wonderingly. \"Who isn't?\"\n\n\n \"Vera. My wife. She's not right.\"\n\n\n Sam frowned. \"Are you serious, Joe? You mean she's—?\" He tapped his\n temple.\n\n\n \"Oh, no. I mean she's not what I want.\"\n\n\n \"That's why we have the Center,\" Sam answered, as if quoting, which he\n was. \"With the current and growing preponderance of women over men,\n something had to be done. I think we've done it.\"\n\n\n Sam was the Director of the Domestic Center and a man sold on his job.", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.", "\"From Vera? At the Center?\"\n\n\n Sam shook his head. \"Vera's been too busy to have much time for the\n director. She's our most popular number.\" Sam paused. \"About the new\n one. Hear she's something to see.\"\n\n\n \"You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a\n man needs at home.\" His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the\n enthusiasm he should have felt.\n\n\n Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. \"Why not bring her over, say,\n tonight? We'll play some bridge.\"\n\n\n That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized,\n working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. \"We'll be there. At\n eight-thirty.\"", "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "Driving over to Westchester that night, Joe told Alice, \"Sam's a\n timid bidder. His wife's inclined to overbid. Plays a sacrificing\n game when she knows it will gain points. Our job will be to make her\n oversacrifice.\"\n\n\n Sam's eyes opened at sight of her; his wife's narrowed. Joe took pride\n in their reaction, but it was a strange, impersonal pride.\n\n\n They had a drink and some small talk, and settled around the table. It\n was more like a seance than a game.\n\n\n They bid and made four clubs, a heart. Sam's wife got that determined\n look. With the opposition holding down one leg of the rubber, she\n figured to make the next bid a costly one.\n\n\n She won it with six diamonds, and went down nine tricks, doubled. Sam\n started to say something, after the debacle, but one look at his wife's\n anguished countenance stopped him short of audibility." ], [ "He went thoughtfully into the living room and snapped on the telenews.\n He saw troops moving by on foot, a file of them dispersed along a\n Brazilian road. He turned the knob to another station and saw the\n huge stock market board, a rebroadcast. Another twist and he saw a\n disheveled, shrieking woman being transported down some tenement steps\n by a pair of policemen. The small crowd on the sidewalk mugged into the\n camera.\n\n\n He snapped it off impatiently and went into the kitchen. The dinette\n was a glass-walled alcove off this, and the table was set. There was\n food on his plate, none on Vera's.\nHe went to the living room and then, with a mutter of impatience, to\n the door of the back bedroom. She had her grips open on the low bed.\n\n\n \"You don't have to leave tonight, you know.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "The stirring in him he didn't want to analyze and he thought of\n the days he'd courted Vera, going to dances at the Center, playing\n bridge at the Center, studying Greek at the Center. A fine but too\n well-lighted place. You could do everything but smooch there; the\n smooching came after the declaration of intentions and a man was bound\n after the declaration to go through with the wedding, to live with his\n chosen mate for the minimum three months of the adjustment period.\nAdjustment period ... another necessity for humans, for imperfect\n people. Across the street, the perfectly adjusted Harveys smiled at\n each other and sipped their drinks. Hell, that wasn't adjustment, that\n was surrender.", "But he did say, \"I certainly thought a lot of Vera. You wouldn't have\n to warm her in any incubating mold.\"\n\n\n \"Wait'll you see this one,\" Joe said.\n\n\n And when she walked into the living room at home, when she acknowledged\n the introduction to the Chief, Joe knew the old boy was sold. The Chief\n could only stare.\n\n\n Joe took him down to the basement then to show him the molecule\n agitator, the memory feeder, the instillers.\n\n\n The old boy looked it over and said, quite simply, \"I'll be damned!\"\n\n\n They went up to a perfect dinner—and incident number two.\n\n\n The Chief was a sentimentalist and he'd just lost a fine friend. This\n friend was his terrier, Murph, who'd been hit by a speeding car.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "\"I used the past tense.\" She started to get out on her side of the car.\n \"I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\n \"But I do,\" he told her. \"Is this love something you can turn on and\n off like a faucet?\"\n\n\n \"I don't care to explain it to you,\" she said. \"I've got to pack.\" She\n left the car, slammed the door, and moved hurriedly toward the house.\n\n\n Joe watched her. Something was troubling him, something he couldn't\n analyze, but he felt certain that if he could, it would prove to be\n absurd.", "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "He got up and went into the living room; fighting the stirring in him,\n the stirring he didn't want to analyze and find absurd. He went into\n the bathroom and studied his lean, now haggard face. He looked like\n hell. He went into the back bedroom and smelled her perfume and went\n quickly from the house and into the backyard.\n\n\n He sat there until seven, listening to the throb from the basement.\n The molecule agitator should have the flesh firm and finished now,\n nourished by the select blood, massaged by the pulsating plastic.\n\n\n At seven, she should be ready.\n\n\n At seven, he went down to the basement. His heart should have been\n hammering and his mind expectant, but he was just another guy going\n down to the basement.", "Joe said nothing to that. Sam looked miserable. They sat there,\n listening to the swishing, burring clicks of the airlocks, two\n friends—one who dealt with people and had grown soft, the other who\n dealt with machines and might not have grown at all.\n\n\n As the car rose for the Inglewood station, Sam looked over, but Joe's\n eyes were straight ahead. Sam got up and out of the seat.\n\n\n There was a whispering sigh of escaping air and the sunlight glare of\n the Inglewood station, synthetic redwood and chrome and marble.\n\n\n Sam was out of the cylindrical, stainless steel car and hurrying for\n the Westchester local when Joe came out onto the platform. Sam was\n annoyed, it was plain.", "The grass was dry and gray; he'd forgotten to set the sprinkler\n clock, Vera's old job. Across the street, Dan Harvey sat with his\n wife, each with a drink. Sat with his human wife, the poor fish. They\n looked happy, though. Some people were satisfied with mediocrities.\n Unscientific people.\n\n\n Why was he restless? Why was he bored? Was he worried about his job?\n Only slightly; the Chief thought a lot of him, a hell of a lot. The\n Chief was a great guy for seniority and Burke had it, or Joe would\n certainly have been Senior Assistant.", "\"From Vera? At the Center?\"\n\n\n Sam shook his head. \"Vera's been too busy to have much time for the\n director. She's our most popular number.\" Sam paused. \"About the new\n one. Hear she's something to see.\"\n\n\n \"You heard right. She's practically flawless, Sam. She's just what a\n man needs at home.\" His voice, for some reason, didn't indicate the\n enthusiasm he should have felt.\n\n\n Sam chewed one corner of his mouth. \"Why not bring her over, say,\n tonight? We'll play some bridge.\"\n\n\n That would be something. Two minds, perfectly in harmony, synchronized,\n working in partnership. Joe's smile was smug. \"We'll be there. At\n eight-thirty.\"", "\"Why?\"\n\n\n \"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a\n person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him\n or her or it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so\n much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural\n tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to\n sociologists all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When\n you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the\n Center as quickly as you can. She's a choice, rare number.\"", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "He went upstairs and fried some eggs. Twice a day, for a week, he had\n fried eggs. Their flavor was overrated.\n\n\n Then he went into the living room and snapped on the ball game.\n\n\n Martin was on third and Pelter was at bat. On the mound, the lank form\n of Dorffberger cast a long, grotesque shadow in the afternoon sun.\n Dorffberger chewed and spat and wiped his nose with the back of his\n glove. He looked over at third and yawned.\n\n\n At the plate, Pelter was digging in. Pelter looked nervous.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Bet that Dorffberger fans him. He's got the Indian sign on\n Pelter.\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "Something flashed toward his face. It was her slim, white hand, but it\n didn't feel slim and white. She said, \"I can see now why you weren't\n made\nSenior\nAssistant to the Adjutant Science Director. You're a\n stupid, emotionless mechanic. A machine.\"\n\n\n He was still staring after her when the door slammed. He thought of the\n huge Domestic Center with its classes in Allure, Boudoir Manners, Diet,\n Poise, Budgeting. That vast, efficient, beautifully decorated Center\n which was the brain child of Sam Tullgren, but which still had to deal\n with imperfect humans.\n\n\n People, people, people ... and particularly women. He rose, after a\n while, and went into the dinette. He sat down and stared moodily at his\n food.", "\"You're being very unreasonable.\"\n\n\n \"Am I?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't trying to be intentionally cruel.\"\n\n\n \"Weren't you?\"\n\n\n His voice rose. \"Will you stop talking like some damned robot? Are you\n a human being, or aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I am,\" she said, \"and that's why I'm going back to the\n Center. I've changed my mind. I want to get registered. I want to find\n a\nman\n.\"\n\n\n She started to go past him, her grip in her hand. He put a hand on her\n shoulder. \"Vera, you—\"" ], [ "\"Here?\" Alice asked.\n\n\n \"No, of course not. Home. Let's go, dear. Have to rush.\"\n\n\n Alice's smile had nothing sentimental about it.\nHe didn't berate her until morning. He wanted time to cool off, to look\n at the whole thing objectively. It just wouldn't get objective, though.\n\n\n At breakfast, he said, \"That was tactless last night. Very, very\n tactless.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Joe. Tact requires deception. Tact is essentially deception.\"\n\n\n When had he said that? Oh, yes, at the Hydra Club lecture. And it was\n true and he hated deception and he'd created a wife without one.\n\n\n He said, \"I'll have to devise a character distiller that won't require\n putting you back in the mold.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, dear. Why?\"", "The pumps had stopped, the agitator, the instiller. He felt the mold;\n it was cool to the touch. He lifted the lid, his mind on Vera for some\n reason.\nA beauty. The lid was fully back and his mate sat up, smiled and said,\n \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"Hello, Alice. Everything all right?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n Her hair was a silver blonde, her features a blend of the patrician and\n the classical. Her figure was neither too slim nor too stout, too flat\n nor too rounded. Nowhere was there any sag.\n\n\n \"Thought we'd drop over to the Harveys' for a drink,\" Joe said. \"Sort\n of show you off, you know.\"\n\n\n \"Ego gratification, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"Of course. I've some clothes upstairs for you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure they're lovely.\"", "The smile faded after about ten minutes. For Alice was telling her\nall\nabout the comptin-reduco-determina. For an hour and nineteen\n minutes, Alice talked to this woman who had been humiliated twice,\n telling her all the things about the famous thinking machine that Mrs.\n Tullgren didn't want to know.\n\n\n It wasn't until Alice was through talking animatedly that the entranced\n Joe began to suspect that perhaps the Tullgrens weren't as interested\n in the dingus as a scientific mind would assume.\n\n\n They weren't. There was a strain after that, a decided heaviness to the\n rest of the evening. Sam seemed to sigh with relief when they said good\n night.\n\n\n In the car, Joe was thoughtful. Halfway home, he said, \"Darling, I\n think you know too much—for a female, that is. I think you'll have to\n have a go with the knowledge-instiller. In reverse, of course.\"", "\"Okay.\" Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. \"I'm going to make a\n perfect wife.\" He tapped his own chest. \"For me, just for me, the way I\n want her. No human frailties. Ideal.\"\n\n\n \"A perfect robot,\" Sam objected.\n\n\n \"A wife,\" Joe corrected. \"A person. A human being.\"\n\n\n \"But without a brain.\"\n\n\n \"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?\"\n\n\n \"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people.\n Nothing.\"\n\"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's\n inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them.\nI'm\na person. I\n think I'm—discerning and sensitive.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" Sam said. \"Let's drop the subject.\"", "\"No offense,\" Joe said. \"It's just that you have to deal with human\n beings.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" Sam said. \"Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you\n were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was\n thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that\n now, aren't you?\"\n\n\n \"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are.\" Joe\n looked at Sam squarely. \"Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?\"\n\n\n Sam shrugged. \"I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so\n far?\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like it.\"", "\"Of course,\" she agreed.\n\n\n \"I don't object to females knowing a lot. The world does.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" she said.\n\n\n She was a first model and, therefore, experimental. These bugs were\n bound to show up. She was now less knowing, more deceptive, and she\n could frown.\n\n\n She began to remind him of Vera, which didn't make sense.\n\n\n Alice was sad when he was sad, gay when he was gay, and romantic to the\n same split-degree in the same split-second. She even told him his old\n jokes with the same inflection he always used.\n\n\n Their mood affinity was geared as closely as the\n comptin-reduco-determina. What more could a man want? And, damn it, why\n should Vera's perfume linger in that back bedroom?", "This afternoon, Burke's long nose was twitching and his thin face was\n gravely bleak. He had a clipped, efficient way of speaking.\n\n\n \"Tired, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Not hitting the ball, not on the beam, no zipperoo.\"\n\n\n \"I'm—yes, I guess you're right. I've been working at home on a private\n project.\"\n\n\n \"Scientific?\"\n\n\n \"Naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\n Joe took a breath, looked away, and back at Burke. \"Well, a wife.\"\n\n\n A frown, a doubtful look from the cold, blue eyes. \"Robot? Dishwasher\n and cook and phone answerer and like that?\"\n\n\n \"More than that.\"", "So far, of course, he had described nothing more than a robot of flesh\n and blood. The spark, now—what distinguished the better-grade robots\n from people? Prenatal heat, that was it. Incubation. A mold, a heated\n mold. Warmth, the spark, the sun, life.\nFor the skin, he went to Pete Celano, the top syntho-dermatologist in\n the Department.\n\n\n \"Something special?\" Pete asked. \"Not just a local skin graft? What\n then?\"\n\n\n \"A wife. A perfect wife.\"\n\n\n Pete's grin sagged baffledly. \"I don't get it, Joe. Perfect how?\"\n\n\n \"In all ways.\" Joe's face was grave. \"Someone ideal to live with.\"\n\n\n \"How about Vera? What was wrong with her?\"", "\"She can't frown,\" Joe explained. \"The muscles are there, but they need\n massage to bring them to life.\" He paused. \"I wanted a smiling wife.\"\n\n\n The Chief inhaled heavily. \"There are times when a smile is out of\n order, don't you think, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"It seems that way.\"\n\n\n It didn't take long. Massage, orientation, practice, concentration. It\n didn't take long, and she was so willing to cooperate. Golly, she was\n agreeable. She was more than that; she voiced his thoughts before he\n did. Because of the mental affinity, you see. He'd made sure of that.\nShe could frown now and she had enough deception to get by in almost\n any company. These flaws were necessary, but they were still flaws and\n brought her closer to being—human.\nAt the office on Saturday morning, Sam Tullgren dropped in. Sam said,\n \"I've been hearing things, Joseph.\"", "\"They are lovely.\"\n\n\n While she dressed, he phoned the Harveys. He explained about Vera\n first, because Vera was what the Harveys considered a good neighbor.\n\n\n Dan Harvey said sympathetically, \"It happens to the best of us.\n Thinking of getting a new one, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"I've got one right here. Thought I'd drop over, sort of break the ice.\"\n\n\n \"Great,\" Dan said. \"Fine. Dandy.\"\n\n\n The event was of minor importance, except for the revelation involved.\n\n\n The Harveys had a gift for putting guests at ease, the gift being a\n cellar full of thirty-year-old bourbon the elder Harvey had bequeathed\n them at the end of their adjustment period.\n\n\n The talk moved here and there, over the bourbon, Alice sharing in it\n rarely, though nodding when Joe was talking.", "Joe's glance went from his hurrying friend to the parking lot, and his\n coupe was there with Vera behind the wheel. It was only a three block\n walk, but she had to be there to meet him, every evening. That was her\n major fault, her romantic sentimentality.\n\n\n \"Darling,\" she said, as he approached the coupe. \"Sweetheart. Have a\n good day?\"\nHe kissed her casually. \"Ordinary.\" She slid over and he climbed in\n behind the wheel. \"Sat with Sam Tullgren on the train.\"\n\n\n \"Sam's nice.\"\n\n\n He turned on the ignition and said, \"Start.\" The motor obediently\n started and he swung out of the lot, onto Chestnut. \"Sam's all right.\n Kind of sentimental.\"", "Joe had the ace, king, queen and jack of hearts and a three to lead to\n Alice's hand. Alice finished up the hearts for a total of seven tricks,\n and this time it was Mrs. Tullgren who opened her mouth to speak.\n\n\n But she remembered Sam's kindness in the former hand, and she said,\n \"It was all my fault, darling. To think I couldn't recognize a\n psychic, just because it came from you. I think we're overmatched,\n sweet.\" She paused to smile at Joe. \"Up against the man who invented\n the comptin-reduco-determina.\" She added, as an afterthought, \"And his\n charming, brilliant new wife.\"\n\n\n Which brought about incident number three.\n\n\n Alice turned to Mrs. Tullgren sweetly and asked, \"Don't you really\n understand the comptin-reduco-determina?\"\n\n\n \"Not even faintly,\" Mrs. Tullgren answered. She smiled at Alice.", "The story of Murph from birth to death was a fairly long one, but never\n dull. The Chief had a way with words. Even Joe, one of the world's\n top-ranking non-sentimentalists, was touched by the tale. When they\n came to the end, where Murph had lain in his master's arms, whimpering,\n as though to comfort him, trying to lick his face, Joe's eyes were wet\n and the drink wobbled in his hand.\n\n\n The Chief finished in a whisper, and looked up from the carpet he'd\n been staring at through the account.\n\n\n And there was Alice, sitting erect, a smile of perfect joy on her face.\n \"How touching,\" she said, and grinned.\n\n\n For one horror-stricken second, the Chief glared at her, and then his\n questioning eyes went to Joe.", "\"A sentimentalist, too romantic, kind of—well, maybe not dumb,\n exactly, but—\"\n\n\n \"But not perfect. Who is, Joe?\"\n\n\n \"My new wife is going to be.\"\n\n\n Pete shrugged and began putting together the ingredients for the kind\n of skin Joe had specified.\n\n\n They're all the same, Joe thought, Sam and Pete and the rest. They\n seemed to think his idea childish. He built the instillers and\n incubator that night. The mold would be done by one of the Department's\n engravers. Joe had the sketches and dimensions ready.\n\n\n Wednesday afternoon, Burke called him in. Burke was the Senior\n assistant, a job Joe had expected and been miffed about. Burke was a\n jerk, in Joe's book.", "Then, at mention of someone or other, Mrs. Harvey said tolerantly,\n \"Well, none of us are perfect, I guess.\"\n\n\n Alice smiled and answered, \"Some of us are satisfied with mediocrities\n in marriage.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Harvey frowned doubtfully. \"I don't quite understand, dear. In\n any marriage, there has to be adjustment. Dan and I, for example, have\n adjusted very well.\"\n\n\n \"You haven't adjusted,\" Alice said smilingly. \"You've surrendered.\"\n\n\n Joe coughed up half a glass of bourbon, Dan turned a sort of red-green\n and Mrs. Harvey stared with her mouth open. Alice smiled.\n\n\n Finally, Mrs. Harvey said, \"Well, I never—\"\n\n\n \"Of all the—\" Dan Harvey said.\n\n\n Joe rose and said, \"Must get to bed, got to get to bed.\"", "She stared at him, a film of moisture in her eyes. She didn't cry or\n ask questions or protest. Joe wished she would. This was worse.\n\n\n \"It's not your fault,\" he said, after a moment. \"I'm not going to get\n another. You're as ideal, almost, as a human wife can ever be.\"\n\n\n \"I've tried so hard,\" she said. \"Maybe I tried too hard.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" he said, \"it isn't your fault. Any reasonable man would be\n delighted with you, Vera. You won't be at the Center long.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want a reasonable man,\" she said quietly. \"I want you, Joe.\n I—I loved you.\"\n\n\n He had started to get out of the car. He paused to look back. \"Loved?\n Did you use the past tense?\"", "\"That's what I mean.\"\nJoe was silent. The coupe went past a row of solar homes and turned on\n Fulsom. Three houses from the corner, he turned into their driveway.\n\n\n \"You're awfully quiet,\" Vera said.\n\n\n \"I'm thinking.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Her voice was suddenly strained. \"Sam didn't try to sell\n you—\"\n\n\n \"A new wife?\" He looked at her. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\n \"You're thinking about me, about trading me in. Joe, haven't\n I—darling, is there—?\" She broke off, looking even more miserable\n than Sam had.\n\n\n \"I don't intend to trade you in,\" he said quietly.\n\n\n She took a deep breath.\n\n\n He didn't look at her. \"But you're going back to the Center.\"", "Joe said patiently, \"I wasn't ribbing him. I took her out of the mold\n last night. I ate breakfast with her this morning. She's—beautiful,\n Chief. She's ideal.\"\n\n\n The Chief looked at him for seconds, his head tilted.\n\n\n Joe said, \"Heat, that's what does it. If you'd like to come for dinner\n with us tonight, Chief, and see for yourself—\"\n\n\n The Chief nodded. \"I'd like that.\"\nThey left a little early to avoid the crowd in the tube. Burke saw them\n leaving, and his long face grew even longer.\n\n\n On the trip, Joe told his boss about the cybernetic brain, about his\n background and his beliefs stored in the memory circuits, and the boss\n listened quietly, not committing himself with any comments.", "Slightly raised eyebrows.\n\n\n \"More?\"\n\n\n \"Completely human, except she will have no human faults.\"\n\n\n Cool smile. \"Wouldn't be human, then, of course.\"\n\n\n \"\nHuman, but without human faults, I said!\n\"\n\n\n \"You raised your voice, Joe.\"\n\n\n \"I did.\"\n\n\n \"I'm the Senior Assistant. Junior Assistants do not raise their voices\n to Senior Assistants.\"\n\n\n \"I thought you might be deaf, as well as dumb,\" Joe said.\n\n\n A silence. The granite face of Burke was marble, then steel and finally\n chromium. His voice matched it. \"I'll have to talk to the Chief before\n I fire you, of course. Department rule. Good afternoon.\"", "Little boys are made of something and snails and puppydogs' tails. What\n are little girls made of? Joe didn't want a little girl; he wanted\n one about a hundred and twenty-two pounds and five feet, four inches\n high. He wanted her to be flat where she should be and curved where she\n should be, with blonde hair and gray-green eyes and an exciting smile.\n\n\n He had a medical degree, among his others. The nerves, muscles, flesh,\n circulatory system could be made—and better than they were ever made\n naturally. The brain would be cybernetic and fashioned after his own,\n with his own mental background stored in the memory circuits." ] ]
test	29170	[ "How has time in space affected Hogey physically?", "What does Hogey mean when he says “I’m a tumbler”?", "Which is the best real-life analogy to Hogey’s situation?", "Who is Marie?", "What happened to the money Hogey earned in space?", "Why is Hogey embarrassed to go home?", "What is the significance of the ending?", "Why does Hogey wait a week before going home?", "What is a hoofer?" ]	[ [ "He is blind and his skin is allergic to the sun. ", "He can’t walk with gravity and he sleeps standing up. ", "He aged faster in space; he has the body of an old man. ", "He has trouble walking with gravity, and his eyes and skin have been scorched by the sun. " ], [ "He’s an alcoholic; he is always stumbling around because he’s drunk. ", "Tumbler is another word for gambler. ", "He has ambitious aspirations and doesn’t want to be tied down in a normal, mundane life. ", "Being a spacer is now part of his identity; his experience in space separates him from people who have not been in space. " ], [ "A workaholic who can’t make time for family. ", "A war veteran struggling to adjust to civilian life back home.", "An addict’s strained relationship with family. ", "An astronaut’s nostalgia for space after coming home." ], [ "Hogey’s sister", "The bus driver", "Hogey’s newborn daughter ", "Hogey’s wife of 6 years" ], [ "He spent it all on booze. ", "He lost it gambling.", "He put it in a savings account for a house. ", "The space program went bankrupt and Hogey didn’t get paid." ], [ "He is afraid to tell his family that he lost $4800. ", "He knows his wife will be angry because he was unfaithful.", "He doesn’t want his family to see his gravity legs. ", "His father-in-law doesn’t like spacers. " ], [ "Hogey gets his feet stuck in cement, symbolizing the way that he feels stuck in parenthood. ", "Hogey cries out for help after getting stuck in cement, which indicates that he will get help from his family and be okay. ", "The dog finds Hogey passed out in the yard, but doesn’t recognize him. This shows how Hogey is out of place. ", "Hogey collapses, but he cannot tell if it is from his gravity legs or the alcohol. His inability to walk is symbolic of his inability to provide for his family. " ], [ "He is avoiding his family responsibilities.", "He wants his body to adjust to Earth before seeing his wife.", "He gets lost on the bus.", "He was fired from the space station and doesn't want to tell his family. " ], [ "A person who stays on Earth. ", "A slang term for astronaut. ", "Someone who works in Big Bottomless. ", "A wandering drunk. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ..." ], [ "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him." ], [ "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily." ], [ "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\nMake the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\nBut that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "on his sun-scorched face, and so\n they tolerated him and helped him.\n They even made allowances for him\n when he staggered and fell in the\n aisle of the bus while pursuing the\n harassed little housewife from seat\n to seat and cajoling her to sit and\n talk with him.", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came." ], [ "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag.", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "Keesey would have a rough time\n for a while—rough as a cob. The pit\n was no playground. The first time\n you went out of the station in a\n suit, the pit got you. Everything\n was falling, and you fell, with it.\n Everything. The skeletons of steel,\n the tire-shaped station, the spheres\n and docks and nightmare shapes—all\n tied together by umbilical cables\n and flexible tubes. Like some crazy\n sea-thing they seemed, floating in a\n black ocean with its tentacles bound\n together by drifting strands in the\n dark tide that bore it.\nEverything was pain-bright or\n dead black, and it wheeled around\n you, and you went nuts trying to\n figure which way was down. In fact,\n it took you months to teach your\n body that\nall\nways were down and\n that the pit was bottomless.\n\n\n He became conscious of a plaintive\n sound in the wind, and froze to\n listen.\n\n\n It was a baby crying.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks" ], [ "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on." ], [ "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "It was far past midnight when he\n became conscious of the dog licking\n wetly at his ear and cheek. He\n pushed the animal away with a low\n curse and mopped at the side of his\n face. He stirred, and groaned. His\n feet were burning up! He tried to\n pull them toward him, but they\n wouldn't budge. There was something\n wrong with his legs.\n\n\n For an instant he stared wildly\n around in the night. Then he remembered\n where he was, closed his\n eyes and shuddered. When he\n opened them again, the moon had\n emerged from behind a cloud, and\n he could see clearly the cruel trap\n into which he had accidentally\n stumbled. A pile of old boards, a\n careful stack of new lumber, a\n pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps\n of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete\n mixer—well, it added up.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud.", "The light was on in the house\n again, and he heard faint sounds.\n The stirring-about woke the baby\n again, and once more the infant's\n wail came on the breeze.\nMake the kid shut up, make the\n kid shut up ...\nBut that was no good. It wasn't\n the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's\n fault. No fathers allowed in space,\n they said, but it wasn't their fault\n either. They were right, and he had\n only himself to blame. The kid was\n an accident, but that didn't change\n anything. Not a thing in the world.\n It remained a tragedy.", "When he awoke, it was night,\n and he was shivering. His stomach\n was screeching, and his nerves dancing\n with high voltages. He sat up\n and groped for his watch, then remembered\n he had pawned it after\n the poker game. Remembering the\n game and the results of the game\n made him wince and bite his lip\n and grope for the bottle again.\n\n\n He sat breathing heavily for a\n moment after the stiff drink. Equating\n time to position had become\n second nature with him, but he had\n to think for a moment because his\n defective vision prevented him from\n seeing the Earth-crescent.\n\n\n Vega was almost straight above\n him in the late August sky, so he\n knew it wasn't much after sundown—probably\n about eight o'clock. He\n braced himself with another swallow\n of gin, picked himself up and\n got back to the road, feeling a little\n sobered after the nap.", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "He shook his head. It wasn't really\n the sun. The sun, the real sun,\n was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in\n the dead black pit. It painted everything\n with pure white pain, and you\n saw things by the reflected pain-light.\n The fat red sun was strictly a\n phoney, and it didn't fool him any.\n He hated it for what he knew it was\n behind the gory mask, and for what\n it had done to his eyes.\nWith a grunt, he got to his feet,\n managed to shoulder the duffle bag,\n and started off down the middle of\n the farm road, lurching from side\n to side, and keeping his eyes on the\n rolling distances. Another car turned\n onto the side-road, honking angrily.", "He gripped his ankles and pulled,\n but his feet wouldn't budge. In\n sudden terror, he tried to stand up,\n but his ankles were clutched by the\n concrete too, and he fell back in\n the sand with a low moan. He lay\n still for several minutes, considering\n carefully.\n\n\n He pulled at his left foot. It was\n locked in a vise. He tugged even\n more desperately at his right foot.\n It was equally immovable.\n\n\n He sat up with a whimper and\n clawed at the rough concrete until\n his nails tore and his fingertips\n bled. The surface still felt damp,\n but it had hardened while he slept.\n\n\n He sat there stunned until Hooky\n began licking at his scuffed fingers.\n He shouldered the dog away, and\n dug his hands into the sand-pile to\n stop the bleeding. Hooky licked at\n his face, panting love." ], [ "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "\"Get away!\" he croaked savagely.\n\n\n The dog whined softly, trotted\n a short distance away, circled, and\n came back to crouch down in the\n sand directly before Hogey, inching\n forward experimentally.\n\n\n Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry\n sand and cursed between his teeth,\n while his eyes wandered over the\n sky. They came to rest on the sliver\n of light—the space station—rising\n in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless\n where the gang was—Nichols\n and Guerrera and Lavrenti\n and Fats. And he wasn't forgetting\n Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced\n him.", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "The burly farmer retrieved his\n gin bottle for him, still miraculously\n unbroken. \"Here's your gravity,\"\n he grunted. \"Listen, fella, you better\n get home pronto.\"\n\n\n \"Pronto? Hey, I'm no Mex. Honest,\n I'm just space burned. You\n know?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway?\n Do you live around here?\"\n\n\n It was obvious that the big man\n had taken him for a hobo or a\n tramp. Hogey pulled himself together.\n \"Goin' to the Hauptman's\n place. Marie. You know Marie?\"\n\n\n The farmer's eyebrows went up.\n \"Marie Hauptman? Sure I know\n her. Only she's Marie Parker now.\n Has been, nigh on six years. Say—\"\n He paused, then gaped. \"You ain't\n her husband by any chance?\"", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "He limped on up the pavement\n and turned left at the narrow drive\n that led between barbed-wire fences\n toward the Hauptman farmhouse,\n five hundred yards or so from the\n farm road. The fields on his left\n belonged to Marie's father, he\n knew. He was getting close—close\n to home and woman and child.\n\n\n He dropped the bag suddenly\n and leaned against a fence post,\n rolling his head on his forearms\n and choking in spasms of air. He\n was shaking all over, and his belly\n writhed. He wanted to turn and\n run. He wanted to crawl out in the\n grass and hide.\n\n\n What were they going to say?\n And Marie, Marie most of all.\n How was he going to tell her about\n the money?", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "The bottom of the ditch was wet,\n and he crawled up the embankment\n with mud-soaked knees, and sat on\n the shoulder again. The gin bottle\n was still intact. He had himself a\n long fiery drink, and it warmed him\n deep down. He blinked around at\n the gaunt and treeless land.\n\n\n The sun was almost down, forge-red\n on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked\n sky faded into sulphurous\n yellow toward the zenith, and the\n very air that hung over the land\n seemed full of yellow smoke, the\n omnipresent dust of the plains.\n\n\n A farm truck turned onto the\n side-road and moaned away, its\n driver hardly glancing at the dark\n young man who sat swaying on his\n duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey\n scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just\n kept staring at the crazy sun.", "He was trembling again. He\n fished the fifth of gin out of his\n coat pocket and sloshed it. Still over\n half a pint. He decided to kill it. It\n wouldn't do to go home with a\n bottle sticking out of his pocket.\n He stood there in the night wind,\n sipping at it, and watching the reddish\n moon come up in the east. The\n moon looked as phoney as the\n setting sun.\n\n\n He straightened in sudden determination.\n It had to be sometime.\n Get it over with, get it over with\n now. He opened the fence-gap, slipped\n through, and closed it firmly\n behind him. He retrieved his bag,\n and waded quietly through the tall\n grass until he reached the hedge\n which divided an area of sickly\n peach trees from the field. He got\n over the hedge somehow, and started\n through the trees toward the\n house. He stumbled over some old\n boards, and they clattered.\n\n\n \"\nShhh!\n\" he hissed, and moved\n on.", "Six hitches in space, and every\n time the promise had been the\n same:\nOne more tour, baby, and\n we'll have enough dough, and then\n I'll quit for good. One more time,\n and we'll have our stake—enough\n to open a little business, or buy a\n house with a mortgage and get a\n job.\nAnd she had waited, but the\n money had never been quite enough\n until this time. This time the tour\n had lasted nine months, and he had\n signed on for every run from station\n to moon-base to pick up the\n bonuses. And this time he'd made\n it. Two weeks ago, there had been\n forty-eight hundred in the bank.\n And now ...\n\n\n \"\nWhy?\n\" he groaned, striking his\n forehead against his forearms. His\n arm slipped, and his head hit the\n top of the fencepost, and the pain\n blinded him for a moment. He staggered\n back into the road with a\n low roar, wiped blood from his\n forehead, and savagely kicked his\n bag." ], [ "\"Hey, watch the traffic!\" The\n driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome\n compassion he trotted\n around after his troublesome passenger,\n taking his arm as he sagged\n again. \"You crossing?\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" Hogey muttered. \"Lemme\n alone, I'm okay.\"\n\n\n The driver started across the\n highway with him. The traffic was\n sparse, but fast and dangerous in\n the central ninety-mile lane.\n\n\n \"I'm okay,\" Hogey kept protesting.\n \"I'm a tumbler, ya know?\n Gravity's got me. Damn gravity.\n I'm not used to gravity, ya know? I\n used to be a tumbler—\nhuk!\n—only\n now I gotta be a hoofer. 'Count\n of li'l Hogey. You know about li'l\n Hogey?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Your son. Come on.\"", "\"Now stay out of the road,\" the\n driver warned, then hurried back\n across the highway. Moments later,\n the atomic battery-driven motors\n droned mournfully, and the bus\n pulled away.\n\n\n Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing\n the back of his neck. \"Nice\n people,\" he said. \"Nice buncha people.\n All hoofers.\"\n\n\n With a grunt and a lurch, he got\n to his feet, but his legs wouldn't\n work right. With his tumbler's reflexes,\n he fought to right himself\n with frantic arm motions, but gravity\n claimed him, and he went stumbling\n into the ditch.\n\n\n \"Damn legs, damn crazy legs!\"\n he cried.", "The dogs were barking angrily,\n and he heard a screen door slam.\n He stopped.\n\n\n \"Ho there!\" a male voice called\n experimentally from the house.\n\n\n One of Marie's brothers. Hogey\n stood frozen in the shadow of a\n peach tree, waiting.\n\n\n \"Anybody out there?\" the man\n called again.\n\n\n Hogey waited, then heard the\n man muttering, \"Sic 'im, boy, sic\n 'im.\"\n\n\n The hound's bark became eager.\n The animal came chasing down the\n slope, and stopped ten feet away to\n crouch and bark frantically at the\n shadow in the gloom. He knew the\n dog.\n\n\n \"Hooky!\" he whispered. \"Hooky\n boy—here!\"", "Hogey tried to turn around to\n look at it, but he forgot to shift his\n footing. He staggered and went\n down on the pavement. The car's\n tires screeched on the hot asphalt.\n Hogey lay there for a moment,\n groaning. That one had hurt his\n hip. A car door slammed and a big\n man with a florid face got out and\n stalked toward him, looking angry.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with\n you, fella?\" he drawled. \"You\n soused? Man, you've really got a\n load.\"\n\n\n Hogey got up doggedly, shaking\n his head to clear it. \"Space legs,\" he\n prevaricated. \"Got space legs. Can't\n stand the gravity.\"", "It rolled a couple of yards up the\n road. He leaped after it and kicked\n it again. When he had finished\n with it, he stood panting and angry,\n but feeling better. He shouldered\n the bag and hiked on toward the\n farmhouse.\n\n\n They're hoofers, that's all—just\n an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers,\n even Marie. And I'm a tumbler. A\n born tumbler. Know what that\n means? It means—God, what does\n it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless,\n where Earth's like a fat\n moon with fuzzy mold growing on\n it. Mold, that's all you are, just\n mold.\n\n\n A dog barked, and he wondered\n if he had been muttering aloud. He\n came to a fence-gap and paused in\n the darkness. The road wound\n around and came up the hill in\n front of the house. Maybe they were\n sitting on the porch. Maybe they'd\n already heard him coming. Maybe ...", "\"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?\" he\n burbled affectionately, crashing into\n the seat beside her.\n\n\n The two men slid out of their\n seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder.\n \"Come on, Broken Wing, let's\n go back to bed.\"\n\n\n \"My name's Hogey,\" he said.\n \"Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding\n about being a Indian.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a\n drink.\" They got him on his feet,\n and led him stumbling back down\n the aisle.\n\n\n \"My ma was half Cherokee, see?\n That's how come I said it. You\n wanta hear a war whoop? Real\n stuff.\"\n\n\n \"Never mind.\"", "\"Hogey, that's me. Big Hogey\n Parker.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I'll be—! Get in the car.\n I'm going right past John Hauptman's\n place. Boy, you're in no\n shape to walk it.\"\n\n\n He grinned wryly, waggled his\n head, and helped Hogey and his\n bag into the back seat. A woman\n with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly\n beside the farmer in the front,\n and she neither greeted the passenger\n nor looked around.\n\n\n \"They don't make cars like this\n anymore,\" the farmer called over\n the growl of the ancient gasoline\n engine and the grind of gears.\n \"You can have them new atomics\n with their loads of hot isotopes\n under the seat. Ain't safe, I say—eh,\n Martha?\"", "The woman with the sun-baked\n neck quivered her head slightly.\n \"A car like this was good enough\n for Pa, an' I reckon it's good\n enough for us,\" she drawled mournfully.\n\n\n Five minutes later the car drew\n in to the side of the road. \"Reckon\n you can walk it from here,\" the\n farmer said. \"That's Hauptman's\n road just up ahead.\"\n\n\n He helped Hogey out of the car\n and drove away without looking\n back to see if Hogey stayed on his\n feet. The woman with the sun-baked\n neck was suddenly talking\n garrulously in his direction.", "He cupped his hands to his\n mouth and favored them with a\n blood-curdling proof of his ancestry,\n while the female passengers\n stirred restlessly and hunched in\n their seats. The driver stopped the\n bus and went back to warn him\n against any further display. The\n driver flashed a deputy's badge and\n threatened to turn him over to a\n constable.\n\n\n \"I gotta get home,\" Big Hogey\n told him. \"I got me a son now,\n that's why. You know? A little\n baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen\n him yet.\"\n\n\n \"Will you just sit still and be\n quiet then, eh?\"\n\n\n Big Hogey nodded emphatically.\n \"Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to\n make any trouble.\"", "When the bus started again, he\n fell on his side and lay still. He\n made retching sounds for a time,\n then rested, snoring softly. The bus\n driver woke him again at Caine's\n junction, retrieved his gin bottle\n from behind the seat, and helped\n him down the aisle and out of the\n bus.\n\n\n Big Hogey stumbled about for a\n moment, then sat down hard in the\n gravel at the shoulder of the road.\n The driver paused with one foot on\n the step, looking around. There was\n not even a store at the road junction,\n but only a freight building\n next to the railroad track, a couple\n of farmhouses at the edge of a side-road,\n and, just across the way, a deserted\n filling station with a sagging\n roof. The land was Great Plains\n country, treeless, barren, and rolling.\n\n\n Big Hogey got up and staggered\n around in front of the bus, clutching\n at it for support, losing his\n duffle bag.", "\"\nHuk!\n—who, me?\" Hogey giggled,\n belched, and shook his head.\n \"Nope. Nobody knows I'm coming.\n S'prise. I'm supposed to be here a\n week ago.\" He looked up at the\n driver with a pained expression.\n \"Week late, ya know? Marie's\n gonna be sore—woo-\nhoo\n!—is she\n gonna be sore!\" He waggled his\n head severely at the ground.\n\n\n \"Which way are you going?\" the\n driver grunted impatiently.\n\n\n Hogey pointed down the side-road\n that led back into the hills.\n \"Marie's pop's place. You know\n where? 'Bout three miles from\n here. Gotta walk, I guess.\"\n\n\n \"Don't,\" the driver warned.\n \"You sit there by the culvert till\n you get a ride. Okay?\"\n\n\n Hogey nodded forlornly.", "It was twilight. The sun had set,\n and the yellow sky was turning\n gray. Hogey was too tired to go on,\n and his legs would no longer hold\n him. He blinked around at the land,\n got his eyes focused, and found\n what looked like Hauptman's place\n on a distant hillside. It was a big\n frame house surrounded by a wheatfield,\n and a few scrawny trees. Having\n located it, he stretched out in\n the tall grass beyond the ditch to\n take a little rest.\n\n\n Somewhere dogs were barking,\n and a cricket sang creaking monotony\n in the grass. Once there was the\n distant thunder of a rocket blast\n from the launching station six miles\n to the west, but it faded quickly. An\n A-motored convertible whined past\n on the road, but Hogey went unseen.", "A wayfarer's return from a far country to his wife and family may be a\n shining experience, a kind of second honeymoon. Or it may be so shadowed\n by Time's relentless tyranny that the changes which have occurred in his\n absence can lead only to tragedy and despair. This rarely discerning, warmly\n human story by a brilliant newcomer to the science fantasy field is told\n with no pulling of punches, and its adroit unfolding will astound you.\nthe\n \nhoofer\nby ... Walter M. Miller, Jr.\nA space rover has no business with a family. But what can a man\n in the full vigor of youth do—if his heart cries out for a home?\nThey all\n knew he was a spacer\n because of the white goggle marks", "The dog stopped barking, sniffed,\n trotted closer, and went\n \"\nRrrooff!\n\" Then he started sniffing\n suspiciously again.\n\n\n \"Easy, Hooky, here boy!\" he\n whispered.\n\n\n The dog came forward silently,\n sniffed his hand, and whined in\n recognition. Then he trotted around\n Hogey, panting doggy affection and\n dancing an invitation to romp. The\n man whistled from the porch. The\n dog froze, then trotted quickly back\n up the slope.\n\n\n \"Nothing, eh, Hooky?\" the\n man on the porch said. \"Chasin'\n armadillos again, eh?\"\n\n\n The screen door slammed again,\n and the porch light went out.\n Hogey stood there staring, unable\n to think. Somewhere beyond the\n window lights were—his woman,\n his son.", "\"Say, you gotta son? I bet you\n gotta son.\"\n\n\n \"Two kids,\" said the driver,\n catching Hogey's bag as it slipped\n from his shoulder. \"Both girls.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you oughta be home with\n them kids. Man oughta stick with\n his family. You oughta get another\n job.\" Hogey eyed him owlishly,\n waggled a moralistic finger, skidded\n on the gravel as they stepped\n onto the opposite shoulder, and\n sprawled again.\n\n\n The driver blew a weary breath,\n looked down at him, and shook his\n head. Maybe it'd be kinder to find\n a constable after all. This guy could\n get himself killed, wandering\n around loose.\n\n\n \"Somebody supposed to meet\n you?\" he asked, squinting around\n at the dusty hills.", "A tumbler had no business with a\n family, but what was a man going\n to do? Take a skinning knife, boy,\n and make yourself a eunuch. But\n that was no good either. They needed\n bulls out there in the pit, not\n steers. And when a man came down\n from a year's hitch, what was he\n going to do? Live in a lonely shack\n and read books for kicks? Because\n you were a man, you sought out a\n woman. And because she was a\n woman, she got a kid, and that was\n the end of it. It was nobody's fault,\n nobody's at all.\n\n\n He stared at the red eye of Mars\n low in the southwest. They were\n running out there now, and next\n year he would have been on the\n long long run ...\n\n\n But there was no use thinking\n about it. Next year and the years\n after belonged to\nlittle\nHogey.", "Having fallen, he decided to\n sleep in the aisle. Two men helped\n him to the back of the bus, dumped\n him on the rear seat, and tucked his\n gin bottle safely out of sight. After\n all, he had not seen Earth for nine\n months, and judging by the crusted\n matter about his eyelids, he couldn't\n have seen it too well now, even if\n he had been sober. Glare-blindness,\n gravity-legs, and agoraphobia were\n excuses for a lot of things, when a\n man was just back from Big Bottomless.\n And who could blame a\n man for acting strangely?\n\n\n Minutes later, he was back up the\n aisle and swaying giddily over the\n little housewife. \"How!\" he said.\n \"Me Chief Broken Wing. You\n wanta Indian wrestle?\"\n\n\n The girl, who sat nervously staring\n at him, smiled wanly, and\n shook her head.", "It was nearly a minute before he\n got the significance of it. It hit him\n where he lived, and he began jerking\n frantically at his encased feet\n and sobbing low in his throat.\n They'd hear him if he kept that up.\n He stopped and covered his ears to\n close out the cry of his firstborn. A\n light went on in the house, and\n when it went off again, the infant's\n cry had ceased.\n\n\n Another rocket went up from the\n station, and he cursed it. Space was\n a disease, and he had it.\n\n\n \"Help!\" he cried out suddenly.\n \"I'm stuck! Help me, help me!\"\n\n\n He knew he was yelling hysterically\n at the sky and fighting the relentless\n concrete that clutched his\n feet, and after a moment he stopped.", "The dark world was reeling\n about him, and the wind was dragging\n at his breath. He fell back\n against the sand pile and let his\n feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled\n his toes. He was laughing\n soundlessly, and his face was wet\n in the wind. He couldn't think. He\n couldn't remember where he was\n and why, and he stopped caring,\n and after a while he felt better.\n\n\n The stars were swimming over\n him, dancing crazily, and the mud\n cooled his feet, and the sand was\n soft behind him. He saw a rocket\n go up on a tail of flame from the\n station, and waited for the sound of\n its blast, but he was already asleep\n when it came.", "What the hell was a tumbler doing\n with a woman and a son?\n\n\n After perhaps a minute, he stepped\n forward again. He tripped over\n a shovel, and his foot plunged into\n something that went\nsquelch\nand\n swallowed the foot past the ankle.\n He fell forward into a heap of\n sand, and his foot went deeper into\n the sloppy wetness.\n\n\n He lay there with his stinging\n forehead on his arms, cursing softly\n and crying. Finally he rolled\n over, pulled his foot out of the\n mess, and took off his shoes. They\n were full of mud—sticky sandy\n mud." ] ]
train	63477	[ "What caused the error in O'Rielly's controls? ", "O'Rielly starts to talk about \"venus dames\" unprompted and acting strangely. Why?", "Why have Venus men struggled to keep their women interested in them?", "What can be said about Grandmamma Berta, Trillium, and the Madame President of Earth?" ]	[ [ "A control malfunctioned and reset itself.", "He missed something when they were preparing. ", "The controls weren't locked before take-off. ", "The Venus woman tampered with it. " ], [ "He's out of sorts from working on the controls. The heat got to him. ", "He's had an experience with them in the past, and wants to discuss is with Callahan. ", "It's the effect that Venus women have on Earth men. The woman's presence changes his focus. ", "He's embarrassed about the controls malfunction and is trying to change the subject " ], [ "Their culture has men in power, and thus they don't consider women their equals. ", "Earth men are too enticing to Venus women. They can't compete.", "They have been too pre-occupied with war, haven't realized the truth.", "Venus females don't interest them enough. " ], [ "They have all felt disrespected by then men that ruled over them. ", "They all anticipated this revolution, and have been working together to make it happen. ", "Madame President did not expect the revolution, but supports Trillium and Berta. ", "None of them anticipated this revolution. It all happened at once. " ] ]	[ 4, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"If every control hadn't been locked in correct setting,\" O'Rielly\n answered from his own angry bewilderment, \"the error would have\n registered before blast-off—wouldn't it, sir?\"\n\n\n \"So a control reset itself in flight, hey?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know yet, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. O'Rielly, you better know before we orbit Earth!\"", "The icy knot in O'Rielly's stomach jerked tighter. A dozen burners on\n this ship; why did something crazy have to happen to O'Rielly's? In a\n hundred years, so the instructors—brisk females all—had told O'Rielly\n in pre-flight school, no control had ever been known to slip. But one\n had moved here. Not enough to cause serious trouble this far out from\n Earth. On blast-down, though, with one jet below peak, the uneven\n thrust could throw the ship, crash it, the whole lovely thing and all\n aboard gone in a churning cloud.", "At the first flash of red on the bank of meters Apprentice Burnerman\n O'Rielly had slammed the safety helmet on his head; he was already\n throwing open the lock to the burner room. The hot, throbbing rumble\n whipped around him and near crushed his breath away. Power! Power of\n the universe trapped here and ready to destroy its captors given one\n chance! Swiftly O'Rielly unlocked the controls and reset them. The\n throbbing rumble changed tone.\n\n\n Old Callahan's voice crackled now through the helmet's ear contact.\n \"Well, Mr. O'Rielly?\"\n\n\n \"Fusion control two points low, sir.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly wondered had Callahan passed out, was so long before the old\n Burner Chief demanded hoarsely, \"Didn't you lock them controls before\n blast-off?\"", "Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"", "A bell suddenly clanged fit to wake the dead while the overhead lights\n flashed wildly. Only the watch room door. Only Callahan here now. Old\n buzzard had a drooped nose like a pick, chin like a shovel.\n\n\n When he talked he was like digging a hole in front of himself. \"Well,\n what about that control?\"\n\n\n \"What control?\"\n\n\n \"Your fusion control that got itself two points low!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that little thing.\"\n\n\n Callahan said something through his teeth, then studied O'Rielly\n sharply. \"Hey, you been wetting your whistle on that Venus vino again?\n Lemme smell your breath! Bah. Loaded yourself full of chlorophyll\n again probably. All right, stand aside whilst I see your burner.\"\n\n\n \"Charmed to, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly said while bowing\n gracefully.", "Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.", "With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.", "\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"", "Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!", "\"Now, now, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded with an airy\n laugh. \"No Earth guy for a hundred twenty-five years been near one and\n lived to tell it, has he?\"\n\n\n \"So the whispers run,\" Callahan murmured with a queer flame dancing\n into his eyes. \"So the old whispers still run.\"\n\n\n \"Never a name, though. Never how it was done.\" O'Rielly snorted.\n \"Probably just a goofy tale set loose by some old space bum.\"", "The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.", "\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"", "O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"", "\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"", "\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.", "The shower units were equipped so no Burnerman need be more than two\n steps from his responsibility. To keep the Old Woman from possibly\n blowing her gaskets completely, O'Rielly simply stepped in, shut the\n door, flipped a switch and tingled as he was electronically cleansed\n of person and clothes. By time he finished, the Old Woman and His\n Excellency were already coming out of the burner room, dripping with\n sweat.\n\n\n Old Woman opened the shower with her customary commanding air. \"You\n first, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\n \"My dear Captain,\" His Excellency replied like a smoothly drawn dagger,\n \"always the lesser gender enjoys precedence.\"\n\n\n No Earth dame ever admitted any guy was even equal to any female. Old\n Woman, a prime symbol of her gender's superiority, whipped a razor edge\n onto her own words. \"Facilities of the Captain's quarters are more\n satisfactory.\"", "O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"", "\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.", "\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"", "Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"" ], [ "With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.", "\"Yes, ma'am,\" Callahan sighed like he hadn't heard a word O'Rielly\n said, \"you could sweet-talk 'em, kiss 'em and hold 'em tighter'n\n Billy-be-damned. And that's all.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" O'Rielly said, \"what you mean by, 'that's all.'\"\n\n\n \"Anybody ever seen anybody but a Venus guy come built with ear beards?\n Course not.\"\n\n\n \"But I thought our boy was wearing the best fakes ever.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't nothing can match the natural growed-on variety, no, ma'am.\n Venus guy kisses a Venus dame, his beards grabs her roundst the ears.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Tickles 'em, boy, tickles 'em!\"", "\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.", "\"No Venus dames allowed within fifty miles of their port. Earth guys\n stay inside the high-voltage fence. Any dame caught trying to leave\n Venus thrown to the tigers for supper. Same for any Earth guy caught\n around a Venus dame. In return, Earth could buy practically everything\n at bargain basement prices.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I was shown the history films in pre-flight,\" O'Rielly said, still\n dreamily. \"But not a peek of any Venus dame.\"\n\n\n \"Pray heaven you'll never lay eyes on one nor have one get within ten\n foot of you! Even though you'd know she'd be your damnation wouldn't\n make a whit difference—you'd still act sappier than thirty-seven\n angels flying on vino.\" Callahan suddenly stared at O'Rielly. \"Holy\n hollering saints!\"", "Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!", "Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four.", "\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.", "Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"", "\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"", "\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.", "Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"", "Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"", "O'Rielly's shower opened and Callahan, glowing like a young bucko,\n bounced onto the bunk. \"Well, did you hide her good this time? No,\n don't tell me! I want to be surprised if the Old Woman ever finds her.\"\n\n\n \"If what old woman finds whom?\" a voice like thin ice crackling wanted\n to know.\n\n\n The watch room's door had opened. Wouldn't think the Old Woman was a\n day over seventy-five, let alone near two hundred. Cut of her uniform\n probably lent a helping hand or three to the young snap of her figure.\n Frosty blue of fancy hair-do, she was, though, and icy of eye as she\n looked at O'Rielly and Callahan still lolling on the bunk.\n\n\n Her voice was an iceberg exploding. \"At attention!\"", "\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"", "O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"", "\"I was in your burner room.\" Her voice matched the rest of her, a blend\n of loveliness unlike anything outside a guy's most secret dreams. \"I\n couldn't stand the heat any longer and I couldn't open that big door.\n So I moved one of your controls a tiny bit. All the noise in there,\n naturally you couldn't hear me walk out while your back was turned\n resetting the control.\"\nO'Rielly suddenly felt like turning her over his knee and whaling her\n until she couldn't sit for a year. This, mind you, he felt in an age\n where no Earth guy for a thousand years had dared raise so much as a\n breath against woman's supremacy in all matters. That male character\n trait, however, did not seem to be the overpowering reason why\n O'Rielly, instead of laying violent hands upon this one's person, heard\n himself saying in sympathetic outrage, \"A shame you had to go to all\n that bother to get out here!\"", "A bell suddenly clanged fit to wake the dead while the overhead lights\n flashed wildly. Only the watch room door. Only Callahan here now. Old\n buzzard had a drooped nose like a pick, chin like a shovel.\n\n\n When he talked he was like digging a hole in front of himself. \"Well,\n what about that control?\"\n\n\n \"What control?\"\n\n\n \"Your fusion control that got itself two points low!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, that little thing.\"\n\n\n Callahan said something through his teeth, then studied O'Rielly\n sharply. \"Hey, you been wetting your whistle on that Venus vino again?\n Lemme smell your breath! Bah. Loaded yourself full of chlorophyll\n again probably. All right, stand aside whilst I see your burner.\"\n\n\n \"Charmed to, Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly said while bowing\n gracefully.", "The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.", "\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.", "\"Oh, you'll have the best answer you ever heard of before long, ma'am!\"\n Callahan assured her heartily. \"The subject of nonsense—I mean,\n women—merely chanced to arise whilst we was scientifically analyzing\n the control phenomenon, ma'am. Naturally I offered this innocent young\n Burnerman the benefit of me long years of experience. Why,\" Callahan\n said with a jaunty laugh, \"dames mean nothing to me. Indeed 'twouldn't\n bother me none if there wasn't one of the things left in the world!\n Present company excepted, of course,\" Callahan hastened to say with a\n courtly bow." ], [ "\"Revolutionaries? Such claptrap! And what's wrong with my wars? People\n have to have something to keep their minds off their troubles! Nobody\n around here gets hurt. Oh, maybe a few scratches here and there. But\n nobody on Venus dies from the things any more.\"\n\n\n \"But Venus men are so excited all the time about going to war they\n haven't time for us women. That's why we always radiated such a fatal\n attraction for Earthmen. We want to be loved! We want our own men home\n doing useful work!\"\n\n\n \"Well, they do come home and do useful work! Couple weeks every ten\n months. Proven to be a highly efficient arrangement.\"\n\n\n \"More boys to run off to your old wars and more girls to stay home and\n be lonely!\"", "\"Thousand years ago, it was, the first flight reached Venus. Guys\n got one look at them dames. Had to bring some home or bust. So then\n everybody on Earth got a look, mostly by TV only of course. That did\n it. Every guy on Earth began blowing his fuse over them dames. Give up\n the shirt off his back, last buck in the bank, his own Earth dame or\n family—everything.", "\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"", "\"No Venus dames allowed within fifty miles of their port. Earth guys\n stay inside the high-voltage fence. Any dame caught trying to leave\n Venus thrown to the tigers for supper. Same for any Earth guy caught\n around a Venus dame. In return, Earth could buy practically everything\n at bargain basement prices.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I was shown the history films in pre-flight,\" O'Rielly said, still\n dreamily. \"But not a peek of any Venus dame.\"\n\n\n \"Pray heaven you'll never lay eyes on one nor have one get within ten\n foot of you! Even though you'd know she'd be your damnation wouldn't\n make a whit difference—you'd still act sappier than thirty-seven\n angels flying on vino.\" Callahan suddenly stared at O'Rielly. \"Holy\n hollering saints!\"", "\"Yes, ma'am,\" Callahan sighed like he hadn't heard a word O'Rielly\n said, \"you could sweet-talk 'em, kiss 'em and hold 'em tighter'n\n Billy-be-damned. And that's all.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not sure,\" O'Rielly said, \"what you mean by, 'that's all.'\"\n\n\n \"Anybody ever seen anybody but a Venus guy come built with ear beards?\n Course not.\"\n\n\n \"But I thought our boy was wearing the best fakes ever.\"\n\n\n \"Ain't nothing can match the natural growed-on variety, no, ma'am.\n Venus guy kisses a Venus dame, his beards grabs her roundst the ears.\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Tickles 'em, boy, tickles 'em!\"", "\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"", "\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"", "\"Well, that's when Earth dames took over like armies of wild cats\n with knots in their tails. Before the guys who'd brought the Venus\n dames to Earth could say anything they was taken apart too small to\n pick up with a blotter. Earth dames wound up by flying the Venus ones\n back where they come from and serving notice if one ever set foot on\n Earth again there wouldn't be enough left of Venus to find with an\n electron microscope.\n\"Venus boys rared up and served notice that if Earth ever got any funny\n notions, right away there wouldn't be enough Earth left to hide in an\n atom's eyebrow. Touchy as hornets on a hot griddle, them Venus guys.\n Crazier than bed bugs about war. Could smell a loose dollar a million\n light years away too. Finagled around until they finally cooked up a\n deal.", "\"Burner Chief Callahan, sir,\" O'Rielly responded courteously, \"I have\n been thinking.\"\n\n\n \"With what? Never mind, just keep on trying whilst I have a shower for\n myself here.\" Wherewith Callahan reached hand for O'Rielly's shower\n door.\n\n\n \"Venus dames,\" O'Rielly said dreamily, \"don't boss anything, do they?\"\n\n\n Callahan yelped like he'd been bit in the pants by a big Jupiter ant.\n \"O'Rielly! You trying to get both of us condemned to a Uranus moon?\"\n Callahan also shot a wild look to the intercom switch. It was in OFF\n position; the flight room full of fancy gold-lace petticoats could not\n have overheard from here. Nevertheless Callahan's eyes rolled like the\n devil was behind him with the fork ready. \"O'Rielly, open your big ears\n whilst for your own good and mine I speak of certain matters.", "With suddenly enlivened interest O'Rielly looked at Callahan. \"Hey, how\n come you know so much?\"\n\n\n \"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like waking from a trance; even groaned\n to himself, something that sounded like, \"Blabbering like I'd had\n a nip myself—or one of them dillies was radiating nearby.\" Then\n Callahan glared fit to drill holes in O'Rielly's head. \"Look! I was\n a full Burnerman before you was born. Been flying the spaces hundred\n twenty-five years now. Had more chances to hear more—just hear more,\n you hear! Only tried to clear your mind about Venus dames so you could\n put your brain on your control mess. So now put it! If you ain't high\n on vino and ain't been made nuts by a Venus dame, what answer do we\n feed the Old Woman?\"\n\n\n \"Search me,\" Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly responded cheerfully.", "\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"", "\"Stay at attention!\" Old Woman sniffed the air near Callahan's face,\n then in O'Rielly's vicinity. \"Smothered it with chlorophyll probably,\"\n she muttered through her teeth, \"if it is that vino.\" Something\n horrible as a plague flickered in her eyes, then the old ice was there\n again. \"Apprentice Burnerman, don't you know what your shower is for?\n Then use it! Mr. Callahan, remain at attention while I inspect this\n burner!\" She tendered a cool glance at the Venus bigwig. \"Care to join\n me, Your Excellency?\"\n\n\n \"May as well.\" His Excellency glanced at O'Rielly and Callahan much as\n he might at a couple of worms. Could bet your last old sox no female\n ever told any Venus man what to do.", "\"Were.\" Features more beautifully mature than Trillium's crowded onto\n the panel too. \"From now on I'm doing the deciding.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! You're only my wife!\"\n\n\n \"And new President of Venus, elected by unanimous vote of all women.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible! The men run Venus! Nobody's turning this planet into\n another Earth where a man can't even sneeze unless some woman says so!\"\n\n\n \"Take him away, girls,\" Berta ordered coolly, whereupon her spouse was\n yanked from view.\n\n\n His bellows, however, could be heard yet. \"Unhand me, you fool\n creatures! Guards! Guards!\"\n\n\n \"Save your breath,\" Berta advised him. \"And while you're in the cooler,\n enjoy this latest batch of surrender communiques. We women are in\n control everywhere now.\"", "Never in his right mind would any crewman dare fail to come stiffly\n erect the instant the Old Woman appeared. Behind her stood a colorfully\n robed specimen of Venus man. Handsome as the devil himself. Fit to snap\n lesser men in two with his highly bejeweled hands. Fuzzy beards trailed\n from his ears and kept twitching lazily as he sneered at the spectacle\n of two men meekly acknowledging the superiority of a woman.\n\n\n She was fit to put frost on a hydrogen burner. \"Mr. Callahan, I asked\n you a question, did I not?\"\n\n\n \"Believe you did, ma'am,\" Callahan responded cheerfully. \"And the\n answer is, ma'am, that Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly and me was\n discussing—ah—matrimony, ma'am. Mr. Apprentice Burnerman O'Rielly\n here is considering it, ma'am.\"", "Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"", "\"You're so kind. But I'm afraid I became rather sticky and smelly in\n there.\"\n\n\n \"They ought to cool the air in there with perfume! I'll drop a\n suggestion in the Old Woman's box first chance I get.\"\n\n\n \"You're so thoughtful. And do you have bathing facilities?\"\n\n\n \"That door right there. Oh, let me open it for you!\"\n\n\n \"You're so sweet.\" Her big dark eyes glowed with such pure innocence\n that O'Rielly could have torn down the universe and rebuilt it just for\n her.\n\n\n Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly was floating on a pink cloud with heavenly music\n in his head. Never felt so fine before. Except on the Venus layover\n when he'd been roped into a dice game with a bunch of Venus lads who\n had a jug to cheer one's parting with one's money.", "\"Oh, you'll have the best answer you ever heard of before long, ma'am!\"\n Callahan assured her heartily. \"The subject of nonsense—I mean,\n women—merely chanced to arise whilst we was scientifically analyzing\n the control phenomenon, ma'am. Naturally I offered this innocent young\n Burnerman the benefit of me long years of experience. Why,\" Callahan\n said with a jaunty laugh, \"dames mean nothing to me. Indeed 'twouldn't\n bother me none if there wasn't one of the things left in the world!\n Present company excepted, of course,\" Callahan hastened to say with a\n courtly bow.", "Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"", "\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.", "Sweat pouring off him, O'Rielly prowled around his burner. Design of\n the thing had been bossed by dames of course; what on Earth wasn't any\n more? Anyway, nobody could get to a burner except through its watch\n room. Anyone entered or left there, a bell clanged, lights flashed\n and a meter registered beside the Burnerman's bunk and on the Burner\n Chief's console up in the flight room full of beautifully efficient\n officers. Ever since Venus blast-off O'Rielly had been in Four's watch\n room. Nobody had passed through. O'Rielly knew it. Callahan knew it.\n By now the Old Woman herself, Captain Millicent Hatwoody, had probably\n inquired what was in charge of Burner Four." ], [ "\"Now you just listen to me, Trillium!\" Grandpapa President was all\n Venus manhood laying down the law. \"That's the way things have been on\n Venus for ten thousand years and all the women in the universe can't\n change it!\"\n\n\n \"I have been in constant contact with my Cabinet during these\n conversations,\" Madame President said crisply. \"Earth is terminating\n all trade agreements with Venus as of this instant.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" Grandpapa's beards near pulled his ears off. \"It's not legal!\n You can't get away with this!\"\n\n\n \"Take your finger off that trigger, boy!\" a heavenly voice similar to\n Trillium's advised from the Venus panel.\n\n\n Whereupon Grandpapa glared to one side. \"Berta! What are you doing\n here? I am deciding matters of the gravest interplanetary nature!\"", "\"Oh, I'm Trillium,\" she assured Callahan sweetly. \"But Grandmamma's\n name is Berta and people say I'm just like she was a hundred and\n twenty-five years ago.\"\n\"Hah? What?\" Callahan blinked like his brain had been taken apart and\n was being slapped together again. \"O'Rielly! Awp, you angel-faced\n pirate, couldn't you hide her somewheres better than that? Shut up,\n you don't have to explain to me, but God help the whole universe if we\n don't flimflam the Old Woman!\" With which ominous remark, rendered in\n a zesty devil-may-care manner, however, Callahan threw himself into\n O'Rielly's shower.", "\"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President's ear beards stood near straight up\n as he roared, \"You couldn't have stolen away by yourself! Trillium,\n tell the truth!\"\n\n\n \"Very well. Grandmamma told me how.\"\n\"Obviously Trillium's poor little brain has been drugged,\" His\n Excellency Dimdooly declared. \"Grandmamma Berta wouldn't know the first\n thing about such things!\"\n\n\n \"Impossible!\" Grandpapa President agreed. \"I've been married to her\n for a hundred and twenty-four and a half years and she's the finest\n rattle-brain I ever knew!\"\n\n\n \"She learned,\" Trillium stated emphatically, \"a hundred and twenty-five\n years ago.\"\n\n\n \"Hundred twenty-five,\" Grandpapa president growled like a boiling\n volcano. \"The year some Earthman.... Never did catch the devil....\n Berta? Impossible!\"", "Madame President's shapely finger now rested full on the button that\n could launch the fleets of war rockets that had been pre-aimed for a\n thousand years. \"I'm afraid your Ambassador is unwelcome now,\" Madame\n President stated coolly. \"Your granddaughter's actions have every mark\n of an invasion tactic by your government.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean, her actions?\" Grandpapa President's finger now lay\n poised on the button that had been waiting a thousand years to blow\n Earth out of the universe. \"My grandchild was kidnapped by men under\n your official command! Weren't you, Trillium dear?\"\n\n\n \"No. One of us stowing away was the only way we Venus women could bring\n our cause to the attention of Earth's President. If Earth will only\n stop buying from Venus, you won't have any money to squander on your\n wars any longer no matter what happens to we revolutionaries!\"", "Yes, ma'am, O'Rielly sure felt like proof of something all of a sudden.\n Worse than the hangover from that crap game with Venus vino. He looked\n away from Trillium and took a look at Callahan. Old guy looked away\n from Grandmamma President like he was packing the second biggest\n headache in history.\n\n\n \"Hmmmm, yes,\" Madame President of Earth observed. \"Reactions agree\n perfectly with the psychoanalytical research project we have been\n conducting on the subject of the Venus female influence. Madame\n President of Venus, congratulations on your victory!\n\n\n \"Long may the superior sex reign on Venus too! We shall be delighted to\n receive an Ambassadoress to discuss a new trade treaty at your earliest\n convenience.\"", "\"Thank you for cancelling the old trade agreements at the psychological\n moment,\" Grandmamma President said cordially. \"What with the\n communications mixup, we managed to have the scenes on these panels\n broadcast throughout all Venus. When the rug went out from under the\n top man, the tide really turned in our favor. Now, Trillium, you take\n over Dimmy's credentials.\"\n\n\n \"The Ambassadorial Suite, too,\" Madame President of Earth said\n graciously. \"Anything else now, Berta?\"\n\n\n \"I should like,\" Grandmamma President Berta said charmingly, \"that\n Mr. O'Rielly and Mr. Callahan be suitably rewarded for assisting our\n revolution better than they knew.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Madame President of Earth was delighted to oblige. \"No\n doubt Captain Hatwoody knows what reward would satisfy their needs\n best.\"", "\"Dimmy,\" Trillium was saying firmly to His Excellency, \"you have beat\n around the bush with me long enough. Now say it!\"\nDimdooly—the mighty, the lordly, who had sneered at the sight of mere\n Earthmen kowtowing to a mere woman—swelled up fit to blow his gaskets,\n then all the gas went out of him. His ear beards, however, still had\n enough zip left to flutter like butterflies. \"Yes, Trillium dear. I\n love only you. Please marry me at your earliest convenience.\"\n\n\n \"Well, Grandmamma,\" Trillium said with a highly self-satisfied air, \"it\n works. And just like you said, Earthmen meant nothing once I knew we\n Venus women had our own men in our power.\"\n\n\n \"Those crewmen there,\" Grandmamma President said, \"seem to be proof\n enough that we Venus women no longer radiate any threat to Earth's\n tranquility.\"", "\"Blasted fools still have the circuits crossed,\" Mr. President swore.\n \"Some silly female cackling now!\"\n\n\n The parties in the panels saw each other now. Each one's left hand on a\n desk moved toward a big red button marked, ROCKETS.\n\n\n \"So,\" Mr. President said evenly. \"Another violation by your Earthmen.\"\n\n\n \"By your granddaughter, at least,\" Madame President replied coolly.\n\n\n \"An innocent child,\" Mr. President snapped, \"obviously kidnapped by\n those two idiotic Earthmen there!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, Grandpapa,\" Trillium said swiftly; \"I stole away all by\n myself, and Mr. O'Rielly and Callahan have been very helpful.\"", "\"Were.\" Features more beautifully mature than Trillium's crowded onto\n the panel too. \"From now on I'm doing the deciding.\"\n\n\n \"Nonsense! You're only my wife!\"\n\n\n \"And new President of Venus, elected by unanimous vote of all women.\"\n\n\n \"Impossible! The men run Venus! Nobody's turning this planet into\n another Earth where a man can't even sneeze unless some woman says so!\"\n\n\n \"Take him away, girls,\" Berta ordered coolly, whereupon her spouse was\n yanked from view.\n\n\n His bellows, however, could be heard yet. \"Unhand me, you fool\n creatures! Guards! Guards!\"\n\n\n \"Save your breath,\" Berta advised him. \"And while you're in the cooler,\n enjoy this latest batch of surrender communiques. We women are in\n control everywhere now.\"", "\"Mr. President's office. He is in personal command of our glorious war\n efforts.\"\n\n\n Old Woman sighed through her teeth. \"Venus woman aboard this ship.\n Stowaway. Rattle that around your belfries.\"\n\n\n The flunkies' faces went slack with shock, then were replaced by a\n blizzard of scrambled faces and torrents of incoherent voices.\n\n\n Finally on the Earth panel appeared the famous classic features. \"The\n facts, if you please, Captain Hatwoody.\"\n\n\n The Venus panel finally held steady on universally notorious features,\n that were as fierce as an eagle's, in a fancy war helmet. \"Trillium! My\n own granddaughter? Impossible! Dimdooly,\" Mr. President roared at his\n Excellency, \"what's this nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"Some loud creature is interfering,\" Madame President snapped with\n annoyance.", "\"Trillium,\" O'Rielly pleaded in loving anguish, \"why do you have to\n keep coming out of hiding just when nobody's going to find you?\"\n\n\n Her eyes merely became deep pools in which O'Rielly would have gladly\n drowned himself if he could.\n\"There are rewards,\" the Old Woman said with the deadly coldness of\n outer space, \"for Earthmen found in a Venus woman's company, and for\n her leaving her planet.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" His Excellency's ear beards were standing straight out\n sideways. \"I'll handle this!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind His Excellency,\" the Old Woman snapped, \"that I represent\n Earth and her dominion of space gained by right of original flight!\"\n\n\n \"May I remind the Captain,\" His Excellency declared fit to be heard\n back to his planet, \"that I am the Personal Ambassador of the President\n of Venus and this thing can mean war!\"", "\"Yes! War in which people will actually die!\" As His Excellency paled\n at that grisly remark, the Old Woman spoke through her teeth at\n O'Rielly, Callahan and Trillium. \"All right, come along!\"\n\n\n O'Rielly joined the death march gladly. He felt the way Callahan\n looked: ready to wrap his arms around Trillium's brave loveliness and\n protect it to his last breath of life.\n\n\n Old Woman led the way to her office. Jabbed some buttons on her desk.\n Panels on opposite walls lit up.\n\n\n \"Presidents of Earth and Venus, please,\" the Old Woman stated evenly.\n \"Interplanetary emergency.\"\n\n\n Highly groomed flunkies appeared on the panels and were impersonally\n pleasant.\n\n\n \"Madame President's office. She is in a Cabinet meeting.\"", "O'Rielly stood looking thoughtfully at lovely, womanly, exquisite\n Trillium. Just like that, O'Rielly felt as sparkling of mind as a\n spiral nebula. \"My locker!\" he crowed with inspiration and yanked open\n the doors under his bunk. He glimpsed a black ditty bag, also the cap\n and coverall uniform of a baggage boy.\n\n\n \"I threw them in there before you came on duty before blast-off,\"\n Trillium explained. \"I knew the burner room would be warm.\"\n\n\n Trillium—with her shape—passing as a boy hustling bags through this\n ship. O'Rielly chortled as he tucked her under his bunk. \"Now don't you\n worry about another thing!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm not,\" she assured him happily. \"Everything is going just the\n way Grandmamma knew it would!\"", "\"No more so than those of the Ambassadorial Suite.\"\nSeeming to grind her teeth, the Old O Woman turned abruptly to leave\n O'Rielly's watch room. Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from busting\n out laughing for joy.\n\n\n Old Woman had been flimflammed for fair! Dear Trillium was saved! And\n betwixt O'Rielly's grand brain and Callahan's great experience she'd be\n happy forever.\n\n\n A fine loud \"thump,\" however, was now heard. Old Woman whirled back and\n yanked open the doors under O'Rielly's bunk.\n\n\n \"Of all the sappy hiding places!\" Callahan yelped, in surprise of\n course.\n\n\n \"Trillium?\" His Excellency bellowed as if stung by one of the\n sabre-tailed hornets of his native planet. \"Trillium!\"", "The Madame Presidents switched to a private circuit, Trillium dragged\n Dimdooly off somewhere and the Old Woman eyed O'Rielly and Callahan.\n Especially she eyed Callahan, like running chilled drills through his\n old conniving brain. \"I award the pair of you five minutes leisure\n before returning to your stations.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" O'Rielly muttered, once he and Callahan were safely beyond\n earshot, \"could have been rewarded worse, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"What you expect for being flimflammed by a foreign dame, the rings of\n Saturn? Lucky we ain't programmed to be hung, shot and thrown to the\n crows for breakfast.\" Callahan's old pick-and-shovel face wore a little\n grin like the cat that nobody could prove ate the canary.", "\"You—I mean, that Earth guy a hundred twenty-five years ago,\" O'Rielly\n said in sudden thought. \"If Venus dames wanted to be loved so bad, why\n did Trillium's Grandmamma let him go?\"\n\n\n \"Venus guys wasn't so busy playing war all the time,\" Callahan mumbled,\n like to himself, \"they'd of found out the answer centuries ago. Yep,\n guess our boy was the only guy on Earth or Venus to find out and live.\n Dames bossing both planets now, though, his old secret won't be one\n much longer. Venus dames could of let it out centuries ago themselves\n but didn't, just to spite Earth probably. Later, was part of organizing\n to take over Venus, I guess.\"\n\n\n O'Rielly still had memories of the way he had felt about Trillium\n before her revolution. \"All right, Callahan, why did 'our boy' leave\n Grandmamma?\"", "Wasn't too bad a fib. The more O'Rielly thought of Trillium, the more\n ideas he got of doing things he'd never dreamt of before in his life.\n Yes, ma'am!\n\n\n \"Wasting your time talking nonsense!\" Old Woman's look was fit to\n freeze O'Rielly's brain, then she gave Callahan the look. \"I sent you\n down here to find the answer to that fusion control slippage!\"", "Well, ma'am, O'Rielly searched every cranny where even a three-tailed\n mouse of Venus could have stowed away. His first flight, and O'Rielly\n saw himself washed out, busted to sweeper on the blast-off stands of\n some God-forsaken satellite. He staggered back into his watch room. And\n his brain was suddenly taken apart and slapped together again. Felt\n that way.\n\n\n She was sitting on his bunk. No three-tailed mouse. No Old Woman\n either. Oh, she was a female human, though, this creature at which\n O'Rielly stood gaping. Yes, ma'am!", "\"Of all the loony apprentices I ever had to answer the Old Woman for!\n Awp, lemme out where I can think of something to save me own neck at\n least!\"\n\n\n Was all O'Rielly could do to keep from rolling on the deck with glee.\n Old Callahan had been flimflammed for fair! The dear little stowaway\n was saved! And O'Rielly would now think of grand ways to save her\n lovely neck and his own forever.\n\n\n O'Rielly's shower door, however, opened abruptly. O'Rielly had not\n opened it. O'Rielly, however, suffered a cruel stab of dismay. Surely\n his dear stowaway had been listening through the door. Why didn't she\n have brains enough to stay hid until Callahan was gone!\n\n\n At sight of her, of course, Callahan's eyes near popped from his old\n head. \"Berta!\"", "The shower units were equipped so no Burnerman need be more than two\n steps from his responsibility. To keep the Old Woman from possibly\n blowing her gaskets completely, O'Rielly simply stepped in, shut the\n door, flipped a switch and tingled as he was electronically cleansed\n of person and clothes. By time he finished, the Old Woman and His\n Excellency were already coming out of the burner room, dripping with\n sweat.\n\n\n Old Woman opened the shower with her customary commanding air. \"You\n first, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\n \"My dear Captain,\" His Excellency replied like a smoothly drawn dagger,\n \"always the lesser gender enjoys precedence.\"\n\n\n No Earth dame ever admitted any guy was even equal to any female. Old\n Woman, a prime symbol of her gender's superiority, whipped a razor edge\n onto her own words. \"Facilities of the Captain's quarters are more\n satisfactory.\"" ] ]
train	63640	[ "What wouldn't Casey say to describe himself?", "Why didn't Casey want to take the deal?", "What was the stoolie's job?", "What hadn't been smuggled out of Mars?", "What convinced Casey to go to Jupiter?", "What didn't surprise Casey about Jupiter?", "Which true statement may have changed Casey's mind if he'd have known?", "How would Casey describe most of the scorpions he saw?", "Was Akroida like the rest of the scorpions?", "What did Casey probably learn from this experience?" ]	[ [ "He'd never give up a client", "He's a master smuggler", "He's traveled all over the solar system", "He'd do anything for money" ], [ "He'd never make a deal with the S.S.C.", "He wanted to retire from smuggling", "He didn't think he'd live through it.", "They didn't offer him enough money" ], [ "To find out Casey's smuggling secrets", "To get information from Casey to give to the S.S.C.", "To become Casey's friend and confidante", "To convince Casey to change his mind" ], [ "emeralds", "diamonds", "rubies", "crystals" ], [ "The Government offered additional money", "Pard told him about the perfume", "He learned that Pard had a friend there", "Pard told him he'd lived through it" ], [ "the red coloring was plants", "items could float in mid-air", "the aliens could remove their eyeballs", "the aliens communicated by tapping" ], [ "Attaboy was Pard's colorblind friend", "The perfume doesn't work", "Akroida really loves jewels", "Pard was working for the S.S.C." ], [ "intelligent and fierce", "huge and curious", "ugly yet caring", "terrifying yet peaceful" ], [ "Yes - they were all enormous and vicious", "Yes - they were all purple and covered in jewels", "No - she was larger and meaner", "No - she spoke better and was prettier" ], [ "Never give up on your friends", "Never trust a crook", "Always listen carefully to instructions", "Don't judge others by how they look" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "I hardly heard the cut. \"You mean you really did get away with them?\"\n My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing\n along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I\n somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was\n impossible. I'd investigated once myself.\n\n\n He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard\n coming.", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.", "I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My\n fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell\n I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me\n into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even\n intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm\n expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided\n to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the\n poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its\n expression.\n\n\n I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone\n else. \"I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming\n lady,\" I informed him. \"However, I have something very special in the\n way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might\n be interested.\"", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight\n of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly\n dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he\n just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city\n block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it\n glowed like the inside of a red light.\n\n\n No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all\n that red!\n\n\n A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up\n a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring\n grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who\n else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!", "Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.", "\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\"" ], [ "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....", "They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude\n at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself\n into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of\n it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard\n won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back\n turned. How stupid could they get?", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "I hardly heard the cut. \"You mean you really did get away with them?\"\n My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing\n along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I\n somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was\n impossible. I'd investigated once myself.\n\n\n He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard\n coming.", "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\"", "I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an\n asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the\n tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week\n when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.\n\n\n \"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me,\" he says. \"I just\n made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" I moaned. \"What were you trying to do, start a feud between\n us and Mars?\"", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"" ], [ "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "I was right. I'd met the shrimp before when I was wound up in an\n asteroid real estate racket. Pard Hoskins was his alias, and he had the\n tag of being a real slick operator. We swapped yarns for about a week\n when we met, and then I asked him what's his rap this trip.\n\n\n \"Oh, a pretty good jolt if they can keep hold of me,\" he says. \"I just\n made a pass at the Killicut Emeralds, that's all, and got nabbed.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\" I moaned. \"What were you trying to do, start a feud between\n us and Mars?\"", "They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude\n at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself\n into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of\n it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard\n won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back\n turned. How stupid could they get?", "I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....", "\"These—\" he had proclaimed with a disdainful flourish, like a placer\n miner pointing to a batch of fool's gold—\"These jewels are as nothing,\n Ritter, compared with the value of the secret you are to buy with\n them. And be assured that if you're man enough to effect the trade—\"\n He paused, his long nose twitching cynically—\"IF you succeed, your\n reward will be triple what you could get for them in any market. Added\n to which, IF you succeed, you will be a free man.\"\n\n\n That twitch of the nose riled me no little. \"I ain't failed yet!\" I\n snarled at him. \"Just you wait till I do, feller!\" I slipped the string\n of emeralds back into its little safe. \"Instead of sniping at me, why\n don't you get that brain busy and set our rendezvous?\"", "I hardly heard the cut. \"You mean you really did get away with them?\"\n My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing\n along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I\n somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was\n impossible. I'd investigated once myself.\n\n\n He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard\n coming.", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"", "He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"" ], [ "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThose methane and ammonia planets, take it from me, they're the\n dead-end of creation, and why the Old Man ever thought them up I'll\n never know. I never thought I'd mess around any of them, but things\n can sure happen. A man can get himself backed into a corner in this\n little old solar system. It just ain't big enough for a gent of scope\n and talent; and the day the Solar System Customs caught me red-handed\n smuggling Kooleen crystals in from Mars, I knew I was in that corner,\n and sewed up tight.", "I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"", "\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.", "Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.", "At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.", "Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that\n red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green\n hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with\n a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even\n though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he\n didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally.\n There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that\n anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now\n that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out\n there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly\n doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one\n thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty.", "Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a\n green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled\n space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that\n twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as\n a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping\n here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of\n somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I\n could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.\n Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,\n shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and\n making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.\n\n\n Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and\n shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went\n across to her alone with the arsenic.", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII", "It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that\n something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and\n the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into\n a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly.\n It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only\n have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant.\n\n\n In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the\n cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in\n diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through\n which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in\n and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my\n eyeballs felt paralyzed.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup...." ], [ "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.", "Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "Real powerful, said the man. What an understatement! But the day I was\n set adrift in that sea of frozen ammonia clouds mixed with nice cozy\n methane gas I sure prayed for it to be powerful, and I clutched that\n tiny bottle like that boy Aladdin clutching his little old lamp.\n\n\n I'd had a lot of cooperation getting that far. An Earth patrol had\n slipped down onto the Red Desert of Mars and picked up the Killicut\n Emeralds from where Pard Hoskins had cached them; and safe out in space\n again, we had pored over that string of green headlights practically\n slobbering. But the Big Sneer of the S.S.C., the fellow that had got\n me into this caper, was right there to take the joy out of it all and\n to remind me that this was public service, strictly.", "At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....", "That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the\n whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first\n there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all\n dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!\n The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating\n around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed\n that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the\n outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I\n forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I\n couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red\n floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,\n I eased along." ], [ "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.", "\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "\"You've no doubt heard tales of the strange population of Jupiter,\"\n he said. \"Every spaceman has, I am sure. Insect-like creatures who\n manifestly migrated there from some other system and who inhabit\n the Red Spot of the planet, floating in some kind of artificial\n anti-gravity field in the gaseous portion of the atmosphere—\"\n\n\n I snorted. \"Aw, hell, judge, that's just one of those screwy fairy\n tales! How could any—\"", "I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.", "Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII", "That famous Red Spot was that big, too. It kept expanding until the\n whole universe was a fierce, raw luminous red. Out beyond it at first\n there had been fringes of snow-white frozen ammonia, but now it was all\n dyed redder than Mars. Then I took the plunge right into it. Surprise!\n The stuff was plants! Plants as big as meadows, bright red, floating\n around in those clouds of frozen ammonia like seaweed! Then I noticed\n that the ammonia around them wasn't frozen any more and peeked at the\n outside thermometer I couldn't believe it. It was above zero. Then I\n forgot about the temperature because it dawned on me that I was lost. I\n couldn't see a thing but drifting ammonia fog and those tangles of red\n floating plants like little islands all around. Cutting down the motor,\n I eased along.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "Pard was right again. These critters had brains. And my S.S.C.\n persecutor was right, too. That anti-grav secret was worth more than\n any string of rocks in the system, including the Killicut Emeralds.\n\n\n Then I swallowed hard. Attaboy was leading me straight across to a\n window. Closing my helmet, my fingers fumbled badly. My brain was\n fumbling, too. \"Zero hour, chump!\" it told me, and I shuddered. Picking\n up the first hundred pounds of the arsenic, I wobbled over to the\n airlock.\nIII\n\n\n That palace was like nothing on earth. Naturally, you'll say, it's\n on Jupiter. But I mean it was even queerer than that. It was like no\n building on any planet at all. And, in fact, it wasn't on a planet; it\n was floating up there only two hundred miles in from the raw edge of\n space.", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that\n red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green\n hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with\n a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even\n though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he\n didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally.\n There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that\n anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now\n that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out\n there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly\n doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one\n thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty.", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"" ], [ "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "I hardly heard the cut. \"You mean you really did get away with them?\"\n My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing\n along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I\n somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was\n impossible. I'd investigated once myself.\n\n\n He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard\n coming.", "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "I didn't get it at first. I'd argued with 'em, but inside I'd been all\n set for the sentence, and even sort of reconciled to it. I could even\n hear the words in my mind. But they didn't match what the judge was\n saying. I stood there gaping like a beached fish while I sorted it out.\n Then I croaked, \"Jupiter! What for? Are you running outa space in stir?\n Want to choke me to death in chlorine instead?\" Being civil to the\n court didn't seem important just then. Jupiter was worse than the pen,\n a lot worse. Jupiter was a death sentence.\n\n\n The senior judge rapped sharply with his gavel. He frowned me down and\n then nodded at the judge on his right. This bird, a little old hank of\n dried-up straw, joined his fingertips carefully, cleared his scrawny\n throat, and told me what for.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "I couldn't believe it. Those emeralds were in the inner shrine of the\n super-sacred, super-secret temple of the cavern-dwelling tribe of\n Killicuts on Mars—the real aborigines. Bleachies, we call them, sort\n of contemptuously; but those Bleachies are a rough lot when they're\n mad, and if Pard had really got near those emeralds, he should be\n nothing but a heap of cleaned bones by now. Either he was the world's\n champion liar or its bravest son, and either way I took my hat off to\n him.\n\n\n \"How'd you make the getaway?\" I asked, taking him at his word.\n\n\n He looked loftily past me. \"Sorry. Gotta keep that a secret. Likewise\n where I cached 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Cached what?\"\n\n\n \"The rocks, stupe.\"", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude\n at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself\n into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of\n it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard\n won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back\n turned. How stupid could they get?", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it." ], [ "Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking\n over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after\n him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a\n natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the\n throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now\n beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions,\n all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.\n\n\n Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free\n and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to\n death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest\n that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.", "Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight\n of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly\n dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he\n just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city\n block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it\n glowed like the inside of a red light.\n\n\n No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all\n that red!\n\n\n A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up\n a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring\n grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who\n else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!", "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "\"You mean those scorpions have really got brains?\"", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "But my green boat must have showed up like a lighthouse in all that\n red, because it wasn't long until I spotted a purple and green\n hopper-scorp traveling straight toward me, sort of rowing along with\n a pair of stubby wings. He didn't seem to be making much effort, even\n though he was climbing vertically up from the planet. In fact, he\n didn't seem to be climbing at all but just going along horizontally.\n There just wasn't any up or down in that crazy place. It must be that\n anti-grav field, I concluded. The air was getting different, too, now\n that I was further in. I'm no chemist, and I couldn't have gotten out\n there to experiment if I had been, but those plants were certainly\n doing something to that ammonia and methane. The fog thinned, for one\n thing, and the temperature rose to nearly forty.", "He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of\n the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and\n then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of\n those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those\n removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up\n screaming....\n\n\n Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I\n backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted.\n Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that\n suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye,\n and I gagged again.", "\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude\n at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself\n into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of\n it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard\n won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back\n turned. How stupid could they get?", "It wasn't until we had covered some two hundred miles of this that\n something began to loom out of the mist, and I forgot the playboys and\n the field workers. It loomed higher and higher. Then we burst out into\n a clearing several miles in diameter, and I saw the structure clearly.\n It was red, like everything else in this screwy place, and could only\n have been built out of compressed blocks of the red plant.\n\n\n In shape it was a perfect octagon. It hung poised in the center of the\n cleared space, suspended on nothing. It had to be at least a mile in\n diameter, and its sides were pierced with thousands of openings through\n which its nightmare occupants appeared and disappeared, drifting in\n and out like they had all the time in the world. I stared until my\n eyeballs felt paralyzed." ], [ "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "We finally came to the central hall of the palace, and at the sight\n of all that space dropping away, I clutched at his shell and nearly\n dropped the arsenic. But he didn't have any brakes I could grab, so he\n just flew out into mid-air in a room that could have swallowed a city\n block, skyscrapers and all. It was like a mammoth red cavern, and it\n glowed like the inside of a red light.\n\n\n No wonder those scorpions like green and purple. What a relief from all\n that red!\n\n\n A patch in the middle of the hall became a floating platform holding up\n a divan twenty feet square covered with stuff as green as new spring\n grass, and in the center of this reclined Akroida. It had to be. Who\n else could look like that? No one, believe me, boys and girls, no one!", "Our little Akroida was a pure and peculiarly violent purple—not a\n green edge anywhere. She was even more purple than my fancy enameled\n space suit, and she was big enough to comfortably fill most of that\n twenty-foot couch. To my shrinking eyes right then she looked as big as\n a ten-ton cannon and twice as mean and dangerous. She was idly nipping\n here and there as though she was just itching to take a hunk out of\n somebody, and the way the servants were edging away out around her, I\n could see they didn't want to get in range. I didn't blame them a bit.\n Under the vicious sag of her Roman nose, her mandibles kept grinding,\n shaking the jewels that were hung all over her repulsive carcass, and\n making the Halcyon Diamond on her chest blaze like a bonfire.\n\n\n Attaboy dumped me onto a floating cushion where I lay clutching and\n shuddering away from her and from the void all around me, and went\n across to her alone with the arsenic.", "\"Jupiter!\" I goggled at him. \"Akroida! Who's she?\"\n\n\n He looked at me as if I hadn't yet got out from under the rock where he\n was sure I'd been born. \"Don't you know nothin', butterhead?\"\n\n\n From him I took it. I even waited patiently till the master spoke\n again. The memory still makes me fry.\n\n\n \"Akroida,\" he explained in his own sweet time, \"is the queen-scorp\n of them idiotic scorpions that lives on Jupiter. I sold her the\n Halcyon Diamond that disappeared from the World Museum five years ago,\n remember?\" He winked broadly. \"It come from Mars in the first place,\n you know. Mars! What a place fer jools! Damn desert's lousy with 'em,\n if it wasn't so much trouble to dig 'em out—\" He went off into a dream\n about the rocks on Mars but I jerked him back.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "A sort of jerking quiver ran through Akroida. She reared up even\n higher. Her mean Roman nose twitched. \"An earthman? Like Pard Hoskins?\"\n\n\n Attaboy shrank smaller and smaller. He could only nod dumbly.\n\n\n The storm broke, all right. That old dame let out a scream like a\n maddened stallion and began to thrash around and flail her couch with\n that dragon's tail of hers.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too.", "\"You mean those scorpions have really got brains?\"", "I braced up and tapped out the greeting Pard had taught me. My\n fiendish-looking opponent tapped right back, inquiring why the hell\n I was back so soon when I knew that Akroida was all set to carve me\n into steaks for just any meal. But the tone was friendly and even\n intimate—or rather, the taps were. There was even a rather warm\n expression discernible in the thing's eyes, so I took heart and decided\n to ignore the ferocious features surrounding those eyes. After all, the\n poor sinner's map was made of shell, and he wasn't responsible for its\n expression.\n\n\n I tapped back very politely that he must be mistaking me for someone\n else. \"I've never been here before, and so I've never met the charming\n lady,\" I informed him. \"However, I have something very special in the\n way of jewels—not with me, naturally—and the rumor is that she might\n be interested.\"", "Then he winked at me. \"But then I got off in a corner and cooked up\n some perfume that drives them nuts the other way; sorta frantic with\n ecstasy, like the book says. Didn't have a chance to try it on Akroida,\n though. She wouldn't give me another audience. It's in the stuff they\n cleaned outa me room: a poiple bottle with a bright green stopper.\"\n\n\n He ruminated a few minutes. \"Tell you what, chump. Make them shell out\n with a green an' poiple spacesuit—them's the real Jupiter colors—an'\n put just a touch o' that there perfume on the outside of it. Akroida'll\n do anything fer you if she just gets a whiff. Just anything! But\n remember, don't use but a drop. It's real powerful.\"\nII", "Peeking out the porthole I saw that my guide was fidgeting and looking\n over his shoulder at my ship, so I eased in the controls and edge after\n him. To my surprise a vapor shot out of a box that I had taken for a\n natural lump on his back, and he darted away from me. I opened the\n throttle and tore after him among the immense red blobs that were now\n beginning to be patterned with dozens of green-and-purple scorpions,\n all busy filling huge baskets with buds and tendrils, no doubt.\n\n\n Other scorpions oared and floated about in twos and threes in a free\n and peaceable manner that almost made me forget that I was scared to\n death of them, and they stared at my boat with only a mild interest\n that would have taught manners to most of my fellow citizens of Earth.", "At the thought my larynx froze up tight. This was worse than I'd\n thought. Government men trapping me and then beaming at me. And a full\n pardon. And a reward. Oh, no! I told myself, it wasn't possible. Not\n when I already had more counts against me than a cur has fleas. Not\n unless it was a straight suicide mission!\n\n\n I feebly massaged my throat. \"Pictures?\" I whispered. \"Show me 'em.\"\n Crude, but it was all I could squeeze out.\n\n\n I squeezed out more when I saw those pictures, though. Those\n inhabitants were charming, just charming if you like scorpions. Well,\n a cross between a scorpion and a grasshopper, to be accurate. Floating\n among that red stuff, they showed up a kind of sickly purple turning to\n gangrene around the edges.", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "They were really stumped. They hadn't expected me to take this attitude\n at all. No doubt they had it figured that I'd gratefully throw myself\n into a sea of ammonia among man-size scorpions just for the hell of\n it. Nuts! After all, in the pen a man can eat and breathe, and a guard\n won't reach in and nip off an arm or leg while he's got his back\n turned. How stupid could they get?", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "With that we got down to business and fixed a meeting point out on\n Jupiter's farthest moon; then they took me in to the edge of Jupiter's\n ice-cloud and turned me loose in a peanut of a space boat with old Jupe\n looming ahead bigger than all outdoors and the Red Spot dead ahead. I\n patted my pretty enameled suit, which was a study in paris green and\n passionate purple.\n\n\n I patted the three hundred pounds of arsenic crystals for Akroida and\n anyone else I might have to bribe. I anxiously examined my suit's air\n and water containers and the heating unit that would keep them in\n their proper state. I had already gone over the space boat. Yeah, I\n was as nervous as a cat with new kittens. Feeling again for my little\n bottle of horrid stench, I breathed a prayer to the god of idiots and\n spacemen, and headed in. The big ship was long gone, and I felt like a\n mighty small and naked microbe diving into the Pacific Ocean.", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it." ], [ "I tried to back off from him a bit, but the ship stopped me. \"I'm Casey\n Ritter. What's your label, chum?\"\n\n\n \"Attaboy,\" he ticked coyly.\n\n\n \"Attaboy?\" Things blurred around me. It couldn't be. It was just plain\n nuts. Then I got a glimmer through my paralyzed gray matter. \"Who named\n you that?\"\n\n\n He simpered. \"My dear friend, Pard Hoskins.\"\n\n\n I breathed again. How simple could I get? He'd already mistaken me for\n Pard, hadn't he? Then I remembered something else. \"How come you aren't\n mad at him? Don't you hate yellow, too?\"\n\n\n He hung his silly head. \"I fear I am colorblind,\" he confessed sadly.", "I went back to my cot that night, and this time instead of biting my\n nails, I bit myself. So I faced it. Casey Ritter lost his nerve, and\n along with it, the chance of a lifetime. A better man than me had\n already penetrated the Great Red Spot of old Jupiter and come out\n alive. That thought ate me to the quick, and I began to wonder if it\n was too late, after all. I could hardly wait for morning to come, so\n that I could pry more information out of Pard Hoskins.\n\n\n But I didn't see Pard for a few days. And then, a week later, a group\n of lifers made a break that didn't jell, and the whole bunch was locked\n up in the blockhouse, the special building reserved for escapees. Pard\n Hoskins was in the bunch. He'd never get out of there, and he knew it.\n So did I.", "In that building everything stayed right where it was put. If it was\n put twelve or fifty feet up off the floor, it stayed there. Not that\n there wasn't gravity. There was plenty of gravity to suit me—just\n right, in fact—and still they had furniture sitting around in the air\n as solid as if on a floor. Which was fine for flying hopper-scorps, but\n what about Casey Ritter, who hadn't cultivated even a feather?\n\n\n Attaboy, however, had the answers for everything. Towing me from the\n airlock to the window ledge, he again sniffed that delectable odor on\n my chest, caressed me with his front pair of legs while I manfully\n endured, and then without warning tossed me onto his back above the\n little box and flew off with me along a tunnel with luminous red walls.", "When I finally wore them down and got to my little cell, I looked\n around it with a feeling of real coziness. I even patted the walls\n chummily and snapped a salute at the guard. It makes me grind my molars\n now to think of it. The way that bunch of stuffed shirts in the S.S.C.\n made a gold-barred chimpanzee out of me has broken my spirit and\n turned me into an honest trader. Me, Casey Ritter, slickest slicker in\n the Solar System, led like a precious infant right where I'd flatly\n refused to go! In plain English, I underestimated the enemy. Feeling\n safe and secure in the grip of the good old Iron College, I relaxed.\n\n\n At this strategic point, the enemy planted a stoolie on me. Not in my\n cell block. They were too smart for that. But we met at recreation, and\n his mug seemed familiar, like a wisp of smoke where no smoke has got a\n right to be; and after awhile I braced him.", "\"I put on a yeller slicker,\" he confessed sadly. \"That there ammonia\n mist was eatin' into the finish on my spacesuit, so I draped this\n here slicker around me to sorta fancy up the rig before goin' in to\n an audience with the old rip.\" He shook his head slowly. \"The kid\n that took me in was colorblind, so I didn't have no warning at all.\n I found out that them scorpions can't stand yeller. It just plain\n drives them nuts! Thought they'd chaw me up and spit me out into the\n chlorine before I could get outa the damn thing. If my colorblind pal\n hadn't helped me, they'd of done it, too. And Akroida claimed I done it\n a-purpose to upset her.\"", "The bleat of anguish that accompanied my first view of those beauties\n had taken my voice again. \"How big?\" I whispered.\n\n\n He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. \"About the size of a man, I\n believe.\"\n\n\n I raised my shrinking head. \"Take me to jail!\" I said firmly, and\n collapsed onto my chair.\n\n\n A crafty-eyed buzzard across the table leaned toward me. \"So this is\n the great Casey Ritter, daredevil of the Solar System!\" he sneered.\n \"Never loses a bet, never turns down a dare!\"\n\n\n I shuddered. \"You're telling that one! And besides, a man's got to draw\n the line somewhere. And I'm drawing it right here. Take me to jail!\"", "Akroida rose up sort of languidly on an elbow that was all stripped\n bone and sharp as a needle. She pulled an eyeball out about a yard and\n scanned Attaboy and the box. He closed in to the couch all hunched\n over, ducked his head humbly half-a-dozen times, and pushed the box\n over beside her. Akroida eased her eyeball back, opened the box and\n sniffed, and then turned to Attaboy with a full-blown Satanic grin. I\n could hear her question reverberate away over where I was.\n\n\n \"Who from?\" asked Akroida.\n\n\n That conversation was telegraphed to me blow by blow by the actions of\n those hopper-scorps. I didn't need their particular brand of Morse Code\n at all.", "I hardly heard the cut. \"You mean you really did get away with them?\"\n My jaw must've been hanging down a foot, because I'd just been playing\n along with him, not really believing him, and now all of a sudden I\n somehow knew that he'd really lifted those emeralds. But how? It was\n impossible. I'd investigated once myself.\n\n\n He nodded and then moved casually away. I looked up and saw a guard\n coming.", "JUPITER'S JOKE\nBy A. L. HALEY\nCasey Ritter, the guy who never turned\n \ndown a dare, breathed a prayer to the gods\n \nof idiots and spacemen, and headed in toward\n \nthe great red spot of terrible Jupiter.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "\"Who from?\" Attaboy cringed lower and blushed a purple all-over blush.\n \"Dear lady, it is from an interspace trader who possesses some truly\n remarkable jewels,\" he confessed coyly.\n\n\n Akroida toyed with the Halcyon Diamond and ignored the bait. \"His\n name?\" she demanded. And when he told her, with a bad stutter in\n his code, she reared up higher on her skinny elbow and glared in my\n direction. \"Casey Ritter? Never heard of him. Where's he from?\"\n\n\n Well, after all, she wasn't blind. He had to confess. \"I—uh—the\n stones were so amazing, Royal Akroida, that I didn't pay much attention\n to the—uh—trader. He does seem to resemble an—ah—earthman.\" He\n ducked his head and fearfully waited.", "For three more days I worked down my knuckles, my nails being gone,\n while I sat around all hunched up, wondering feverishly if Pard would\n make a deal about those emeralds. Then I broke down and sent out a\n letter to the S.S.C.\n\n\n The Big Sneer of the conference table promptly dropped in on me,\n friendly as a bottle of strychnine. But for a lad headed for Jupiter\n that was good training, so I sneered right back at him, explained the\n caper, and we both paid a visit to Pard. In two days the deal was made\n and the caper set up. There were a few bits of info that Pard had to\n shell out, like where the emeralds were, and how to communicate with\n those scorpions, and how he'd made Akroida mad.", "My actions didn't bother him a bit. \"Jewels, did you say?\" he tapped\n out thoughtfully, just like an ordinary business man, and I managed to\n tap out yes. He drifted closer; close enough to get a whiff....\nA shudder of ecstasy stiffened him. His head and eyes rolled with it,\n and he wafted closer still. Right there I began to harbor a premonition\n that there might be such a thing as being too popular in Scorpdom, but\n I thrust this sneak-thief idea back into limbo.\n\n\n Taking advantage of his condition, I boldly tapped out, \"How's about\n taking me on a guided tour through this red spinach patch to Akroida,\n old pal?\" Or words to that effect.\n\n\n He lolled his hideous cranium practically on my shoulder. \"Anything!\n Just anything you desire, my dearest friend.\"", "Sure, the crystals are deadly, but I was smuggling them legitimately,\n in a manner of speaking, for this doctor to experiment with. He wasn't\n going to sell them for dope. But—and this was the 'but' that was\n likely to deprive the System of my activities—even experimenting with\n them was illegal even if it needed to be done; also, I had promised not\n to rat on him before taking the job.\n\n\n Well, Casey Ritter may be a lot of things we won't mention, but he\n doesn't rat on his clients. So there I was, closeted with the ten\n members of the S.S. Customs Court, getting set to hear the gavel\n fall and the head man intone the sentence that would take me out of\n circulation for a long, long time. And instead, blast me, if they\n didn't foul me with this trip to good old Jupiter.", "The senior judge rapped ferociously, and I skidded to a halt. Our\n little story teller patiently cleared his skinny throat again.\n \"I assure you it is no fairy tale. We possess well-authenticated\n photographs of these inhabitants, and if you are prepared to visit them\n and in some way worm from them the secret of their anti-gravity field,\n the government stands ready to issue you a full pardon as well as a\n substantial monetary reward. Your talents, Mr. Ritter, seem, shall we\n say, eminently suited to the task.\"\nHe beamed at me. I looked around. They were all beaming. At me!\n Suddenly I smelled a rat as big as an elephant. That whole Kooleen\n caper: Had it been just a trap to lead me straight to this? I hadn't\n been able to figure how they'd cracked my setup....", "That night I turned on my hard prison cot until my bones were so much\n jelly, trying to figure that steal. The next morning I got up burning\n with this fever for information, only to find that Pard had got himself\n put in solitary for mugging a guard, and that really put the heat on\n me. I chewed my fingernails down to the quick by the time he got out a\n week later.\nBy that time he really had me hooked. I'd of sworn he was leveling\n with me. But he wouldn't tell me how he'd worked the steal. Instead,\n he opened up on the trade he'd booked for the string. He said, \"When I\n chisel me way outa this squirrel cage, I'm gonna hit fer good old Jupe\n and sell 'em to Akroida. She's nuts about jools. What that old girl\n won't give me fer 'em—\" He whistled appreciatively, thinking about it.", "\"Brains!\" he snorted. \"Have they got brains! Why, they're smarter than\n people! And not ferocious, neither, in spite of how they look, if you\n just leave 'em alone. That's all they want, just to be left alone.\n Peace an' quiet, and lots of methane and ammonia and arsenic, that's\n fer them. Besides, the space suit rig you got to wear, they can't bite\n you. Akroida's not a bad old girl. Partial to arsenic on her lettuce,\n so I brought her a hundred pounds of the stuff, an' she went fer that\n almost like it was diamonds, too. Did I rate around there fer awhile!\"\n He sighed regretfully. \"But then I went and made her mad, an' I'm kinda\n persona non grata there right now. By the time I gnaw outa this here\n cheese trap, though, I figger she'll be all cooled off and ready fer\n them emeralds.\"", "Right there I forgave him for pulling that eye on me. He was the guide\n I needed, the one who had got Pard out alive. I almost hugged him.\n \"Lead off, old pal,\" I sang out, and then had to tap it. \"I'll follow\n in my boat.\"\n\n\n Well, I'd met the first of the brood and was still alive. Not only\n alive but loved and cherished, thanks to Pard's inventiveness and to\n a kindly fate which had sent Pard's old pal my way. A great man, Pard\n Hoskins. How had he made friends with the brute in the first place?\n\n\n Being once more inside my spaceboat, I raised my helmet, which was like\n one of those head-pieces they used to put on suits of armor instead of\n the usual plastic bubble. And it was rigged out with phony antennae and\n mandibles and other embellishments calculated to interest my hosts.\n Whether it interested them or not, it was plenty uncomfortable for me.", "He shrugged, but his little black-currant eyes began to sparkle with\n real passion, the high voltage kind that only a woman in a million, or\n a million in a bank, can kindle in a guy. \"Buddy,\" he said reverently,\n \"I'd start more than that just to get me mitts on them stones again!\n Why, you ain't never seen jools till you've seen them! Big as hen's\n eggs, an even dozen of 'em; and flawless, I'm a-shoutin', not a flaw!\"\n His eyes watered at the memory, yearning like a hound-dog's over a\n fresh scent.", "He reared back at that, and reaching up, plucked his right eye out of\n the socket and reeled it out to the end of a two-foot tentacle, and\n then he examined me with it just like an old-time earl with one of\n those things they called monocles. Pard hadn't warned me about those\n removable eyes, for reasons best known to himself. I still wake up\n screaming....\n\n\n Anyway, when that thing pulled out its eye and held it toward me, I\n backed up against the side of the ship like I'd been half-electrocuted.\n Then I gagged. But I could still remember that I had to live in that\n suit for awhile, so I held on. Then that monstrosity reeled in the eye,\n and I gagged again.", "Meanwhile the hopper-scorp reached the ship. Hastily I squirted some of\n my Scorpion-Come-Hither lure on the chest of my spacesuit, opened the\n lock, and popped out, brave as could be. Face to face with that thing,\n though, I nearly lost my grip on the handle. In fact, I'd have fainted\n dead away right there if Pard Hoskins hadn't been there already and\n lived. If that little shrimp could do it, I could, too." ] ]
train	63442	[ "What can be inferred about the personality of Grannie Annie from the passage?", "Why was Baker hesitant to send his employees on an enforced vacation?", "What was the point in Grannie Annie and Billy-boy venturing into the desert?", "Although Billy-boy questioned his decision of letting Grannie Annie leave with Baker in the kit car, what put his mind at ease?", "What was a common factor with all the victims of the Red Spot Fever?", "How was Antlers Park able to fool Ezra and Billy-boy into believing Grannie Annie was with him?", "What was the motivation behind Antlers Park's behavior?", "How did Grannie Annie avoid the actions of Antlers Park?" ]	[ [ "She's fearless and quick-witted", "She's fearful and hard to work with", "She lacks the experience that she claims she has for her novels", "She lacks the knowledge that is needed for her novels" ], [ "He feared they would have too much difficulty getting the employees back to work.", "He feared that would not stop the plague of Red Spot Fever.", "He feared they would lose chartered rights with Spacolonial", "He feared their work would suffer from the break." ], [ "They were there to find Baker", "They were trying to locate the strange birds", "They were looking for proof of the Red Spot Fever", "They were trying to locate the kites" ], [ "The car and its passengers were safe from the Red Spot Fever", "The kite car was protected by the strange birds.", "The invention by Baker allowed them to watch the movements of the car and its passengers", "She was a strong woman and capable of taking care of herself." ], [ "They were all treated in the Baldric ", "They had all started investigating the odd birds and their strange behavior", "They had all started seeing symptoms in the mines", "They had all started seeing symptoms in the barracks" ], [ "He was driving the kite car too quickly through the sand to clearly see who the passenger was.", "He was using one of the images from the birds as an impersonator of Grannie Annie ", "He was a skilled mastermind with tendencies that could trick anyone into believing him", "His vehicle was equipped with technology that could infiltrate the invention by Baker" ], [ "He wanted Shalf Four all to himself and his team.", "He wanted the mining to stop because it was causing Larynx Voice to become more powerful than Interstellar Incorporated", "He wanted the mining to stop because it was causing Larynx Incorporated to become more powerful than Interstellar Voice", "He wanted his heat gun invention to overpower Baker's inventions" ], [ "She pretended to contract the plague.", "She distracted him by sharing a new plot for her novel.", "She used a cockatoo image to distract him.", "She turned his own heat gun on him" ] ]	[ 1, 3, 1, 3, 4, 2, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "other works of science fiction. Blood-and-thunder as these books are,\n however, they have one redeeming feature—authenticity of background.\n Grannie Annie was the original research digger-upper, and when she\n laid the setting of a yarn on a star of the sixth magnitude, only a\n transportation-velocity of less than light could prevent her from\n visiting her \"stage\" in person.", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "Baker looked up. \"That's right. We only began operations there a\n comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that\n runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of\nInterstellar Voice\n, our rival, in a year.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up\n there,\" she said. \"But first I want to see your laboratory.\"\n\n\n There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower\n level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length\n of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began\n dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four\n Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small\n dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire\n and other items.", "DOUBLE TROUBLE\nby CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction\n\n writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot\n\n fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees,\n\n I was running in circles—especially since\n\n Grannie became twins every now and then.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the\n rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me,\n were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing\n directly behind them.\n\n\n \"It's Mr. Baker's own invention,\" the operator said. \"An improvement on\n the visiphone.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its\n passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice\n entered the room. It stopped abruptly. \"The machine uses a lot of\n power,\" the operator said, \"and as yet we haven't got much.\"\n\n\n The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared\n somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself\n posted of Grannie's movements.", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of\n Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down\n the center of the gorge toward the entrance.\n\n\n But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen\n had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like\n contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of\n bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth\n upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian.\n\n\n \"Ultra violet,\" Grannie Annie explained. \"The opposite end of the\n vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays\n that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've\n reached Shaft Four.\"", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "\"If I weren't a realist, I'd say that\nLarynx Incorporated\nhas been\n bewitched,\" he began slowly. \"We pay our men high wages and give them\n excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year.\n Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and\n spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them.\"\n\n\n \"Red Spot Fever?\" Grannie looked at him curiously.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker nodded. \"The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness\n on the part of the patient. Then they disappear.\"\n\n\n He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass.\n\n\n \"They walk out into the Baldric,\" he continued, \"and nothing can stop\n them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as\n they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes\n are turned, they give us the slip.\"", "But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that\n their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in\n awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie\n Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way.\n\n\n Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away,\n they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" I said in a hushed voice.\n\n\n Grannie shook her head. \"Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced\n by some chemical radiations,\" she replied. \"Whatever it is, we'd better\n watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead.\"\n\n\n We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no\n repetition of the \"mirage.\" The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and\n the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWe had left the offices of\nInterstellar Voice\nthree days ago, Earth\n time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky,\n entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the\n lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in\n this desert as the trees.\n\n\n Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with\n only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of\n vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful\n wind that blew from all quarters.\n\n\n As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt.\n\n\n \"This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit\n it at its narrowest spot.\"" ], [ "\"Mr. Baker,\" he said breathlessly, \"seventy-five workers at Shaft Four\n have headed out into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four, eh?\" he repeated. \"That's our principal mine. If the fever\n spreads there, I'm licked.\"\n\n\n He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent\n Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his\n notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained\n standing.\n\n\n Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to\n the bottle of Martian whiskey there.\n\n\n \"There must be ways of stopping this,\" she said. \"Have you called in\n any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the\n men away until the plague has died down?\"", "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "\"If I weren't a realist, I'd say that\nLarynx Incorporated\nhas been\n bewitched,\" he began slowly. \"We pay our men high wages and give them\n excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year.\n Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and\n spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them.\"\n\n\n \"Red Spot Fever?\" Grannie looked at him curiously.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker nodded. \"The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness\n on the part of the patient. Then they disappear.\"\n\n\n He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass.\n\n\n \"They walk out into the Baldric,\" he continued, \"and nothing can stop\n them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as\n they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes\n are turned, they give us the slip.\"", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the\n rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me,\n were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing\n directly behind them.\n\n\n \"It's Mr. Baker's own invention,\" the operator said. \"An improvement on\n the visiphone.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its\n passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice\n entered the room. It stopped abruptly. \"The machine uses a lot of\n power,\" the operator said, \"and as yet we haven't got much.\"\n\n\n The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared\n somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself\n posted of Grannie's movements.", "Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When\n we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing.\n I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of\n Antlers Park flashed on the screen.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he said in his friendly way. \"I see you arrived all right. Is\n Miss Flowers there?\"\n\n\n \"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four,\" I said. \"There's\n trouble up there. Red spot fever.\"\n\n\n \"Fever, eh?\" repeated Park. \"That's a shame. Is there anything I can\n do?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me,\" I said, \"has your company had any trouble with this plague?\"", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "Baker looked up. \"That's right. We only began operations there a\n comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that\n runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of\nInterstellar Voice\n, our rival, in a year.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up\n there,\" she said. \"But first I want to see your laboratory.\"\n\n\n There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower\n level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length\n of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began\n dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four\n Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small\n dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire\n and other items.", "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened\n it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been\n attacked by the strange malady.\n\n\n Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had\n received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while\n sleeping or lounging in the barracks.\n\n\n Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that\n led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low\n rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.\n\n\n Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those\n bunks some thirty men lay sleeping.\n\n\n The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood\n there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk\n toward that window.\n\n\n \"Look here,\" he said.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of\n Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down\n the center of the gorge toward the entrance.\n\n\n But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen\n had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like\n contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of\n bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth\n upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian.\n\n\n \"Ultra violet,\" Grannie Annie explained. \"The opposite end of the\n vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays\n that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've\n reached Shaft Four.\"", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "\"There are two companies here,\" he continued, \"\nInterstellar Voice\nand\nLarynx Incorporated\n. Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that.\n However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies\n stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric.\n\n\n \"There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees\n and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has\n crossed the Baldric without trouble.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of trouble?\" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers\n Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, \"Fiddlesticks, I never\n saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour.\"\nSo now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers\n on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and\n supplies.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of\nInterstellar Voice\non Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another\n novel in the state of embryo.\n\n\n What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie\n had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed\n her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated\n to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book.\n\n\n Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the\n offices of\nInterstellar Voice\n. And then I was shaking hands with\n Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said cordially. \"I've just been trying to\n persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n \"What's the Baldric?\" I had asked." ], [ "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "But it wasn't a mirage. As the party came closer, we could see that\n their lips were moving, and their voices became audible. I listened in\n awe. The duplicate of myself was talking to the duplicate of Grannie\n Annie, and she was replying in the most natural way.\n\n\n Steadily the four travelers approached. Then, when a dozen yards away,\n they suddenly faded like a negative exposed to light and disappeared.\n\n\n \"What do you make of it?\" I said in a hushed voice.\n\n\n Grannie shook her head. \"Might be a form of mass hypnosis superinduced\n by some chemical radiations,\" she replied. \"Whatever it is, we'd better\n watch our step. There's no telling what might lie ahead.\"\n\n\n We walked after that with taut nerves and watchful eyes, but we saw no\n repetition of the \"mirage.\" The wind continued to blow ceaselessly, and\n the sand seemed to grow more and more powdery.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the\n rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me,\n were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing\n directly behind them.\n\n\n \"It's Mr. Baker's own invention,\" the operator said. \"An improvement on\n the visiphone.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its\n passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice\n entered the room. It stopped abruptly. \"The machine uses a lot of\n power,\" the operator said, \"and as yet we haven't got much.\"\n\n\n The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared\n somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself\n posted of Grannie's movements.", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWe had left the offices of\nInterstellar Voice\nthree days ago, Earth\n time, and now as the immense disc of Jupiter flamed across the sky,\n entered the outer limits of the Baldric. Grannie Annie strode in the\n lead, her absurd long-skirted black dress looking as out of place in\n this desert as the trees.\n\n\n Flagpole trees. They rose straight up like enormous cat-tails, with\n only a melon-shaped protuberance at the top to show they were a form of\n vegetation. Everything else was blanketed by the sand and the powerful\n wind that blew from all quarters.\n\n\n As we reached the first of those trees, Grannie came to a halt.\n\n\n \"This is the Baldric all right. If my calculations are right, we've hit\n it at its narrowest spot.\"", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver\n cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter\n began to descend toward the horizon.\n\n\n And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a\n high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had\n just crossed.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy,\" she said to me in a strange voice, \"look down there and\n tell me what you see.\"\n\n\n I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from\n head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a\n party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black\n dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat,\n another Earth man, and a Martian.\nDetail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves!\n\"A mirage!\" said Ezra Karn.", "Baker looked up. \"That's right. We only began operations there a\n comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that\n runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of\nInterstellar Voice\n, our rival, in a year.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up\n there,\" she said. \"But first I want to see your laboratory.\"\n\n\n There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower\n level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length\n of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began\n dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four\n Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small\n dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire\n and other items.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "\"There are two companies here,\" he continued, \"\nInterstellar Voice\nand\nLarynx Incorporated\n. Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that.\n However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies\n stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric.\n\n\n \"There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees\n and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has\n crossed the Baldric without trouble.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of trouble?\" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers\n Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, \"Fiddlesticks, I never\n saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour.\"\nSo now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers\n on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and\n supplies.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "\"Val-ley. Thir-ty miles. Entrance hidden by wall of ... flagpole trees.\"\nI leaped into the driver's seat and gave the kite its head. And now the\n country began to undergo a subtle change. The trees seemed to group\n themselves in a long flanking corridor in a northwesterly direction, as\n if to hide some secret that lay beyond. Twice I attempted to penetrate\n that wall, only to find my way blocked by those curious growths.\n\n\n Then a corridor opened before me; a mile forward and the desert began\n again. But it was a new desert this time: the sand packed hard as\n granite, the way ahead utterly devoid of vegetation. In the distance\n black bulging hills extended to right and left, with a narrow chasm or\n doorway between.\n\n\n I headed for that entrance, and when I reached it, I shut off power\n with an exclamation of astonishment.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair\n with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle\n was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each\n variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in.\n\n\n The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted\n in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole\n appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head.\n\n\n \"Heat gun!\" Ezra yelled.\n\n\n Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between\n the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie\n Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of\n hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole\n shattered our windscreen.", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form." ], [ "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the\n rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me,\n were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing\n directly behind them.\n\n\n \"It's Mr. Baker's own invention,\" the operator said. \"An improvement on\n the visiphone.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its\n passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice\n entered the room. It stopped abruptly. \"The machine uses a lot of\n power,\" the operator said, \"and as yet we haven't got much.\"\n\n\n The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared\n somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself\n posted of Grannie's movements.", "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "Baker looked up. \"That's right. We only began operations there a\n comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that\n runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of\nInterstellar Voice\n, our rival, in a year.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up\n there,\" she said. \"But first I want to see your laboratory.\"\n\n\n There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower\n level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length\n of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began\n dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four\n Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small\n dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire\n and other items.", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "Ezra spoke over my shoulder. \"He's doing scenes for Grannie's new\n book,\" he said. \"The old lady figures on using the events here for a\n plot.\nLook at that damned nosy bird!\n\"\n\n\n A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying\n curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird\n scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the\n eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird\n companions.\n\n\n And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A\n group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and\n moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world.\n\n\n With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw\n the image of Jimmy Baker.", "\"Mr. Baker,\" he said breathlessly, \"seventy-five workers at Shaft Four\n have headed out into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four, eh?\" he repeated. \"That's our principal mine. If the fever\n spreads there, I'm licked.\"\n\n\n He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent\n Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his\n notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained\n standing.\n\n\n Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to\n the bottle of Martian whiskey there.\n\n\n \"There must be ways of stopping this,\" she said. \"Have you called in\n any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the\n men away until the plague has died down?\"", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "The\nreal\nJimmy Baker stood next to Grannie, staring up at this\n incredible mirage. Grannie let out a whoop. \"I've got it!\" she said.\n \"Those things we see up there are nothing more than mental images.\n They're Xartal's drawings!\"\n\"Don't you see,\" the lady continued. \"Everything that Xartal put on\n paper has been seen by one or more of these cockatoos. The cockatoos\n are like Earth parrots all right, but not only have they the power\n of copying speech, they also have the ability to recreate a mental\n image of what they have seen. In other words their brains form a\n powerful photographic impression of the object. That impression is\n then transmitted simultaneously in telepathic wavelengths to common\n foci. That eyrie might be likened to a cinema screen, receiving brain\n vibrations from a hundred different sources that blend into the light\n field to form what are apparently three-dimensional images.\"", "Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of\n Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down\n the center of the gorge toward the entrance.\n\n\n But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen\n had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like\n contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of\n bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth\n upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian.\n\n\n \"Ultra violet,\" Grannie Annie explained. \"The opposite end of the\n vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays\n that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've\n reached Shaft Four.\"", "\"If I weren't a realist, I'd say that\nLarynx Incorporated\nhas been\n bewitched,\" he began slowly. \"We pay our men high wages and give them\n excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year.\n Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and\n spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them.\"\n\n\n \"Red Spot Fever?\" Grannie looked at him curiously.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker nodded. \"The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness\n on the part of the patient. Then they disappear.\"\n\n\n He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass.\n\n\n \"They walk out into the Baldric,\" he continued, \"and nothing can stop\n them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as\n they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes\n are turned, they give us the slip.\"" ], [ "\"If I weren't a realist, I'd say that\nLarynx Incorporated\nhas been\n bewitched,\" he began slowly. \"We pay our men high wages and give them\n excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year.\n Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and\n spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them.\"\n\n\n \"Red Spot Fever?\" Grannie looked at him curiously.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker nodded. \"The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness\n on the part of the patient. Then they disappear.\"\n\n\n He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass.\n\n\n \"They walk out into the Baldric,\" he continued, \"and nothing can stop\n them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as\n they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes\n are turned, they give us the slip.\"", "Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When\n we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing.\n I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of\n Antlers Park flashed on the screen.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he said in his friendly way. \"I see you arrived all right. Is\n Miss Flowers there?\"\n\n\n \"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four,\" I said. \"There's\n trouble up there. Red spot fever.\"\n\n\n \"Fever, eh?\" repeated Park. \"That's a shame. Is there anything I can\n do?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me,\" I said, \"has your company had any trouble with this plague?\"", "Six feet up on that window a small almost imperceptible button of dull\n metal had been wedged into an aperture cut in the quartz. The central\n part of the button appeared to be a powerful lens of some kind, and as\n I seized it and pulled it loose, I felt the hum of tiny clock work.\n\n\n All at once I had it! Red spot fever. Heat fever from the infra-red\n rays of Jupiter's great spot. Someone had constructed this lens to\n concentrate and amplify the power of those rays. The internal clockwork\n served a double purpose. It opened a shutter, and it rotated the lens\n slowly so that it played for a time on each of the sleeping men.\n\n\n I slid the metal button in my pocket and left the barracks at a run.\n Back in the visiscreen room, I snapped to the operator:\n\n\n \"Turn it on!\"", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "Advancing toward me like a column of infantry came a long line of\n Larynx miners. They walked slowly, looking straight ahead, moving down\n the center of the gorge toward the entrance.\n\n\n But there was more! A kite car was drawn up to the side. The windscreen\n had been removed, and mounted on the hood was a large bullet-like\n contrivance that looked not unlike a search lamp. A blinding shaft of\n bluish radiance spewed from its open end. Playing it back and forth\n upon the marching men were Jimmy Baker and Xartal, the Martian.\n\n\n \"Ultra violet,\" Grannie Annie explained. \"The opposite end of the\n vibratory scale and the only thing that will combat the infra-red rays\n that cause red spot fever. Those men won't stop walking until they've\n reached Shaft Four.\"", "\"Mr. Baker,\" he said breathlessly, \"seventy-five workers at Shaft Four\n have headed out into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four, eh?\" he repeated. \"That's our principal mine. If the fever\n spreads there, I'm licked.\"\n\n\n He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent\n Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his\n notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained\n standing.\n\n\n Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to\n the bottle of Martian whiskey there.\n\n\n \"There must be ways of stopping this,\" she said. \"Have you called in\n any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the\n men away until the plague has died down?\"", "On Jimmy Baker's desk was a large file marked: FEVER VICTIMS. I opened\n it and found it contained the case histories of those men who had been\n attacked by the strange malady.\n\n\n Reading them over, I was struck by one detail. Each patient had\n received the first symptoms, not while working in the mines, but while\n sleeping or lounging in the barracks.\n\n\n Five minutes later Karn and I were striding down a white ramp that\n led to the nearest barracks. The building came into sight, a low\n rectangular structure, dome-roofed to withstand the violent winds.\n\n\n Inside double tiers of bunks stretched along either wall. In those\n bunks some thirty men lay sleeping.\n\n\n The far wall was taken up by a huge window of denvo-quartz. As I stood\n there, something suddenly caught Ezra Karn's eye. He began to walk\n toward that window.\n\n\n \"Look here,\" he said.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared,\n but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of\n speed, I raced alongside.\n\n\n The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could\n use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and\n sent it coiling across the intervening space.\n\n\n The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only\n thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a\n halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free\n from his grasp.\n\n\n \"What have you done with Miss Flowers?\" I demanded.\n\n\n The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the\n trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver\n cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter\n began to descend toward the horizon.\n\n\n And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a\n high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had\n just crossed.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy,\" she said to me in a strange voice, \"look down there and\n tell me what you see.\"\n\n\n I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from\n head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a\n party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black\n dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat,\n another Earth man, and a Martian.\nDetail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves!\n\"A mirage!\" said Ezra Karn.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "Ezra spoke over my shoulder. \"He's doing scenes for Grannie's new\n book,\" he said. \"The old lady figures on using the events here for a\n plot.\nLook at that damned nosy bird!\n\"\n\n\n A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying\n curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird\n scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the\n eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird\n companions.\n\n\n And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A\n group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and\n moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world.\n\n\n With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw\n the image of Jimmy Baker.", "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "DOUBLE TROUBLE\nby CARL JACOBI\nGrannie Annie, that waspish science-fiction\n\n writer, was in a jam again. What with red-spot\n\n fever, talking cockatoos and flagpole trees,\n\n I was running in circles—especially since\n\n Grannie became twins every now and then.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Spring 1945.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Ezra Karn took a greasy pipe from his lips and spat. \"It looks like the\n rest of this God-forsaken moon,\" he said, \"'ceptin for them sticks.\"\n\n\n Xartal, the Martian illustrator, said nothing. He was like that,\n taciturn, speaking only when spoken to.", "I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair\n with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle\n was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each\n variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in.\n\n\n The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted\n in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole\n appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head.\n\n\n \"Heat gun!\" Ezra yelled.\n\n\n Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between\n the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie\n Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of\n hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole\n shattered our windscreen." ], [ "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "Ezra spoke over my shoulder. \"He's doing scenes for Grannie's new\n book,\" he said. \"The old lady figures on using the events here for a\n plot.\nLook at that damned nosy bird!\n\"\n\n\n A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying\n curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird\n scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the\n eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird\n companions.\n\n\n And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A\n group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and\n moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world.\n\n\n With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw\n the image of Jimmy Baker.", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When\n we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing.\n I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of\n Antlers Park flashed on the screen.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he said in his friendly way. \"I see you arrived all right. Is\n Miss Flowers there?\"\n\n\n \"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four,\" I said. \"There's\n trouble up there. Red spot fever.\"\n\n\n \"Fever, eh?\" repeated Park. \"That's a shame. Is there anything I can\n do?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me,\" I said, \"has your company had any trouble with this plague?\"", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared,\n but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of\n speed, I raced alongside.\n\n\n The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could\n use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and\n sent it coiling across the intervening space.\n\n\n The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only\n thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a\n halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free\n from his grasp.\n\n\n \"What have you done with Miss Flowers?\" I demanded.\n\n\n The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the\n trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest.", "Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of\nInterstellar Voice\non Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another\n novel in the state of embryo.\n\n\n What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie\n had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed\n her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated\n to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book.\n\n\n Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the\n offices of\nInterstellar Voice\n. And then I was shaking hands with\n Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said cordially. \"I've just been trying to\n persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n \"What's the Baldric?\" I had asked.", "Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged.\n\n\n \"Will you believe me, sir,\" he said, \"when I tell you I've been out\n here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?\"\n\n\n I scowled at that; it didn't make sense.", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "It was a scene of a rapidly unfolding desert country as seen from the\n rear of a kite car. Directly behind the windscreen, backs turned to me,\n were Jimmy Baker, Grannie, and Xartal. It was as if I were standing\n directly behind them.\n\n\n \"It's Mr. Baker's own invention,\" the operator said. \"An improvement on\n the visiphone.\"\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you can follow the movements of that car and its\n passengers wherever it goes? Can you hear them talk too?\"\n\n\n \"Sure.\" The operator turned another dial, and Grannie's falsetto voice\n entered the room. It stopped abruptly. \"The machine uses a lot of\n power,\" the operator said, \"and as yet we haven't got much.\"\n\n\n The cloud of anxiety which had wrapped itself about me disappeared\n somewhat as I viewed this device. At least I could now keep myself\n posted of Grannie's movements.", "Ten minutes later we were on the move again. We saw more silver\n cockatoos and more flagpole trees. Above us, the great disc of Jupiter\n began to descend toward the horizon.\n\n\n And then all at once Grannie stopped again, this time at the top of a\n high ridge. She shielded her eyes and stared off into the plain we had\n just crossed.\n\n\n \"Billy-boy,\" she said to me in a strange voice, \"look down there and\n tell me what you see.\"\n\n\n I followed the direction of her hand and a shock went through me from\n head to foot. Down there, slowly toiling across the sand, advanced a\n party of four persons. In the lead was a little old lady in a black\n dress. Behind her strode a grizzled Earth man in a flop-brimmed hat,\n another Earth man, and a Martian.\nDetail for detail they were a duplicate of ourselves!\n\"A mirage!\" said Ezra Karn.", "\"There are two companies here,\" he continued, \"\nInterstellar Voice\nand\nLarynx Incorporated\n. Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that.\n However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies\n stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric.\n\n\n \"There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees\n and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has\n crossed the Baldric without trouble.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of trouble?\" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers\n Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, \"Fiddlesticks, I never\n saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour.\"\nSo now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers\n on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and\n supplies.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"" ], [ "Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged.\n\n\n \"Will you believe me, sir,\" he said, \"when I tell you I've been out\n here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?\"\n\n\n I scowled at that; it didn't make sense.", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When\n we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing.\n I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of\n Antlers Park flashed on the screen.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he said in his friendly way. \"I see you arrived all right. Is\n Miss Flowers there?\"\n\n\n \"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four,\" I said. \"There's\n trouble up there. Red spot fever.\"\n\n\n \"Fever, eh?\" repeated Park. \"That's a shame. Is there anything I can\n do?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me,\" I said, \"has your company had any trouble with this plague?\"", "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared,\n but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of\n speed, I raced alongside.\n\n\n The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could\n use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and\n sent it coiling across the intervening space.\n\n\n The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only\n thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a\n halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free\n from his grasp.\n\n\n \"What have you done with Miss Flowers?\" I demanded.\n\n\n The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the\n trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of\nInterstellar Voice\non Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another\n novel in the state of embryo.\n\n\n What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie\n had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed\n her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated\n to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book.\n\n\n Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the\n offices of\nInterstellar Voice\n. And then I was shaking hands with\n Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said cordially. \"I've just been trying to\n persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n \"What's the Baldric?\" I had asked.", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair\n with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle\n was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each\n variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in.\n\n\n The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted\n in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole\n appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head.\n\n\n \"Heat gun!\" Ezra yelled.\n\n\n Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between\n the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie\n Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of\n hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole\n shattered our windscreen.", "\"If I weren't a realist, I'd say that\nLarynx Incorporated\nhas been\n bewitched,\" he began slowly. \"We pay our men high wages and give them\n excellent living conditions with a vacation on Callisto every year.\n Up until a short time ago most of them were in excellent health and\n spirits. Then the Red Spot Fever got them.\"\n\n\n \"Red Spot Fever?\" Grannie looked at him curiously.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker nodded. \"The first symptoms are a tendency to garrulousness\n on the part of the patient. Then they disappear.\"\n\n\n He paused to make an adjustment of the windlass.\n\n\n \"They walk out into the Baldric,\" he continued, \"and nothing can stop\n them. We tried following them, of course, but it was no go. As soon as\n they realize they're being followed, they stop. But the moment our eyes\n are turned, they give us the slip.\"", "\"There are two companies here,\" he continued, \"\nInterstellar Voice\nand\nLarynx Incorporated\n. Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that.\n However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies\n stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric.\n\n\n \"There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees\n and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has\n crossed the Baldric without trouble.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of trouble?\" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers\n Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, \"Fiddlesticks, I never\n saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour.\"\nSo now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers\n on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and\n supplies.", "I decided I liked Baker the moment I saw him. In his middle thirties,\n he was tall and lean, with pleasant blue eyes which even his sand\n goggles could not conceal.\n\n\n \"I can't tell you how glad I am you're here, Grannie,\" he said. \"If\n anybody can help me, you can.\"\n\n\n Grannie's eyes glittered. \"Trouble with the mine laborers?\" she\n questioned.\nJimmy Baker nodded. He told his story over the roar of the wind as we\n headed back across the desert. Occasionally he touched a stud on an\n electric windlass to which the kite wire was attached. Apparently these\n adjustments moved planes or fins on the kite and accounted for the\n car's ability to move in any direction.", "\"However, as you perhaps know, the only reason for colonial activities\n here at all is because of the presence of an ore known as Acoustix.\n It's no use to the people of Earth but of untold value on Mars. I'm\n not up on the scientific reasons, but it seems that life on the red\n planet has developed with a supersonic method of vocal communication.\n The Martian speaks as the Earthman does, but he amplifies his thoughts'\n transmission by way of wave lengths as high as three million vibrations\n per second. The trouble is that by the time the average Martian reaches\n middle age, his ability to produce those vibrations steadily decreases.\n Then it was found that this ore, Acoustix, revitalized their sounding\n apparatus, and the rush was on.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n Park leaned back. \"The rush to find more of the ore,\" he explained.\n \"But up until now this moon is the only place where it can be found.", "Ezra spoke over my shoulder. \"He's doing scenes for Grannie's new\n book,\" he said. \"The old lady figures on using the events here for a\n plot.\nLook at that damned nosy bird!\n\"\n\n\n A silver cockatoo had alighted on the kite car and was surveying\n curiously Xartal's work. As each drawing was completed, the bird\n scanned it with rapt attention. Abruptly it flew to the top of the\n eyrie, where it seemed to be having a consultation with its bird\n companions.\n\n\n And then abruptly it happened. The cockatoos took off in mass flight. A\n group of Earth people suddenly materialized on the eyrie, talking and\n moving about as if it were the most natural thing in the world.\n\n\n With a shock I saw the likeness of myself; I saw Ezra Karn; and I saw\n the image of Jimmy Baker." ], [ "There was a huge chair-shaped rock there, and seated upon it was\n Grannie Annie. She had a tablet in her hands, and she was writing.\n\n\n \"Grannie!\" I yelled. \"What're you doing here? Where's Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\n She rose to her feet and clambered down the rock.\n\n\n \"Getting back Jimmy's mine laborers,\" she said, a twinkle in her eyes.\n \"I see you've got Antlers Park. I'm glad of that. It saves me a lot of\n trouble.\" She took off her spectacles and wiped them on her sleeve.\n \"Don't look so fuddled, Billy-boy. Come along, and I'll show you.\"\n\n\n She led the way through the narrow passage into the valley. A deep\n gorge, it was, with the black sheer cliffs on either side pressing\n close. Ten feet forward, I stopped short, staring in amazement.", "Grannie Annie told her story during the long ride back to Shaft Four.\n We drove slowly, keeping the line of marching Larynx miners always\n ahead of us.\n\n\n Jimmy Baker had struck a new big lode of Acoustix, a lode which if\n worked successfully would see\nLarynx Incorporated\nbecome a far more\n powerful exporting concern than\nInterstellar Voice\n. Antlers Park\n didn't want that.\n\n\n It was he or his agents who placed those lens buttons in the Larynx\n barracks.\nFor he knew that just as Jupiter's great spot was\n responsible for a climate and atmosphere suitable for an Earthman on\n this Eighth Moon, so also was that spot a deadly power in itself,\n capable when its rays were concentrated of causing a fatal sickness.\nThen suddenly becoming fearful of Grannie's prying, Antlers Park strove\n to head her off before she reached Shaft Four.", "It was Grannie. As the car drew up alongside I saw her sitting in her\n prim way next to Antlers Park. Park said:\n\n\n \"We left the others at the mine. Miss Flowers is going back with me to\n my offices to help me improve the formula for that new antitoxin.\"\n\n\n He waved his hand, and the car moved off. I watched it as it sped\n across the desert, and a growing suspicion began to form in my mind.\n Then, like a knife thrust, the truth struck me.\n\n\n \"Ezra!\" I yelled, swinging the car. \"That wasn't Grannie!\nThat was one\n of those damned cockatoo images.\nWe've got to catch him.\"\n\n\n The other car was some distance ahead now. Park looked back and saw us\n following. He did something to the kite wire, and his car leaped ahead.", "The Larynx manager nodded slowly. \"I see,\" he said. \"But why don't the\n birds reconstruct images from the actual person. Why use drawings?\"\n\n\n \"Probably because the drawings are exaggerated in certain details and\n made a greater impression on their brains,\" Grannie replied.\n\n\n Up on the eyrie a strange performance was taking place. The duplicate\n of Grannie Annie was bowing to the duplicate of Jimmy Baker, and the\n image of Ezra Karn was playing leap frog with the image of Antlers Park.\n\n\n Then abruptly the screen before me blurred and went blank.\n\n\n \"Sorry,\" the operator said. \"I've used too much power already. Have to\n give the generators a chance to build it up again.\"\n\n\n Nodding, I turned and motioned to Karn. We went back downstairs.\n\n\n \"That explains something at any rate,\" the old prospector said. \"But\n how about that Red spot fever?\"", "He did head her off and managed to lure her and Baker and Xartal into\n the Shaft barracks where they would be exposed to the rays from the\n lens button. But Grannie only pretended to contract the plague.\n\n\n Park then attempted to outwit Ezra Karn and me by returning in Jimmy\n Baker's kite car with a cockatoo image of Grannie.", "Karn and I went down to the commissary where we ate our supper. When\n we returned to Jimmy Baker's office, the visiphone bell was ringing.\n I went over to it and turned it on, and to my surprise the face of\n Antlers Park flashed on the screen.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he said in his friendly way. \"I see you arrived all right. Is\n Miss Flowers there?\"\n\n\n \"Miss Flowers left with Mr. Baker for Shaft Four,\" I said. \"There's\n trouble up there. Red spot fever.\"\n\n\n \"Fever, eh?\" repeated Park. \"That's a shame. Is there anything I can\n do?\"\n\n\n \"Tell me,\" I said, \"has your company had any trouble with this plague?\"", "The kite car swam into view in the screen above the instrument panel.\n I stared with open eyes. Jimmy Baker no longer was in the car, nor\n was Xartal, the Martian. Grannie Annie was there, but seated at the\n controls was Antlers Park, the manager of Interstellar Voice.\nEzra Karn jabbed my elbow. \"Grannie's coming back. I thought she'd be\n getting sick of this blamed moon.\"\n\n\n It didn't make sense. In all the years I'd known Annabella C. Flowers,\n never yet had I seen her desert a case until she had woven the clues\n and facts to a logical conclusion.\n\n\n \"Ezra,\" I said, \"we're going to drive out and meet them. There's\n something screwy here.\"\n\n\n Ten minutes later in another kite car we were driving at a fast clip\n through the powdery sands of the Baldric. And before long we saw\n another car approaching.", "\"But surely you must have some idea of where they go,\" Grannie said.\n\n\n Baker lit a cigarette. \"There's all kinds of rumors,\" he replied, \"but\n none of them will hold water. By the way, there's a cockatoo eyrie\n ahead of us.\"\n\n\n I followed his gaze and saw a curious structure suspended between\n a rude circle of flagpole trees. A strange web-like formation of\n translucent gauzy material, it was. Fully two hundred cockatoos were\n perched upon it. They watched us with their mild eyes as we passed, but\n they didn't move.\n\n\n After that we were rolling up the driveway that led to the offices of\nLarynx Incorporated\n. As Jimmy Baker led the way up the inclined ramp,\n a door in the central building opened, and a man emerged. His face was\n drawn.", "\"There's an eyrie over there,\" Jimmy Baker was saying. \"We might as\n well camp beside it.\"\nMoments later a rude circle of flagpole trees loomed ahead. Across the\n top of them was stretched a translucent web. Jimmy and Grannie got out\n of the car and began making camp. Xartal remained in his seat. He was\n drawing pictures on large pieces of pasteboard, and as I stood there in\n the visiscreen room, I watched him.\n\n\n There was no doubt about it, the Martian was clever. He would make\n a few rapid lines on one of the pasteboards, rub it a little to get\n the proper shading and then go on to the next. In swift rotation\n likenesses of Ezra Karn, of myself, of Jimmy Baker, and of Antlers Park\n took form.", "Antlers Park flicked the ash from his cheroot and shrugged.\n\n\n \"Will you believe me, sir,\" he said, \"when I tell you I've been out\n here on this forsaken moon five years and don't rightly know myself?\"\n\n\n I scowled at that; it didn't make sense.", "\"A little. But up until yesterday the fever's been confined to the\n other side of the Baldric. We had one partial case, but my chemists\n gave the chap an antitoxin that seems to have worked. Come to think of\n it, I might drive over to Shaft Four and give Jimmy Baker the formula.\n I haven't been out in the Baldric for years, but if you didn't have any\n trouble, I shouldn't either.\"\n\n\n We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and then he rang off. In exactly\n an hour I went upstairs to the visiscreen room.\n\n\n Then once more I was directly behind my friends, listening in on their\n conversation. The view through the windscreen showed an irregular array\n of flagpole trees, with the sky dotted by high-flying cockatoos.", "Therefore when she asked me to meet her at the landing field of\nInterstellar Voice\non Jupiter's Eighth Moon, I knew she had another\n novel in the state of embryo.\n\n\n What I didn't expect was Ezra Karn. He was an old prospector Grannie\n had met, and he had become so attached to the authoress he now followed\n her wherever she went. As for Xartal, he was a Martian and was slated\n to do the illustrations for Grannie's new book.\n\n\n Five minutes after my ship had blasted down, the four of us met in the\n offices of\nInterstellar Voice\n. And then I was shaking hands with\n Antlers Park, the manager of I. V. himself.\n\n\n \"Glad to meet you,\" he said cordially. \"I've just been trying to\n persuade Miss Flowers not to attempt a trip into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n \"What's the Baldric?\" I had asked.", "Baker shook his head. \"Three doctors from Callisto were here last\n month. They were as much at loss as I am. As for sending the men away,\n I may have to do that, but when I do, it means quits. Our company is\n chartered with Spacolonial, and you know what that means. Failure\n to produce during a period of thirty days or more, and you lose all\n rights.\"\n\n\n A visiphone bell sounded, and Baker walked across to the instrument. A\n man's face formed in the vision plate. Baker listened, said \"Okay\" and\n threw off the switch.\n\n\n \"The entire crew of Shaft Four have gone out into the Baldric,\" he said\n slowly. There was a large map hanging on the wall back of Baker's desk.\n Grannie Annie walked across to it and began to study its markings.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four is at the outer edge of the Baldric at a point where that\n corridor is at its widest,\" she said.", "\"There are two companies here,\" he continued, \"\nInterstellar Voice\nand\nLarynx Incorporated\n. Chap by the name of Jimmy Baker runs that.\n However, the point is, between the properties of these two companies\n stretches a band or belt which has become known as the Baldric.\n\n\n \"There are two principal forms of life in the Baldric; flagpole trees\n and a species of ornithoid resembling cockatoos. So far no one has\n crossed the Baldric without trouble.\"\n\n\n \"What sort of trouble?\" Grannie Annie had demanded. And when Antlers\n Park stuttered evasively, the old lady snorted, \"Fiddlesticks, I never\n saw trouble yet that couldn't be explained. We leave in an hour.\"\nSo now here we were at the outer reaches of the Baldric, four travelers\n on foot with only the barest necessities in the way of equipment and\n supplies.", "Baker looked up. \"That's right. We only began operations there a\n comparatively short time ago. Struck a rich vein of Acoustix that\n runs deep in. If that vein holds out, we'll double the output of\nInterstellar Voice\n, our rival, in a year.\"\n\n\n Grannie nodded. \"I think you and I and Xartal had better take a run up\n there,\" she said. \"But first I want to see your laboratory.\"\n\n\n There was no refusing her. Jimmy Baker led the way down to a lower\n level where a huge laboratory and experimental shop ran the length\n of the building. Grannie seized a light weight carry-case and began\n dropping articles into it. A pontocated glass lens, three or four\n Wellington radite bulbs, each with a spectroscopic filament, a small\n dynamo that would operate on a kite windlass, and a quantity of wire\n and other items.", "\"Mr. Baker,\" he said breathlessly, \"seventy-five workers at Shaft Four\n have headed out into the Baldric.\"\n\n\n Baker dropped his cigarette and ground his heel on it savagely.\n\n\n \"Shaft Four, eh?\" he repeated. \"That's our principal mine. If the fever\n spreads there, I'm licked.\"\n\n\n He motioned us into his office and strode across to a desk. Silent\n Xartal, the Martian illustrator, took a chair in a corner and got his\n notebook out, sketching the room's interior. Grannie Annie remained\n standing.\n\n\n Presently the old lady walked across to the desk and helped herself to\n the bottle of Martian whiskey there.\n\n\n \"There must be ways of stopping this,\" she said. \"Have you called in\n any physicians? Why don't you call an enforced vacation and send the\n men away until the plague has died down?\"", "The wind shifted and blew from another quarter. The box kite soared,\n but the triangular kite faltered. Taking advantage of Park's loss of\n speed, I raced alongside.\n\n\n The I. V. manager lifted his weapon frantically. But before he could\n use it a third time, Ezra Karn had whipped a lariat from his belt and\n sent it coiling across the intervening space.\n\n\n The thong yanked tight about the manager's throat. Park did the only\n thing he could do. He shut off power, and the two cars coasted to a\n halt. Then I was across in the other seat, wrenching the weapon free\n from his grasp.\n\n\n \"What have you done with Miss Flowers?\" I demanded.\n\n\n The manager's eyes glittered with fear as he saw my finger tense on the\n trigger. Weakly he lifted an arm and pointed to the northwest.", "For some time I had fixed my gaze on a dot in the sky which I supposed\n to be a high-flying cockatoo. As that dot continued to move across the\n heavens in a single direction, I called Grannie's attention to it.\n\n\n \"It's a kite,\" she nodded. \"There should be a car attached to it\n somewhere.\"\n\n\n She offered no further explanation, but a quarter of an hour later as\n we topped another rise a curious elliptical car with a long slanting\n windscreen came into view. Attached to its hood was a taut wire which\n slanted up into the sky to connect with the kite.\n\n\n A man was driving and when he saw us, he waved. Five minutes later\n Grannie was shaking his hand vigorously and mumbling introductions.\n\n\n \"This is Jimmy Baker,\" she said. \"He manages\nLarynx Incorporated\n, and\n he's the real reason we're here.\"", "The kite car was brought out again, and the old woman, Baker and the\n Martian took their places in it. Then Jimmy waved, and the car began to\n roll down the ramp.\nNot until they had vanished in the desert haze did I sense the\n loneliness of this outpost. With that loneliness came a sudden sense of\n foreboding. Had I been a fool to let Grannie go? I thought of her, an\n old woman who should be in a rocking chair, knitting socks. If anything\n happened to Annabella C. Flowers, I would never forgive myself and\n neither would her millions of readers.\n\n\n Ezra Karn and I went back into the office. The old prospector chuckled.\n\n\n \"Dang human dynamo. Got more energy than a runaway comet.\"\n\n\n A connecting door on the far side of the office opened onto a long\n corridor which ended at a staircase.\n\n\n \"Let's look around,\" I said.", "I threw the speed indicator hard over. Our kite was a huge box affair\n with a steady powerful pull to the connecting wire. Park's vehicle\n was drawn by a flat triangular kite that dove and fluttered with each\n variance of the wind. Steadily we began to close in.\n\n\n The manager of Interstellar Voice turned again, and something glinted\n in his hand. There was a flash of purple flame, and a round hole\n appeared in our windscreen inches above Karn's head.\n\n\n \"Heat gun!\" Ezra yelled.\n\n\n Now we were rocketing over the sand dunes, winding in and out between\n the flagpole trees. I had to catch that car I told myself. Grannie\n Annie's very life might be at stake, not to mention the lives of\n hundreds of mine workers. Again Park took aim and again a hole\n shattered our windscreen." ] ]
train	20010	[ "Which is the least likely reason for not circulating The Bell Curve in galleys?", "What was the basic purpose of The Bell Curve?", "Which wouldn't the author use to describe Herrnstein and Murray?", "What is the problem with using IQ to predict economic success?", "What do Herrnstein and Murray want you to believe?" ]	[ [ "by the time people could intelligently criticize it, it was nearly too late", "it made people more excited to read it when it did come out", "it gave little time for people to check the facts", "there wasn't enough time between the galley publication and the official publication" ], [ "to show that our government really can't help poor people become more successful", "to get people to stop believing in IQ tests", "to explain how to improve peoples' intelligence", "to help people learn how to improve their social status" ], [ "overgeneralizing", "strategic", "manipulative", "unbiased" ], [ "IQ tests are not aimed at people of all races", "IQ tests are impacted by the amount of education a person has had", "IQ tests aren't all the same, so it's not a fair control", "IQ tests only test inherited intelligence" ], [ "be happy with your current status - it's where you're going to stay", "the government should put more money into closing the socio-economic gap", "people of all races should be treated equally", "if you work hard enough, you can do anything" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 4, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The Bell Curve was not circulated in galleys before publication. The effect was, first, to increase the allure of the book (There must be something really hot in there!), and second, to ensure that no one inclined to be skeptical would be able to weigh in at the moment of publication. The people who had galley proofs were handpicked by Murray and his publisher. The ordinary routine of neutral reviewers having a month or two to go over the book with care did not occur. Another handpicked group was flown to Washington at the expense of the American Enterprise Institute and given a weekend-long personal briefing on the book's contents by Murray himself (Herrnstein had died very recently), just before publication. The result was what you'd expect: The first wave of publicity was either credulous or angry, but short on evidence, because nobody had had time to digest and evaluate the book carefully.", "The Bell Curve Flattened \n\n Charles Murray is a publicity genius, and the publication of his and Richard Herrnstein's book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , in the fall of 1994 was his masterpiece. \n\n Virtually all ambitious trade hardcover books are preceded by an edition of 100 to 200 flimsy \"galley proofs.\" These are sent out to people who might generate buzz for the book: blurbists, bookers for television talk shows, editors, and--most important--book critics. There is an ethos of letting the chips fall where they may about the sending out of galleys: Now the book will begin to receive uncontrolled reaction. (For example, back in 1991, Murray somehow got hold of the galleys of my own last book, and wrote me heatedly denying that he was working on a book about black genetic intellectual inferiority, as I had asserted. I left the passage in, but softened it.)", "The Bell Curve isn't a typical work of trade nonfiction. It is gotten up as a work of original scholarly research. Most works containing fresh regression analysis and historical argument from primary sources would be published in academic quarterlies that send manuscripts out for elaborate, lengthy evaluation before deciding whether to publish them. Herrnstein and Murray didn't do this, so it wasn't until a full year or more after The Bell Curve was published that the leading experts on its subject had a chance to go through the underlying data with care. Therefore, as time went on, the knowledgeability of the Bell Curve discussion grew, but the attention paid to that discussion inevitably shrank.", "The debate on publication day was conducted in the mass media by people with no independent ability to assess the book. Over the next few months, intellectuals took some pretty good shots at it in smaller publications like the New Republic and the New York Review of Books . It wasn't until late 1995 that the most damaging criticism of The Bell Curve began to appear, in tiny academic journals. What follows is a brief summary of that last body of work. The Bell Curve , it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors. Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors' thesis.", "In fact, The Bell Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it draws upon are heavily", "Republic ). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. ( shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white", "part of the American elite. It constantly tells these people that they are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept The Bell Curve as tough-minded and realistic,", "The notion that IQ tests are completely useless never prevailed in liberal academia to nearly the extent that Herrnstein and Murray say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather than a single \"general intelligence,\" there are a handful of crucial--and separate--mental abilities; that none of these abilities is important enough to obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers in passing to some of these points, but on the whole it sets up a cartoon-left position as its (easy) target. Meanwhile, the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.", "At the beginning of The Bell Curve , Herrnstein and Murray declare that \"the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.\" And they claim that their view of IQ tests is \"squarely in the middle of the scientific road.\" They end by expressing the hope that we can \"be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life.\" Throughout, Herrnstein and Murray consistently present themselves as fair- (or even liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the evidence where it leads--which, unfortunately, is to a few unassailable if unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report.", "First, a quick prÃ©cis of The Bell Curve . IQ tests, according to Murray and Herrnstein, measure an essential human quality, general intelligence. During the second half of the 20 th century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an \"invisible migration,\" from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them.", "The next problem with The Bell Curve 's thesis is in the idea of the rise to dominance of the cognitive elite. To the book's initial audience of Ivy Leaguers, this idea seemed valid on its face. Everybody knows that the best universities, law firms, hospitals, investment banks, and the State Department used to be run by preppies whose main virtue was fortunate birth, and are now open to one and all on the basis of merit.", "IQ scores, which they claim to find \"encouraging,\" look smaller than it actually is.) The Bell Curve 's air of strict scientism doesn't preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median", "One of The Bell Curve 's theoretical linchpins is the high heritability of IQ. Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that \"half a century of work, now amounting", "while actually they would be \"dazzled by excess of light.\" The image applies to The Bell Curve : Presented as an exact representation of reality, in opposition to the shadows of political correctness, it actually reflects the blinkered vision of one", "The basic tool of statistical social science in general, and of The Bell Curve in particular, is regression analysis, a technique used to assign weights to various factors (called \"independent variables\") in determining a final outcome (called the \"dependent variable\"). The original statistical work in The Bell Curve consists of regression analyses on a database called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The authors claim to demonstrate that high IQ is more predictive of economic success than any other factor, and that low IQ is more predictive of poverty and social breakdown. Virtually all the early commentators on The Bell Curve were unable to assess the merits of the regression analysis. \"I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics,\" wrote Leon Wieseltier (who was otherwise quite critical) in a typical disclaimer. \n\n But by now the statistics have been gone over by professionals, who have come up with different results. The key points of their critique of The Bell Curve are as follows:", "What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects' education--but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. \n\n Most of The Bell Curve 's analysis is devoted to proving that IQ has more predictive power than parental \"socio-economic status.\" But Herrnstein and Murray's method of figuring socioeconomic status seems designed to low-ball its influence, as explains.", "But the larger premise--that intelligent people used to be scattered throughout the class structure, and are now concentrated at the top--is almost impossible to prove, simply because the mass administration of mental tests is such a recent phenomenon. High scorers on mental tests do \"bunch up\" (as Herrnstein and Murray put it) in elite-university student bodies. But this is tautological: Any group selected on the basis of scores on mental tests will be composed disproportionately of people who score high on mental tests. Proving The Bell Curve 's thesis would require proving that success increasingly correlates with IQ in areas of life where mental tests are not the explicit gatekeepers. To see how The Bell Curve tries and fails to get around these inherent problems, see and . \n\n Having conditioned its audience to view IQ as all-important, The Bell Curve then manipulates statistics in a way that makes IQ look bigger, and everything else smaller, in determining Americans' life-chances.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is too much a result of IQ. It's not an independent variable. (Of course, according to their theory, socioeconomic status is also a result of IQ, but somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from a policy standpoint--how much education can increase opportunity--isn't dealt with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support the liberal, pro-education position that Herrnstein and Murray say is futile. One footnote shows education increasing IQ year by year. The other shows a higher correlation between college degree and family income than between IQ and family income.", "IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that \"intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected\" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and", "Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, \"Intelligence is a bankrupt concept\"--has been discredited, and that \"a scholarly consensus has been reached\" around their position. This consensus is \"beyond significant technical dispute.\" Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of \"consensus.\"" ], [ "At the beginning of The Bell Curve , Herrnstein and Murray declare that \"the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.\" And they claim that their view of IQ tests is \"squarely in the middle of the scientific road.\" They end by expressing the hope that we can \"be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life.\" Throughout, Herrnstein and Murray consistently present themselves as fair- (or even liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the evidence where it leads--which, unfortunately, is to a few unassailable if unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report.", "First, a quick prÃ©cis of The Bell Curve . IQ tests, according to Murray and Herrnstein, measure an essential human quality, general intelligence. During the second half of the 20 th century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an \"invisible migration,\" from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them.", "In fact, The Bell Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it draws upon are heavily", "The Bell Curve Flattened \n\n Charles Murray is a publicity genius, and the publication of his and Richard Herrnstein's book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , in the fall of 1994 was his masterpiece. \n\n Virtually all ambitious trade hardcover books are preceded by an edition of 100 to 200 flimsy \"galley proofs.\" These are sent out to people who might generate buzz for the book: blurbists, bookers for television talk shows, editors, and--most important--book critics. There is an ethos of letting the chips fall where they may about the sending out of galleys: Now the book will begin to receive uncontrolled reaction. (For example, back in 1991, Murray somehow got hold of the galleys of my own last book, and wrote me heatedly denying that he was working on a book about black genetic intellectual inferiority, as I had asserted. I left the passage in, but softened it.)", "The basic tool of statistical social science in general, and of The Bell Curve in particular, is regression analysis, a technique used to assign weights to various factors (called \"independent variables\") in determining a final outcome (called the \"dependent variable\"). The original statistical work in The Bell Curve consists of regression analyses on a database called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The authors claim to demonstrate that high IQ is more predictive of economic success than any other factor, and that low IQ is more predictive of poverty and social breakdown. Virtually all the early commentators on The Bell Curve were unable to assess the merits of the regression analysis. \"I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics,\" wrote Leon Wieseltier (who was otherwise quite critical) in a typical disclaimer. \n\n But by now the statistics have been gone over by professionals, who have come up with different results. The key points of their critique of The Bell Curve are as follows:", "The Bell Curve isn't a typical work of trade nonfiction. It is gotten up as a work of original scholarly research. Most works containing fresh regression analysis and historical argument from primary sources would be published in academic quarterlies that send manuscripts out for elaborate, lengthy evaluation before deciding whether to publish them. Herrnstein and Murray didn't do this, so it wasn't until a full year or more after The Bell Curve was published that the leading experts on its subject had a chance to go through the underlying data with care. Therefore, as time went on, the knowledgeability of the Bell Curve discussion grew, but the attention paid to that discussion inevitably shrank.", "The debate on publication day was conducted in the mass media by people with no independent ability to assess the book. Over the next few months, intellectuals took some pretty good shots at it in smaller publications like the New Republic and the New York Review of Books . It wasn't until late 1995 that the most damaging criticism of The Bell Curve began to appear, in tiny academic journals. What follows is a brief summary of that last body of work. The Bell Curve , it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors. Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors' thesis.", "Republic ). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. ( shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white", "One of The Bell Curve 's theoretical linchpins is the high heritability of IQ. Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that \"half a century of work, now amounting", "What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects' education--but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. \n\n Most of The Bell Curve 's analysis is devoted to proving that IQ has more predictive power than parental \"socio-economic status.\" But Herrnstein and Murray's method of figuring socioeconomic status seems designed to low-ball its influence, as explains.", "The Bell Curve was not circulated in galleys before publication. The effect was, first, to increase the allure of the book (There must be something really hot in there!), and second, to ensure that no one inclined to be skeptical would be able to weigh in at the moment of publication. The people who had galley proofs were handpicked by Murray and his publisher. The ordinary routine of neutral reviewers having a month or two to go over the book with care did not occur. Another handpicked group was flown to Washington at the expense of the American Enterprise Institute and given a weekend-long personal briefing on the book's contents by Murray himself (Herrnstein had died very recently), just before publication. The result was what you'd expect: The first wave of publicity was either credulous or angry, but short on evidence, because nobody had had time to digest and evaluate the book carefully.", "The notion that IQ tests are completely useless never prevailed in liberal academia to nearly the extent that Herrnstein and Murray say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather than a single \"general intelligence,\" there are a handful of crucial--and separate--mental abilities; that none of these abilities is important enough to obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers in passing to some of these points, but on the whole it sets up a cartoon-left position as its (easy) target. Meanwhile, the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.", "part of the American elite. It constantly tells these people that they are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept The Bell Curve as tough-minded and realistic,", "The next problem with The Bell Curve 's thesis is in the idea of the rise to dominance of the cognitive elite. To the book's initial audience of Ivy Leaguers, this idea seemed valid on its face. Everybody knows that the best universities, law firms, hospitals, investment banks, and the State Department used to be run by preppies whose main virtue was fortunate birth, and are now open to one and all on the basis of merit.", "IQ scores, which they claim to find \"encouraging,\" look smaller than it actually is.) The Bell Curve 's air of strict scientism doesn't preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median", "But the larger premise--that intelligent people used to be scattered throughout the class structure, and are now concentrated at the top--is almost impossible to prove, simply because the mass administration of mental tests is such a recent phenomenon. High scorers on mental tests do \"bunch up\" (as Herrnstein and Murray put it) in elite-university student bodies. But this is tautological: Any group selected on the basis of scores on mental tests will be composed disproportionately of people who score high on mental tests. Proving The Bell Curve 's thesis would require proving that success increasingly correlates with IQ in areas of life where mental tests are not the explicit gatekeepers. To see how The Bell Curve tries and fails to get around these inherent problems, see and . \n\n Having conditioned its audience to view IQ as all-important, The Bell Curve then manipulates statistics in a way that makes IQ look bigger, and everything else smaller, in determining Americans' life-chances.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, \"Intelligence is a bankrupt concept\"--has been discredited, and that \"a scholarly consensus has been reached\" around their position. This consensus is \"beyond significant technical dispute.\" Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of \"consensus.\"", "skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books ), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New", "Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is too much a result of IQ. It's not an independent variable. (Of course, according to their theory, socioeconomic status is also a result of IQ, but somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from a policy standpoint--how much education can increase opportunity--isn't dealt with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support the liberal, pro-education position that Herrnstein and Murray say is futile. One footnote shows education increasing IQ year by year. The other shows a higher correlation between college degree and family income than between IQ and family income.", "If the purpose of the whole exercise is to figure out what our social policies should be, then, \"Which is more predictive, IQ or socioeconomic status?\" isn't the essential question anyway. Making it the essential question avoids the issue of whether IQ is really so massively predictive that it drowns out everything else. (Herrnstein and Murray mostly leave the evidence for this, their central contention, to footnotes. The figures they offer are far from dispositive.)" ], [ "Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, \"Intelligence is a bankrupt concept\"--has been discredited, and that \"a scholarly consensus has been reached\" around their position. This consensus is \"beyond significant technical dispute.\" Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of \"consensus.\"", "At the beginning of The Bell Curve , Herrnstein and Murray declare that \"the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.\" And they claim that their view of IQ tests is \"squarely in the middle of the scientific road.\" They end by expressing the hope that we can \"be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life.\" Throughout, Herrnstein and Murray consistently present themselves as fair- (or even liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the evidence where it leads--which, unfortunately, is to a few unassailable if unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report.", "What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects' education--but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. \n\n Most of The Bell Curve 's analysis is devoted to proving that IQ has more predictive power than parental \"socio-economic status.\" But Herrnstein and Murray's method of figuring socioeconomic status seems designed to low-ball its influence, as explains.", "skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books ), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New", "or their middling value of 60 per cent. Consequently, Herrnstein and Murray give the impression that IQ is highly 'heritable,' but it is not.\"", "The notion that IQ tests are completely useless never prevailed in liberal academia to nearly the extent that Herrnstein and Murray say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather than a single \"general intelligence,\" there are a handful of crucial--and separate--mental abilities; that none of these abilities is important enough to obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers in passing to some of these points, but on the whole it sets up a cartoon-left position as its (easy) target. Meanwhile, the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.", "The Bell Curve Flattened \n\n Charles Murray is a publicity genius, and the publication of his and Richard Herrnstein's book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , in the fall of 1994 was his masterpiece. \n\n Virtually all ambitious trade hardcover books are preceded by an edition of 100 to 200 flimsy \"galley proofs.\" These are sent out to people who might generate buzz for the book: blurbists, bookers for television talk shows, editors, and--most important--book critics. There is an ethos of letting the chips fall where they may about the sending out of galleys: Now the book will begin to receive uncontrolled reaction. (For example, back in 1991, Murray somehow got hold of the galleys of my own last book, and wrote me heatedly denying that he was working on a book about black genetic intellectual inferiority, as I had asserted. I left the passage in, but softened it.)", "Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is too much a result of IQ. It's not an independent variable. (Of course, according to their theory, socioeconomic status is also a result of IQ, but somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from a policy standpoint--how much education can increase opportunity--isn't dealt with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support the liberal, pro-education position that Herrnstein and Murray say is futile. One footnote shows education increasing IQ year by year. The other shows a higher correlation between college degree and family income than between IQ and family income.", "One of The Bell Curve 's theoretical linchpins is the high heritability of IQ. Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that \"half a century of work, now amounting", "First, a quick prÃ©cis of The Bell Curve . IQ tests, according to Murray and Herrnstein, measure an essential human quality, general intelligence. During the second half of the 20 th century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an \"invisible migration,\" from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them.", "Republic ). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. ( shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white", "The Bell Curve was not circulated in galleys before publication. The effect was, first, to increase the allure of the book (There must be something really hot in there!), and second, to ensure that no one inclined to be skeptical would be able to weigh in at the moment of publication. The people who had galley proofs were handpicked by Murray and his publisher. The ordinary routine of neutral reviewers having a month or two to go over the book with care did not occur. Another handpicked group was flown to Washington at the expense of the American Enterprise Institute and given a weekend-long personal briefing on the book's contents by Murray himself (Herrnstein had died very recently), just before publication. The result was what you'd expect: The first wave of publicity was either credulous or angry, but short on evidence, because nobody had had time to digest and evaluate the book carefully.", "Murray leave readers with the distinct impression that IQ is the cause of economic success and failure, and that genetic difference explains the black-white IQ gap.", "The Bell Curve isn't a typical work of trade nonfiction. It is gotten up as a work of original scholarly research. Most works containing fresh regression analysis and historical argument from primary sources would be published in academic quarterlies that send manuscripts out for elaborate, lengthy evaluation before deciding whether to publish them. Herrnstein and Murray didn't do this, so it wasn't until a full year or more after The Bell Curve was published that the leading experts on its subject had a chance to go through the underlying data with care. Therefore, as time went on, the knowledgeability of the Bell Curve discussion grew, but the attention paid to that discussion inevitably shrank.", "a middling estimate of 60 per cent heritability.\" This now looks seriously overstated. Michael Daniels, Bernie Devlin, and Kathryn Roeder of Carnegie Mellon University took the same studies on which Herrnstein and Murray based their estimate, and subjected them", "If the purpose of the whole exercise is to figure out what our social policies should be, then, \"Which is more predictive, IQ or socioeconomic status?\" isn't the essential question anyway. Making it the essential question avoids the issue of whether IQ is really so massively predictive that it drowns out everything else. (Herrnstein and Murray mostly leave the evidence for this, their central contention, to footnotes. The figures they offer are far from dispositive.)", "per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent. [The difference between broad and narrow is too technical to explain in this limited space.] This is a far cry from Herrnstein and Murray's maximum value of 80 per cent", "IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that \"intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected\" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and", "part of the American elite. It constantly tells these people that they are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept The Bell Curve as tough-minded and realistic,", "while actually they would be \"dazzled by excess of light.\" The image applies to The Bell Curve : Presented as an exact representation of reality, in opposition to the shadows of political correctness, it actually reflects the blinkered vision of one" ], [ "Murray leave readers with the distinct impression that IQ is the cause of economic success and failure, and that genetic difference explains the black-white IQ gap.", "If the purpose of the whole exercise is to figure out what our social policies should be, then, \"Which is more predictive, IQ or socioeconomic status?\" isn't the essential question anyway. Making it the essential question avoids the issue of whether IQ is really so massively predictive that it drowns out everything else. (Herrnstein and Murray mostly leave the evidence for this, their central contention, to footnotes. The figures they offer are far from dispositive.)", "What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects' education--but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. \n\n Most of The Bell Curve 's analysis is devoted to proving that IQ has more predictive power than parental \"socio-economic status.\" But Herrnstein and Murray's method of figuring socioeconomic status seems designed to low-ball its influence, as explains.", "First, a quick prÃ©cis of The Bell Curve . IQ tests, according to Murray and Herrnstein, measure an essential human quality, general intelligence. During the second half of the 20 th century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an \"invisible migration,\" from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is too much a result of IQ. It's not an independent variable. (Of course, according to their theory, socioeconomic status is also a result of IQ, but somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from a policy standpoint--how much education can increase opportunity--isn't dealt with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support the liberal, pro-education position that Herrnstein and Murray say is futile. One footnote shows education increasing IQ year by year. The other shows a higher correlation between college degree and family income than between IQ and family income.", "The basic tool of statistical social science in general, and of The Bell Curve in particular, is regression analysis, a technique used to assign weights to various factors (called \"independent variables\") in determining a final outcome (called the \"dependent variable\"). The original statistical work in The Bell Curve consists of regression analyses on a database called the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The authors claim to demonstrate that high IQ is more predictive of economic success than any other factor, and that low IQ is more predictive of poverty and social breakdown. Virtually all the early commentators on The Bell Curve were unable to assess the merits of the regression analysis. \"I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics,\" wrote Leon Wieseltier (who was otherwise quite critical) in a typical disclaimer. \n\n But by now the statistics have been gone over by professionals, who have come up with different results. The key points of their critique of The Bell Curve are as follows:", "But the larger premise--that intelligent people used to be scattered throughout the class structure, and are now concentrated at the top--is almost impossible to prove, simply because the mass administration of mental tests is such a recent phenomenon. High scorers on mental tests do \"bunch up\" (as Herrnstein and Murray put it) in elite-university student bodies. But this is tautological: Any group selected on the basis of scores on mental tests will be composed disproportionately of people who score high on mental tests. Proving The Bell Curve 's thesis would require proving that success increasingly correlates with IQ in areas of life where mental tests are not the explicit gatekeepers. To see how The Bell Curve tries and fails to get around these inherent problems, see and . \n\n Having conditioned its audience to view IQ as all-important, The Bell Curve then manipulates statistics in a way that makes IQ look bigger, and everything else smaller, in determining Americans' life-chances.", "The notion that IQ tests are completely useless never prevailed in liberal academia to nearly the extent that Herrnstein and Murray say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather than a single \"general intelligence,\" there are a handful of crucial--and separate--mental abilities; that none of these abilities is important enough to obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers in passing to some of these points, but on the whole it sets up a cartoon-left position as its (easy) target. Meanwhile, the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.", "The next problem with The Bell Curve 's thesis is in the idea of the rise to dominance of the cognitive elite. To the book's initial audience of Ivy Leaguers, this idea seemed valid on its face. Everybody knows that the best universities, law firms, hospitals, investment banks, and the State Department used to be run by preppies whose main virtue was fortunate birth, and are now open to one and all on the basis of merit.", "At the beginning of The Bell Curve , Herrnstein and Murray declare that \"the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.\" And they claim that their view of IQ tests is \"squarely in the middle of the scientific road.\" They end by expressing the hope that we can \"be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life.\" Throughout, Herrnstein and Murray consistently present themselves as fair- (or even liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the evidence where it leads--which, unfortunately, is to a few unassailable if unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, \"Intelligence is a bankrupt concept\"--has been discredited, and that \"a scholarly consensus has been reached\" around their position. This consensus is \"beyond significant technical dispute.\" Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of \"consensus.\"", "One of The Bell Curve 's theoretical linchpins is the high heritability of IQ. Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that \"half a century of work, now amounting", "IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that \"intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected\" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and", "IQ scores, which they claim to find \"encouraging,\" look smaller than it actually is.) The Bell Curve 's air of strict scientism doesn't preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median", "The chapter of The Bell Curve on policies that might be able to overcome the fate of a low IQ focuses mainly on whether early-childhood programs like Head Start (most of which aren't run with raising IQ as their primary goal) can raise IQ significantly over the long term, and sorrowfully concludes that they can't. What the book doesn't discuss is whether public schools--by far the biggest government social program--can raise IQ, or earnings after you control for IQ. As James Heckman of the University of Chicago wrote in the Journal of Political Economy , \" Evidence of a genetic component to skills has no bearing on the efficacy of any social policy. ... The relevant issue is the cost effectiveness of the intervention.\" (As an example of where the kind of analysis Herrnstein and Murray didn't do can lead, a new study by Jay Girotto and Paul Peterson of Harvard shows that students who raise their grades and take harder courses can increase their IQ scores by an average of eight points during the first three years of high school.)", "or their middling value of 60 per cent. Consequently, Herrnstein and Murray give the impression that IQ is highly 'heritable,' but it is not.\"", "skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books ), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New", "per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent. [The difference between broad and narrow is too technical to explain in this limited space.] This is a far cry from Herrnstein and Murray's maximum value of 80 per cent", "to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies, permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 per cent or higher than 80 per cent. ... For purposes of this discussion, we will adopt", "The debate on publication day was conducted in the mass media by people with no independent ability to assess the book. Over the next few months, intellectuals took some pretty good shots at it in smaller publications like the New Republic and the New York Review of Books . It wasn't until late 1995 that the most damaging criticism of The Bell Curve began to appear, in tiny academic journals. What follows is a brief summary of that last body of work. The Bell Curve , it turns out, is full of mistakes ranging from sloppy reasoning to mis-citations of sources to outright mathematical errors. Unsurprisingly, all the mistakes are in the direction of supporting the authors' thesis." ], [ "At the beginning of The Bell Curve , Herrnstein and Murray declare that \"the concept of intelligence has taken on a much higher place in the pantheon of human virtues than it deserves.\" And they claim that their view of IQ tests is \"squarely in the middle of the scientific road.\" They end by expressing the hope that we can \"be a society that makes good on the fundamental promise of the American tradition: the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life.\" Throughout, Herrnstein and Murray consistently present themselves as fair- (or even liberal-) minded technicians who have, with great caution, followed the evidence where it leads--which, unfortunately, is to a few unassailable if unpleasant scientific truths that it is their reluctant duty to report.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin by telling us that the liberal position on IQ--namely, \"Intelligence is a bankrupt concept\"--has been discredited, and that \"a scholarly consensus has been reached\" around their position. This consensus is \"beyond significant technical dispute.\" Thus, by the end of their introduction, they have arranged matters so that if intelligence has any meaning at all, the idiotic liberals stand discredited; and meanwhile, extremely broad claims for intelligence have the cover of \"consensus.\"", "Murray leave readers with the distinct impression that IQ is the cause of economic success and failure, and that genetic difference explains the black-white IQ gap.", "First, a quick prÃ©cis of The Bell Curve . IQ tests, according to Murray and Herrnstein, measure an essential human quality, general intelligence. During the second half of the 20 th century, this quality has risen to supreme importance, because society has become increasingly complex. The intelligent have therefore gone through an \"invisible migration,\" from points of origin all over the class system to a concentration at the top of business, government, and the professions. They are likely to become ever more dominant and prosperous. The unintelligent are falling further and further behind. Because intelligence is substantially inherited, nothing is likely to reverse this process. Blacks are overrepresented among the unintelligent. Any efforts government might make to improve the economic opportunities of poor people, especially poor black people, are likely to fail, because their poverty is so much the result of inherited low intelligence. About the best that can be done for these people is an effort to create a world of simple, decent, honorable toil for them.", "One of The Bell Curve 's theoretical linchpins is the high heritability of IQ. Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that \"half a century of work, now amounting", "skewed to the right. Herrnstein and Murray used quasi-nutty studies that support their position (as Charles Lane demonstrated in the New York Review of Books ), and ignore mainstream studies that contradict it (as Richard Nisbett showed in the New", "or their middling value of 60 per cent. Consequently, Herrnstein and Murray give the impression that IQ is highly 'heritable,' but it is not.\"", "What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects' education--but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence. \n\n Most of The Bell Curve 's analysis is devoted to proving that IQ has more predictive power than parental \"socio-economic status.\" But Herrnstein and Murray's method of figuring socioeconomic status seems designed to low-ball its influence, as explains.", "Herrnstein and Murray begin their discussion of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth data by announcing that they aren't going to analyze the effect of education, because education is too much a result of IQ. It's not an independent variable. (Of course, according to their theory, socioeconomic status is also a result of IQ, but somehow, that doesn't stop them.) Therefore, what you'd most want to know from a policy standpoint--how much education can increase opportunity--isn't dealt with in the book, except in two obscure footnotes. Both would seem to support the liberal, pro-education position that Herrnstein and Murray say is futile. One footnote shows education increasing IQ year by year. The other shows a higher correlation between college degree and family income than between IQ and family income.", "The Bell Curve Flattened \n\n Charles Murray is a publicity genius, and the publication of his and Richard Herrnstein's book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life , in the fall of 1994 was his masterpiece. \n\n Virtually all ambitious trade hardcover books are preceded by an edition of 100 to 200 flimsy \"galley proofs.\" These are sent out to people who might generate buzz for the book: blurbists, bookers for television talk shows, editors, and--most important--book critics. There is an ethos of letting the chips fall where they may about the sending out of galleys: Now the book will begin to receive uncontrolled reaction. (For example, back in 1991, Murray somehow got hold of the galleys of my own last book, and wrote me heatedly denying that he was working on a book about black genetic intellectual inferiority, as I had asserted. I left the passage in, but softened it.)", "Republic ). The data in The Bell Curve are consistently massaged to produce conservative conclusions; not once is a finding that contradicts the main thesis reported in the text. ( shows how Herrnstein and Murray have made the convergence in black-white", "The notion that IQ tests are completely useless never prevailed in liberal academia to nearly the extent that Herrnstein and Murray say. A more accurate rendering of the liberal position would be that rather than a single \"general intelligence,\" there are a handful of crucial--and separate--mental abilities; that none of these abilities is important enough to obviate the role of family background and education; and that native ability (and economic success independent of native ability) can be enhanced by improving education, training, and public health. The Bell Curve refers in passing to some of these points, but on the whole it sets up a cartoon-left position as its (easy) target. Meanwhile, the psychometricians who dominate the footnotes of The Bell Curve are John Hunter, Arthur Jensen, Malcolm Ree, and Frank Schmidt. These men are well known within the field as representing its right wing, not a mainstream consensus.", "a middling estimate of 60 per cent heritability.\" This now looks seriously overstated. Michael Daniels, Bernie Devlin, and Kathryn Roeder of Carnegie Mellon University took the same studies on which Herrnstein and Murray based their estimate, and subjected them", "per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent. [The difference between broad and narrow is too technical to explain in this limited space.] This is a far cry from Herrnstein and Murray's maximum value of 80 per cent", "If the purpose of the whole exercise is to figure out what our social policies should be, then, \"Which is more predictive, IQ or socioeconomic status?\" isn't the essential question anyway. Making it the essential question avoids the issue of whether IQ is really so massively predictive that it drowns out everything else. (Herrnstein and Murray mostly leave the evidence for this, their central contention, to footnotes. The figures they offer are far from dispositive.)", "IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that \"intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected\" (no footnote). Though they piously claim not to be doing so, Herrnstein and", "But the larger premise--that intelligent people used to be scattered throughout the class structure, and are now concentrated at the top--is almost impossible to prove, simply because the mass administration of mental tests is such a recent phenomenon. High scorers on mental tests do \"bunch up\" (as Herrnstein and Murray put it) in elite-university student bodies. But this is tautological: Any group selected on the basis of scores on mental tests will be composed disproportionately of people who score high on mental tests. Proving The Bell Curve 's thesis would require proving that success increasingly correlates with IQ in areas of life where mental tests are not the explicit gatekeepers. To see how The Bell Curve tries and fails to get around these inherent problems, see and . \n\n Having conditioned its audience to view IQ as all-important, The Bell Curve then manipulates statistics in a way that makes IQ look bigger, and everything else smaller, in determining Americans' life-chances.", "In fact, The Bell Curve is a relentless brief for the conservative position in psychometrics and social policy. For all its talk of reflecting a consensus, the sources it draws upon are heavily", "part of the American elite. It constantly tells these people that they are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept The Bell Curve as tough-minded and realistic,", "The Bell Curve was not circulated in galleys before publication. The effect was, first, to increase the allure of the book (There must be something really hot in there!), and second, to ensure that no one inclined to be skeptical would be able to weigh in at the moment of publication. The people who had galley proofs were handpicked by Murray and his publisher. The ordinary routine of neutral reviewers having a month or two to go over the book with care did not occur. Another handpicked group was flown to Washington at the expense of the American Enterprise Institute and given a weekend-long personal briefing on the book's contents by Murray himself (Herrnstein had died very recently), just before publication. The result was what you'd expect: The first wave of publicity was either credulous or angry, but short on evidence, because nobody had had time to digest and evaluate the book carefully." ] ]
train	20011	[ "How would one best describe the lifestyle discussed in the article?", "What is exclusively unique about working for a person like Si?", "What is the significance of including all the costs and price tags in the article?", "What is a main message conveyed in the article?", "What general structure does the article follow?", "What statement would the author agree with?" ]	[ [ "Excessive", "Confidential", "Exhausting", "Competitive" ], [ "Your pay would be much higher than at a similar job with a different employer.", "You would have more communication with your employer.", "You would experience luxurious employee benefits.", "You would work significantly harder than at job with a less successful employer." ], [ "To show the carelessness for money demonstrated by the New York elite.", "To eventually calculate and justify the net worth of people like Si.", "To demonstrate how such large sums of money are spent so generously.", "To show how people like Si keep track of their budget." ], [ "Respecting worker's rights.", "Fame and fortune.", "Carelessness leads to demise.", "Hard work pays off." ], [ "Topic sentence and details.", "Persuasive hook and explanation.", "Argument and supportive details.", "Problem and solution." ], [ "The luxurious lifestyle that the author wrote about is also easy-going and relaxing.", "Everyone should strive to live a life that the author wrote about.", "The lifestyle the author wrote about is highly unattainable.", "The amount of benefits the workers receive is highly exaggerated." ] ]	[ 1, 3, 1, 2, 2, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "Condé Nast's magazines are all about glamour, wealth, prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who make far more money than magazine editors do--investment bankers, corporate chieftains, and fashion designers. Million-dollar salaries aren't enough to mix as equals with the Trumps and Karans. Si's perks are equalizers.", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex- Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of \"hundreds of thousands of dollars.\"", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)", "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "That annual Washington do has grown from an after-dinner gathering for drinks at a contributor's apartment to two huge blasts--before and after the dinner itself--at a rented embassy. VF 's annual Oscar-night party has become a similar institution in Hollywood. In addition to the parties themselves, Si also naturally pays to fly in VF staffers and to put them up at top hotels. (What, they don't have editors in Washington or L.A.?) \n\n Some Condé Nast parties are so ridiculous that even other Condé Nasties make fun of them. This week's New Yorker , for example, mocks a recent Vogue party in honor of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. According to The New Yorker , Wintour so detested the carpet at Le Cirque 2000 that she ordered the florist to cover it with autumn leaves (handpicked, of course).", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after" ], [ "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "Condé Nast's magazines are all about glamour, wealth, prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who make far more money than magazine editors do--investment bankers, corporate chieftains, and fashion designers. Million-dollar salaries aren't enough to mix as equals with the Trumps and Karans. Si's perks are equalizers.", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "a Random House book party at Le Cirque 2000 (estimated cost to Si: $35,000), your car ferries you home.", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "That annual Washington do has grown from an after-dinner gathering for drinks at a contributor's apartment to two huge blasts--before and after the dinner itself--at a rented embassy. VF 's annual Oscar-night party has become a similar institution in Hollywood. In addition to the parties themselves, Si also naturally pays to fly in VF staffers and to put them up at top hotels. (What, they don't have editors in Washington or L.A.?) \n\n Some Condé Nast parties are so ridiculous that even other Condé Nasties make fun of them. This week's New Yorker , for example, mocks a recent Vogue party in honor of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. According to The New Yorker , Wintour so detested the carpet at Le Cirque 2000 that she ordered the florist to cover it with autumn leaves (handpicked, of course).", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)" ], [ "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex- Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of \"hundreds of thousands of dollars.\"", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "That annual Washington do has grown from an after-dinner gathering for drinks at a contributor's apartment to two huge blasts--before and after the dinner itself--at a rented embassy. VF 's annual Oscar-night party has become a similar institution in Hollywood. In addition to the parties themselves, Si also naturally pays to fly in VF staffers and to put them up at top hotels. (What, they don't have editors in Washington or L.A.?) \n\n Some Condé Nast parties are so ridiculous that even other Condé Nasties make fun of them. This week's New Yorker , for example, mocks a recent Vogue party in honor of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. According to The New Yorker , Wintour so detested the carpet at Le Cirque 2000 that she ordered the florist to cover it with autumn leaves (handpicked, of course).", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "a Random House book party at Le Cirque 2000 (estimated cost to Si: $35,000), your car ferries you home." ], [ "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex- Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of \"hundreds of thousands of dollars.\"", "Condé Nast's magazines are all about glamour, wealth, prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who make far more money than magazine editors do--investment bankers, corporate chieftains, and fashion designers. Million-dollar salaries aren't enough to mix as equals with the Trumps and Karans. Si's perks are equalizers.", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)", "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "That annual Washington do has grown from an after-dinner gathering for drinks at a contributor's apartment to two huge blasts--before and after the dinner itself--at a rented embassy. VF 's annual Oscar-night party has become a similar institution in Hollywood. In addition to the parties themselves, Si also naturally pays to fly in VF staffers and to put them up at top hotels. (What, they don't have editors in Washington or L.A.?) \n\n Some Condé Nast parties are so ridiculous that even other Condé Nasties make fun of them. This week's New Yorker , for example, mocks a recent Vogue party in honor of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. According to The New Yorker , Wintour so detested the carpet at Le Cirque 2000 that she ordered the florist to cover it with autumn leaves (handpicked, of course).", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after" ], [ "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)", "Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex- Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of \"hundreds of thousands of dollars.\"", "That annual Washington do has grown from an after-dinner gathering for drinks at a contributor's apartment to two huge blasts--before and after the dinner itself--at a rented embassy. VF 's annual Oscar-night party has become a similar institution in Hollywood. In addition to the parties themselves, Si also naturally pays to fly in VF staffers and to put them up at top hotels. (What, they don't have editors in Washington or L.A.?) \n\n Some Condé Nast parties are so ridiculous that even other Condé Nasties make fun of them. This week's New Yorker , for example, mocks a recent Vogue party in honor of food writer Jeffrey Steingarten. According to The New Yorker , Wintour so detested the carpet at Le Cirque 2000 that she ordered the florist to cover it with autumn leaves (handpicked, of course).", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "Condé Nast's magazines are all about glamour, wealth, prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who make far more money than magazine editors do--investment bankers, corporate chieftains, and fashion designers. Million-dollar salaries aren't enough to mix as equals with the Trumps and Karans. Si's perks are equalizers.", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after" ], [ "of an editor who had just been promoted to an extremely senior job. His office was jammed with congratulatory flowers and cards. All had been sent by fellow Condé Nast staffers. All had been billed to the company.) Four o'clock,", "At the top of the masthead, the perks are perkier. His Si-ness (their joke, not mine) does not expect his editors in chief to actually live on their million-dollar salaries. He also gives them clothing allowances (up to $50,000 a year). He buys them cars of their choice and hires chauffeurs to drive them. He offers them low- or no-interest home loans. GQ editor Art Cooper reportedly received two $1-million loans, one for a Manhattan apartment, the other for a Connecticut farm. Tina Brown and her husband, Harold Evans, former president of Random House, reportedly just took a $2-million boost to buy a $3.7-million Manhattan house.", "Let Si Get This \n\n During a typical lunch time at the Royalton Hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, The New Yorker 's Tina Brown might be installed at her usual table, and Vogue 's Anna Wintour might be at her usual table (chewing on her usual meal--a $25 hamburger). Vanity Fair 's Graydon Carter might be there too, although he has transferred his main allegiance to a place called Patroon. Filling out the room are other editors, publicists, and writers from these magazines and GQ and House & Garden and so on. And one man, who probably isn't there himself, picks up every tab. Some of the lesser fry may even utter the Condé Nast mantra--though it is hardly necessary at the Royalton--as they grab for the check: \"Let Si get this.\"", "Si's favorite courtiers lead lives of jaw-dropping privilege. When she was editor of British Vogue , Wintour commuted between London and New York--on the Concorde. Another Si confidant decided his office didn't feel right, so he hired one of the grandmasters of feng shui to rearrange it. Some editors prepare for trips by Federal Expressing their luggage to their destination. Why? \"So you don't have to carry your bags. No one would be caught dead carrying a bag.\" \n\n Condé Nast has also created a class of mandarin journalists, writers who live much better than they ever could if they wrote only for normal magazines. One free-lancer tells of building much of a summer traveling with her husband in the West and Europe around a couple of Condé Nast assignments. Last summer, The New Yorker sent a staffer to Venice to cover the Venice Film Festival. The weeklong trip, which must have cost thousands, resulted in a short piece.", "Writers, of course, are nowhere near as profligate as photographers. Stories of wasteful shoots abound: the matching seaweed that had to be flown from California to the Caribbean for a fashion photo; the Annie Liebovitz Vanity Fair cover shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger that reportedly cost $100,000; the Vogue shoot in Africa in which, an ex- Vogue editor claims, the photographer and his huge entourage wined and dined to the tune of \"hundreds of thousands of dollars.\"", "And they say it's not as good as it used to be. In 1992, according to Thomas Maier's biography of Newhouse, the editor of Self held a birthday party for Si Newhouse's dog . (Owners ate caviar; dogs drank Evian.) The lowliest assistants used to take car services home. But new Condé Nast CEO Steve Florio has restricted cars and catering. Editors who used to fly the Concorde now fly first-class; those who used to fly first-class now fly business. Expense accounts are scrutinized. Even so, today's Condé Nast is economical only by Condé Nast standards. The belt is tighter, but it's still hand-tooled, hand-tanned, and fashioned from the finest Italian leather.", "A Lincoln Town Car is waiting outside your door in the morning to take you to work. The car, which costs $50 an hour, is written into your contract. First stop, breakfast with a writer at the Four Seasons. The check may be as little as $40. When you reach the office, you realize you're out of cigarettes. No problem--you send your assistant to buy a pack for you. She gets reimbursed from petty cash ($3). (Could be worse for the assistant: She could be forced to pick up her boss's birth-control pills, or her boss's pet from the vet, or presents for her boss's children--regular duties for Condé Nast underlings.) \n\n You've forgotten to return the video your kids watched yesterday, so you have a messenger take it back to Blockbuster. Si spends $20; you save a $1.50 late fee.", "None of the 39 past and present Newhouse employees I spoke to for this story would talk on the record, for . And the nature of the subject makes it hard to separate apocrypha from the truth. Did Condé Nast pay, as sources insist it did, hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes on behalf of an editor who didn't bother to file tax forms? Did an editor really expense $20,000 in a weeklong trip to Paris? The people who pay the bills are not talking. But every example of excess cited here was told to me by at least one source (and usually more than one) in a position to know.", "The apogee of party absurdity is Vanity Fair 's sponsorship of an annual London dinner for the Serpentine Museum in Hyde Park. As one observer puts it, \"Vanity Fair , an American magazine, pays more than $100,000 to a British art museum solely so that it can sponsor a dinner where Graydon Carter gets to sit next to Princess Diana.\" The princess was the museum's patron. \n\n Actually, paying $100,000 for face time with Princess Di may not have been a foolish investment for a magazine so dependent on peddling her image. And Condé Nast's excess has other plausible justifications as well.", "Newhouse expense stories are a staple of New York literary-journalistic conversation. Stories about the $10,000 in expenses that a New Yorker editor billed for a single month. About the interior-decorating costs for the fashion-magazine editor who likes to have her office photographs rearranged every few months. About the hotel tab for the big-name New York writer who spent three weeks in Washington's Hay-Adams (basic room: $285 a night) researching a Vanity Fair story that will never run. About the Vogue editor who has furnished her summer house from items purchased for fashion shoots--beautiful furniture, designer pillows, coffee-table books. Vogue assistants have nicknamed the house \"Petty Cash Junction.\"", "S.I. \"Si\" Newhouse Jr. and his younger brother, Donald, control Advance Publications, one of America's largest privately held companies. (Estimate of their combined wealth: $13 billion.) Donald tends to Advance's hugely profitable newspaper, radio, and TV holdings. Si runs the less profitable but more glamorous properties. These are the 15 Condé Nast magazines, including (in descending order of fabulousness) Vogue , Vanity Fair , GQ , Condé Nast Traveler , House & Garden , Allure , Details , Self , Mademoiselle , and Glamour ; ; and Random House. \n\n The expense-account lunch is a hallowed journalistic tradition. But consider a day in the life of an editor working for Si Newhouse. (Donald's editors are a different story, as they will be happy to tell you.) It's a closed economy where almost all human needs and desires can be gratified with a miraculous, unlimited currency called the Si.", "a Random House book party at Le Cirque 2000 (estimated cost to Si: $35,000), your car ferries you home.", "and it's snack time. Your assistant joins the mob in the lobby newsstand. She bills your candy bar, juice, and cigarettes (as well as her own candy bar, juice, and cigarettes) to the magazine ($15). After all, it's a", "Then there's lunch. The magazines account for more than a quarter of daytime revenues at the Four Seasons and the Royalton. A modest lunch for two at the Royalton (no fancy wine or anything) might cost $80. But Si's generosity extends to even assistants and sub-sub-editors, dining on sushi at their desks. If you spend $10 or less on lunch, and claim you were working, Si pays. At Vogue and Vanity Fair , almost everyone has a \"working lunch\" every day . An editor at Allure says that \"working lunches\" there are limited to 10 a month.", "Some top editors may earn their perks. Vogue and GQ make millions, according to industry analysts. Vanity Fair is enjoying banner years, and while it probably hasn't made back the millions Newhouse lost in starting it up, it is certainly in the black. The New Yorker loses money--how much may even surpass perks as a topic of Newhouse gossip and speculation. On the other hand, The New Yorker is the most talked-about magazine in America, and Tina Brown is the most talked-about editor. That is worth something. \n\n Public media companies such as Time Warner (or, for that matter, Microsoft) can entice and hold journalists with stock options. Advance is private, so Newhouse uses other golden handcuffs. He runs a lifestyle prison. Top editors stay because they could never afford to live in a house as nice as the one Si's interest-free loan bought them, or to host parties as nice as the ones Si's party planners throw for them.", "\"working snack.\" Later, there's a birthday party for your assistant. You order champagne and a cake--on the company, of course, and present her with your gift--a Prada wallet ($200). Later, she submits the expense sheet for it. Finally, after", "And then there are the parties. Last month The New Yorker spent--and this is not a joke--$500,000 on a two-day \"Next Conference\" at the Disney Institute in Florida, in connection with a special issue on the same theme. In order to get Vice President Gore, who was traveling in California at the time, The New Yorker paid for him and his entourage to fly Air Force Two from California to Florida and back. And vice presidents are not the only things that Condé Nast flies in for parties. The New Yorker once shipped silverware from New York to Chicago for a dinner. (\"What, they don't have silverware in Chicago?\" asks a New Yorker staffer.) Vanity Fair toted food from New York to Washington for this year's party on the night of the White House Correspondents Dinner. (What, they don't have food in Washington?)", "Need a facial? Treat yourself and bill it to Si. This is what is called \"scouting.\" It is also a great way to get free haircuts. To be fair, Si doesn't pay for all such treats. There is also a much-honored tradition of accepting tribute from companies that Condé Nast magazines cover. One magazine exec reportedly got so much loot last Christmas--Cuban cigars, \"crates of wine,\" designer suits (\"It was like a Spanish galleon\")--that he needed three cars to cart it home. At yuletide, even midlevel fashion-mag writers and editors are inundated with \"cashmere sweaters, Versace pillows, coats ...\" recalls one ex- Vogue staffer wistfully.", "Condé Nast's magazines are all about glamour, wealth, prestige. To uphold that image, magazine editors need to circulate at the top of New York society. But the top of New York society consists of people who make far more money than magazine editors do--investment bankers, corporate chieftains, and fashion designers. Million-dollar salaries aren't enough to mix as equals with the Trumps and Karans. Si's perks are equalizers.", "Back at the office, you hear that a friend at another Newhouse magazine has been promoted, so you send flowers. The tab: $100. Si pays. (One of my favorite Condé Nast stories is" ] ]
train	42111	[ "Had the truck driver driving along Route 202 not noticed the change in road ahead while traveling, what would have likely happened?", "What had given it away to Don that the attractive redhead he saw on the train was not actually a natural redhead?", "Why did Miss Jervis think that Don worked for the government?", "Why did the citizens of Superior fear the edge of the town?", "Based on the information in the text, why would Don choose to leave Superior?", "Why was Don unable to shower while on Superior?", "What action did Don consider for testing the water flow in Superior?", "What did Don use as a method for seeing over the edge of the stream?", "Why did Alis tell Don that he should order his eggs scrambled for breakfast the next morning?", "What impression can be made about Don’s feelings towards Alis?" ]	[ [ "He would have driven down into the pit where Superior was formerly located. ", "He would have passed right over the town and missed it totally. ", "He would have spilled his coffee while trying to make the sudden stop. ", "He would have floated above the ground and continued driving into the town of Superior. " ], [ "Her skin tone was too off to match the hair color. ", "The red tone of her hair was far too bright to be considered natural.", "She was carrying box hair dye. ", "Her dark roots were showing. " ], [ "Because it seemed as though everyone in the area worked for the government. ", "His appearance made her think so. ", "Because he was familiar with Senator Bobby Thebold. ", "Because he was handcuffed to a briefcase. " ], [ "They feared that they would plummet to the ground because of gravity. ", "They feared they would fall with the flow of the stream. ", "They feared they would vanish if they left the edge.", "They feared they would be sucked into a vortex." ], [ "He had to deliver the handcuffed briefcase. ", "He had a family to return to that would be expecting him at home. ", "He feared the future of Superior.", "His wife would not appreciate him spending time with Alis. " ], [ "He feared that someone would steal the briefcase if he left it unattended. ", "The water supply was lacking from the stream flowing out of Superior.", "There was an electrical current flowing throughout the water in Superior. ", "He was unable to remove the briefcase in order to remove his clothing, " ], [ "Taking a rowboat over the edge to see what would happen. ", "Jumping into North Lake to see if there was an electrical current. ", "Swimming through the stream to see what would happen. ", "Throwing something into the stream and seeing if it would funnel back into Superior. " ], [ "A mirror found in the Cavalier dorms.", "A compact from Miss Jervis. ", "A compact from Alis. ", "A camera to take a photograph. " ], [ "It was difficult for him to cut them with the briefcase handcuffed to himself. ", "They were better cooked that way in the cafeteria. ", "Because there were more available scrambled. ", "Because they were not cooked in water when they were scrambled. " ], [ "He was afraid of her because of her boldness. ", "He was quickly becoming fond of her. ", "He found her to be attractive, yet too young for his liking. ", "He found her to be too young and annoying. " ] ]	[ 1, 4, 4, 1, 1, 4, 1, 3, 1, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "A truck driver named Pierce Knaubloch was the first to report it. He had\n been highballing west along Route 202, making up for the time he'd spent\n over a second cup of coffee in a diner, when he screeched to a stop. If\n he'd gone another twenty-five feet he'd have gone into the pit where\n Superior had been.\n\n\n Knaubloch couldn't see the extent of the pit because it was too dark,\n but it looked big. Bigger than if a nitro truck had blown up, which was\n his first thought. He backed up two hundred feet, set out flares, then\n sped off to a telephone.\n\n\n The state police converged on the former site of Superior from several\n directions. Communicating by radiophone across the vast pit, they\n confirmed that the town undoubtedly was missing. They put in a call to\n the National Guard.", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "\"If you don't get this junk off the line,\" the engineer said, \"I'll plow\n right through it. Off the edge! you crazy or something?\"\n\n\n \"Look for yourself,\" the old man in the white helmet said. \"Go ahead.\n Look.\"\n\n\n The engineer was exasperated. He turned to the fireman. \"You look. Humor\n the old man. Then let's go.\"\n\n\n The bearded man—he called himself Professor Garet—went off with the\n fireman. Don followed them. They had tramped a quarter of a mile along\n the gravel when the fireman stopped. \"Okay,\" he said \"where's the edge?\n I don't see nothing.\" The tracks seemed to stretch forever into the\n darkness.\n\n\n \"It's another half mile or so,\" the professor said.\n\n\n \"Well, let's hurry up. We haven't got all night.\"", "The guard surrounded the area with troops—more than a thousand were\n needed—to keep people from falling into the pit. A pilot who flew over\n it reported that it looked as if a great ice-cream scoop had bitten into\n the Ohio countryside.\n\n\n The Pennsylvania Railroad complained that one of its passenger trains\n was missing. The train's schedule called for it to pass through but not\n stop at Superior at 11:58. That seemed to fix the time of the\n disappearance at midnight. The truck driver had made his discovery\n shortly after midnight.\n\n\n Someone pointed out that October 31 was Halloween and that midnight was\n the witching hour.\n\n\n Somebody else said nonsense, they'd better check for radiation. A civil\n defense official brought up a Geiger counter, but no matter how he shook\n it and rapped on it, it refused to click.", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "She took his arm as they gazed past the electrified fence at the Earth\n below and to the west.\n\n\n \"It's impressive, isn't it?\" she said. \"I wonder if that's Indiana way\n over there?\"\n\n\n He patted her hand absent-mindedly. \"I wonder if it's west at all. I\n mean, how do we know Superior is maintaining the same position up here\n as it used to down there?\"\n\n\n \"We could tell by the sun, silly.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" he said, grinning at his stupidity. \"And I guess we're not\n high enough to see very far. If we were we'd be able to see the Great\n Lakes—or Lake Erie, anyway.\"", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight.\n Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with\n the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South\n Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees,\n with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.\n\n\n \"Where is the water going?\" Don asked. \"I can't make it out.\"\n\n\n \"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people.\"\n\n\n \"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look.\"\n\n\n \"Don't! You'll fall off!\"" ], [ "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had\n been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in\n his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered,\n with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome\n nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between\n his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully.\n\n\n But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he\n carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist.\n\n\n \"Will we be here long?\" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss\n his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd\n get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one\n reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing.", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt,\n emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described\n the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth\n of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be\n kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more\n densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.\n\n\n \"You may call me Alis,\" she said. \"And I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\n Don grinned. \"Going on?\"\n\n\n \"Three months past. How old are\nyou\n, Mr. Cort?\"\n\n\n \"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go\n with you to the end of the world.\"", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "\"You're still quite acceptable, if a bit whiskery.\" She stopped, still\n holding his arm, and he turned so they were face to face. \"So kiss me,\"\n she said, \"before you deteriorate.\"\n\n\n They were in the midst of an extremely pleasant kiss when the brief case\n at the end of Don's handcuff began to talk to him.", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "\"If you don't get this junk off the line,\" the engineer said, \"I'll plow\n right through it. Off the edge! you crazy or something?\"\n\n\n \"Look for yourself,\" the old man in the white helmet said. \"Go ahead.\n Look.\"\n\n\n The engineer was exasperated. He turned to the fireman. \"You look. Humor\n the old man. Then let's go.\"\n\n\n The bearded man—he called himself Professor Garet—went off with the\n fireman. Don followed them. They had tramped a quarter of a mile along\n the gravel when the fireman stopped. \"Okay,\" he said \"where's the edge?\n I don't see nothing.\" The tracks seemed to stretch forever into the\n darkness.\n\n\n \"It's another half mile or so,\" the professor said.\n\n\n \"Well, let's hurry up. We haven't got all night.\"", "Don opened the compact and carefully transferred it to his right hand.\n He held it out beyond the edge and peered into it, focusing it on the\n end of the creek. \"Now I've got it. The water\nisn't\ngoing off the\n edge!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't? Then where is it going?\"\n\n\n \"Down, of course, but it's as if it's going into a well, or a vertical\n tunnel, just short of the edge.\"\n\n\n \"Why? How?\"\n\n\n \"I can't see too well, but that's my impression. Hold on now. I'm coming\n back.\" He inched away from the edge, then got up and brushed himself\n off. He returned her compact. \"I guess you know where we go next.\"\n\n\n \"The other end of the creek?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"", "The mess hall, or whatever they called it, was cafeteria style and he\n got in line with a tray for juice, eggs and coffee. He saw no one he\n knew, but as he was looking for a table a willowy blonde girl smiled and\n gestured to the empty place opposite her.\n\n\n \"You're Mr. Cort,\" she said. \"Won't you join me?\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said, unloading his tray. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"The mystery man with the handcuff. You'd be hard to miss. I'm\n Alis—that's A-l-i-s, not A-l-i-c-e—Garet. Are you with the FBI? Or did\n you escape from jail?\"\n\n\n \"How do you do. No, just a bank messenger. What an unusual name.\n Professor Garet's daughter?\"", "The \"explanation\" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by\n Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not\n understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously\n handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to\n set.\nDon said, \"I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark.\"", "\"I'm with Senator Bobby Thebold, S.O.B.\"\n\n\n Don laughed again. \"He sure is.\"\n\n\n \"\nMister\nCort!\" she said, annoyed. \"You know as well as I do that\n S.O.B. stands for Senate Office Building. I'm his secretary.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry. We'd better get out and find a place to sleep. It's getting\n late.\"\n\n\n \"\nPlaces\nto sleep,\" she corrected. She looked angry.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Don said, puzzled by her emphasis. \"Come on. Where they put\n you, you'll probably be surrounded by co-eds, even if I could get out of\n this cuff.\"" ], [ "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "\"The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you\n say your name was, miss?\"\n\n\n \"Jen Jervis,\" she said. \"Geneva Jervis, formally.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose.\"\n\n\n The girl smiled sideways. \"We have a nodding acquaintance.\" Don nodded\n and grinned.\n\n\n \"There's plenty of room in the dormitories,\" Civek said. \"People don't\n exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier.\"\n\n\n \"Are you connected with the college?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the\n world, hasn't it?\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "\"Professor of what?\"\n\n\n \"Magnology. As I say, the school isn't accredited. Well, Professor\n Garet telephoned and said, 'Hector'—that's my name, Hector\n Civek—'everything's up in the air.' He was having his little joke, of\n course. I said, 'What?' and then he told me.\"\n\n\n \"Told you what?\" Jen Jervis asked. \"I mean, does he have any theory\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"He has a theory about everything. I think what he was trying to convey\n was that this—this levitation confirmed his magnology principle.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\" Don asked.", "If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had\n been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in\n his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered,\n with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome\n nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between\n his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully.\n\n\n But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he\n carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist.\n\n\n \"Will we be here long?\" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss\n his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd\n get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one\n reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing.", "She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt,\n emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described\n the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth\n of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be\n kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more\n densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.\n\n\n \"You may call me Alis,\" she said. \"And I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\n Don grinned. \"Going on?\"\n\n\n \"Three months past. How old are\nyou\n, Mr. Cort?\"\n\n\n \"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go\n with you to the end of the world.\"", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "The mess hall, or whatever they called it, was cafeteria style and he\n got in line with a tray for juice, eggs and coffee. He saw no one he\n knew, but as he was looking for a table a willowy blonde girl smiled and\n gestured to the empty place opposite her.\n\n\n \"You're Mr. Cort,\" she said. \"Won't you join me?\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said, unloading his tray. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"The mystery man with the handcuff. You'd be hard to miss. I'm\n Alis—that's A-l-i-s, not A-l-i-c-e—Garet. Are you with the FBI? Or did\n you escape from jail?\"\n\n\n \"How do you do. No, just a bank messenger. What an unusual name.\n Professor Garet's daughter?\"", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"I'm with Senator Bobby Thebold, S.O.B.\"\n\n\n Don laughed again. \"He sure is.\"\n\n\n \"\nMister\nCort!\" she said, annoyed. \"You know as well as I do that\n S.O.B. stands for Senate Office Building. I'm his secretary.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry. We'd better get out and find a place to sleep. It's getting\n late.\"\n\n\n \"\nPlaces\nto sleep,\" she corrected. She looked angry.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Don said, puzzled by her emphasis. \"Come on. Where they put\n you, you'll probably be surrounded by co-eds, even if I could get out of\n this cuff.\"", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "The \"explanation\" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by\n Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not\n understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously\n handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to\n set.\nDon said, \"I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark.\"", "Alis had been creaming and sugaring Don's coffee. She pushed it across\n to him and said, \"It's not on page one. Ed Clark and Mayor Civek don't\n get along, so you'll find the mayor's statement in a box on page three,\n bottom.\"", "\"Overnight,\" Geneva Jervis said. \"If what Mr. Cort and the fireman say\n is true. I haven't seen the edge myself.\"\n\n\n \"You'll have a better chance to look at it in the morning,\" the mayor\n said, \"if we don't settle back in the meantime.\"\n\n\n \"Was there any sort of explosion?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"No. There wasn't any sensation at all, as far as I noticed. I was\n watching the late show—or trying to. My house is down in a hollow and\n reception isn't very good, especially with old English movies. Well, all\n of a sudden the picture sharpened up and I could see just as plain. Then\n the phone rang and it was Professor Garet.\"\n\n\n \"The old fellow with the whiskers and the riding boots?\" Jen Jervis\n asked.\n\n\n \"Yes. Osbert Garet, Professor of Magnology at the Cavalier Institute of\n Applied Sciences.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"" ], [ "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "Smaller print on the sign said:\nProtecting mouth of South Creek, one of\n two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is\n sufficient to kill.\nIt was signed:\nVincent Grande, Chief of Police,\n Hector Civek, Mayor\n.\n\n\n \"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?\" Don\n asked.\n\n\n \"North Lake, maybe,\" Alis said. \"People fish there but nobody's allowed\n to swim.\"\n\n\n \"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder\n what would happen?\"\n\n\n \"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you\n found out.\"", "Nor had there been any defense plants in Superior that might have blown\n up. The town's biggest factory made kitchen sinks and the next biggest\n made bubble gum.\nA United Airlines pilot found Superior early on the morning of November\n 1. The pilot, Captain Eric Studley, who had never seen a flying saucer\n and hoped never to see one, was afraid now that he had. The object\n loomed out of a cloudbank at twelve thousand feet and Studley changed\n course to avoid it. He noted with only minimum satisfaction that his\n co-pilot also saw the thing and wondered why it wasn't moving at the\n terrific speed flying saucers were allegedly capable of.\n\n\n Then he saw the church steeple on it.\n\n\n A few minutes later he had relayed a message from Superior, formerly of\n Ohio, addressed to whom it might concern:\n\n\n It said that Superior had seceded from Earth.", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "A truck driver named Pierce Knaubloch was the first to report it. He had\n been highballing west along Route 202, making up for the time he'd spent\n over a second cup of coffee in a diner, when he screeched to a stop. If\n he'd gone another twenty-five feet he'd have gone into the pit where\n Superior had been.\n\n\n Knaubloch couldn't see the extent of the pit because it was too dark,\n but it looked big. Bigger than if a nitro truck had blown up, which was\n his first thought. He backed up two hundred feet, set out flares, then\n sped off to a telephone.\n\n\n The state police converged on the former site of Superior from several\n directions. Communicating by radiophone across the vast pit, they\n confirmed that the town undoubtedly was missing. They put in a call to\n the National Guard.", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "The old man chuckled. \"I'm afraid you have.\"\n\n\n They came to it at last, stopping well back from it. Professor Garet\n swelled with pride, it seemed, as he made a theatrical gesture.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" he said. \"Something even Columbus couldn't find. The edge of\n the world.\"\n\n\n True, everything seemed to stop, and they could see stars shining low on\n the horizon where stars could not properly be expected to be seen.\n\n\n Don Cort and the fireman walked cautiously toward the edge while the\n professor ambled ahead with the familiarity of one who had been there\n before. But there was a wind and they did not venture too close.\n Nevertheless, Don could see that it apparently was a neat, sharp edge,\n not one of your old ragged, random edges such as might have been caused\n by an explosion. This one had the feeling of design behind it.", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "\"The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you\n say your name was, miss?\"\n\n\n \"Jen Jervis,\" she said. \"Geneva Jervis, formally.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose.\"\n\n\n The girl smiled sideways. \"We have a nodding acquaintance.\" Don nodded\n and grinned.\n\n\n \"There's plenty of room in the dormitories,\" Civek said. \"People don't\n exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier.\"\n\n\n \"Are you connected with the college?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the\n world, hasn't it?\"", "Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But\n Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that\n nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they\n accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local\n townspeople, a crackpot professor.\n\n\n But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious\n that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up\n to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his\n days on the smallest—and the nuttiest—planet in the galaxy!\nI\nThe town of Superior, Ohio, disappeared on the night of October 31.", "\"I haven't the faintest idea. I'm a politician, not a scientist.\n Professor Garet went on about it for a while, on the telephone, about\n magnetism and gravity, but I think he was only calling as a courtesy, so\n the mayor wouldn't look foolish the next morning, not knowing his town\n had flown the coop.\"\n\n\n \"What's the population of Superior?\"\n\n\n \"Three thousand, including the students at the institute. Three thousand\n and forty, counting you people from the train. I guess you'll be with us\n for a while.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean by that?\" Jen Jervis asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I don't see how you can get down. Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Does Superior have an airport?\" Don asked. \"I've got to get back to—to\n Earth.\" It sounded odd to put it that way.", "The guard surrounded the area with troops—more than a thousand were\n needed—to keep people from falling into the pit. A pilot who flew over\n it reported that it looked as if a great ice-cream scoop had bitten into\n the Ohio countryside.\n\n\n The Pennsylvania Railroad complained that one of its passenger trains\n was missing. The train's schedule called for it to pass through but not\n stop at Superior at 11:58. That seemed to fix the time of the\n disappearance at midnight. The truck driver had made his discovery\n shortly after midnight.\n\n\n Someone pointed out that October 31 was Halloween and that midnight was\n the witching hour.\n\n\n Somebody else said nonsense, they'd better check for radiation. A civil\n defense official brought up a Geiger counter, but no matter how he shook\n it and rapped on it, it refused to click.", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "\"Overnight,\" Geneva Jervis said. \"If what Mr. Cort and the fireman say\n is true. I haven't seen the edge myself.\"\n\n\n \"You'll have a better chance to look at it in the morning,\" the mayor\n said, \"if we don't settle back in the meantime.\"\n\n\n \"Was there any sort of explosion?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"No. There wasn't any sensation at all, as far as I noticed. I was\n watching the late show—or trying to. My house is down in a hollow and\n reception isn't very good, especially with old English movies. Well, all\n of a sudden the picture sharpened up and I could see just as plain. Then\n the phone rang and it was Professor Garet.\"\n\n\n \"The old fellow with the whiskers and the riding boots?\" Jen Jervis\n asked.\n\n\n \"Yes. Osbert Garet, Professor of Magnology at the Cavalier Institute of\n Applied Sciences.\"", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "And Then the Town Took Off\nby RICHARD WILSON\nACE BOOKS, INC.\n\n 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N.Y.\nAND THEN THE TOWN TOOK OFF\nCopyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc.\n\n All Rights Reserved\nFor\nFelicitas K. Wilson\nTHE SIOUX SPACEMAN\n\n Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc.\nPrinted in U.S.A.\nTHE CITY THAT RAN OFF THE MAP\nThe town of Superior, Ohio, certainly was living up to its name! In what\n was undoubtedly the most spectacular feat of the century, it simply\n picked itself up one night and rose two full miles above Earth!", "Don creased the paper the other way, took a sip of coffee, nodded his\n thanks, and read:\nMayor Claims Secession From Earth\nMayor Hector Civek, in a proclamation issued locally by hand and\n dropped to the rest of the world in a plastic shatter-proof bottle, said\n today that Superior has seceded from Earth. His reasons were as vague as\n his explanation.\nThe \"reasons\" include these: (1) Superior has been discriminated against\n by county, state and federal agencies; (2) Cavalier Institute has been\n held up to global derision by orthodox (presumably meaning accredited)\n colleges and universities; and (3) chicle exporters have conspired\n against the Superior Bubble Gum Company by unreasonably raising prices.", "\"If you don't get this junk off the line,\" the engineer said, \"I'll plow\n right through it. Off the edge! you crazy or something?\"\n\n\n \"Look for yourself,\" the old man in the white helmet said. \"Go ahead.\n Look.\"\n\n\n The engineer was exasperated. He turned to the fireman. \"You look. Humor\n the old man. Then let's go.\"\n\n\n The bearded man—he called himself Professor Garet—went off with the\n fireman. Don followed them. They had tramped a quarter of a mile along\n the gravel when the fireman stopped. \"Okay,\" he said \"where's the edge?\n I don't see nothing.\" The tracks seemed to stretch forever into the\n darkness.\n\n\n \"It's another half mile or so,\" the professor said.\n\n\n \"Well, let's hurry up. We haven't got all night.\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked." ], [ "Don creased the paper the other way, took a sip of coffee, nodded his\n thanks, and read:\nMayor Claims Secession From Earth\nMayor Hector Civek, in a proclamation issued locally by hand and\n dropped to the rest of the world in a plastic shatter-proof bottle, said\n today that Superior has seceded from Earth. His reasons were as vague as\n his explanation.\nThe \"reasons\" include these: (1) Superior has been discriminated against\n by county, state and federal agencies; (2) Cavalier Institute has been\n held up to global derision by orthodox (presumably meaning accredited)\n colleges and universities; and (3) chicle exporters have conspired\n against the Superior Bubble Gum Company by unreasonably raising prices.", "Nor had there been any defense plants in Superior that might have blown\n up. The town's biggest factory made kitchen sinks and the next biggest\n made bubble gum.\nA United Airlines pilot found Superior early on the morning of November\n 1. The pilot, Captain Eric Studley, who had never seen a flying saucer\n and hoped never to see one, was afraid now that he had. The object\n loomed out of a cloudbank at twelve thousand feet and Studley changed\n course to avoid it. He noted with only minimum satisfaction that his\n co-pilot also saw the thing and wondered why it wasn't moving at the\n terrific speed flying saucers were allegedly capable of.\n\n\n Then he saw the church steeple on it.\n\n\n A few minutes later he had relayed a message from Superior, formerly of\n Ohio, addressed to whom it might concern:\n\n\n It said that Superior had seceded from Earth.", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "\"The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you\n say your name was, miss?\"\n\n\n \"Jen Jervis,\" she said. \"Geneva Jervis, formally.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose.\"\n\n\n The girl smiled sideways. \"We have a nodding acquaintance.\" Don nodded\n and grinned.\n\n\n \"There's plenty of room in the dormitories,\" Civek said. \"People don't\n exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier.\"\n\n\n \"Are you connected with the college?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the\n world, hasn't it?\"", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "\"I haven't the faintest idea. I'm a politician, not a scientist.\n Professor Garet went on about it for a while, on the telephone, about\n magnetism and gravity, but I think he was only calling as a courtesy, so\n the mayor wouldn't look foolish the next morning, not knowing his town\n had flown the coop.\"\n\n\n \"What's the population of Superior?\"\n\n\n \"Three thousand, including the students at the institute. Three thousand\n and forty, counting you people from the train. I guess you'll be with us\n for a while.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean by that?\" Jen Jervis asked.\n\n\n \"Well, I don't see how you can get down. Do you?\"\n\n\n \"Does Superior have an airport?\" Don asked. \"I've got to get back to—to\n Earth.\" It sounded odd to put it that way.", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "Radio messages stated simply that Superior had seceded from Earth. But\n Don Cort, stranded on that rising town, was beginning to suspect that\n nothing was simple about Superior except its citizens. Calmly they\n accepted their rise in the world as being due to one of their local\n townspeople, a crackpot professor.\n\n\n But after a couple of weeks of floating around, it began to be obvious\n that the professor had no idea how to get them down. So then it was up\n to Cort: either find a way to anchor Superior, or spend the rest of his\n days on the smallest—and the nuttiest—planet in the galaxy!\nI\nThe town of Superior, Ohio, disappeared on the night of October 31.", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "Smaller print on the sign said:\nProtecting mouth of South Creek, one of\n two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is\n sufficient to kill.\nIt was signed:\nVincent Grande, Chief of Police,\n Hector Civek, Mayor\n.\n\n\n \"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?\" Don\n asked.\n\n\n \"North Lake, maybe,\" Alis said. \"People fish there but nobody's allowed\n to swim.\"\n\n\n \"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder\n what would happen?\"\n\n\n \"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you\n found out.\"", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "The \"explanation\" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by\n Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not\n understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously\n handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to\n set.\nDon said, \"I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark.\"", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying." ], [ "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "\"The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you\n say your name was, miss?\"\n\n\n \"Jen Jervis,\" she said. \"Geneva Jervis, formally.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose.\"\n\n\n The girl smiled sideways. \"We have a nodding acquaintance.\" Don nodded\n and grinned.\n\n\n \"There's plenty of room in the dormitories,\" Civek said. \"People don't\n exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier.\"\n\n\n \"Are you connected with the college?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the\n world, hasn't it?\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "Smaller print on the sign said:\nProtecting mouth of South Creek, one of\n two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is\n sufficient to kill.\nIt was signed:\nVincent Grande, Chief of Police,\n Hector Civek, Mayor\n.\n\n\n \"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?\" Don\n asked.\n\n\n \"North Lake, maybe,\" Alis said. \"People fish there but nobody's allowed\n to swim.\"\n\n\n \"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder\n what would happen?\"\n\n\n \"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you\n found out.\"", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had\n been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in\n his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered,\n with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome\n nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between\n his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully.\n\n\n But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he\n carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist.\n\n\n \"Will we be here long?\" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss\n his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd\n get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one\n reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing.", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "Nor had there been any defense plants in Superior that might have blown\n up. The town's biggest factory made kitchen sinks and the next biggest\n made bubble gum.\nA United Airlines pilot found Superior early on the morning of November\n 1. The pilot, Captain Eric Studley, who had never seen a flying saucer\n and hoped never to see one, was afraid now that he had. The object\n loomed out of a cloudbank at twelve thousand feet and Studley changed\n course to avoid it. He noted with only minimum satisfaction that his\n co-pilot also saw the thing and wondered why it wasn't moving at the\n terrific speed flying saucers were allegedly capable of.\n\n\n Then he saw the church steeple on it.\n\n\n A few minutes later he had relayed a message from Superior, formerly of\n Ohio, addressed to whom it might concern:\n\n\n It said that Superior had seceded from Earth." ], [ "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "Smaller print on the sign said:\nProtecting mouth of South Creek, one of\n two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is\n sufficient to kill.\nIt was signed:\nVincent Grande, Chief of Police,\n Hector Civek, Mayor\n.\n\n\n \"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?\" Don\n asked.\n\n\n \"North Lake, maybe,\" Alis said. \"People fish there but nobody's allowed\n to swim.\"\n\n\n \"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder\n what would happen?\"\n\n\n \"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you\n found out.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "Don opened the compact and carefully transferred it to his right hand.\n He held it out beyond the edge and peered into it, focusing it on the\n end of the creek. \"Now I've got it. The water\nisn't\ngoing off the\n edge!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't? Then where is it going?\"\n\n\n \"Down, of course, but it's as if it's going into a well, or a vertical\n tunnel, just short of the edge.\"\n\n\n \"Why? How?\"\n\n\n \"I can't see too well, but that's my impression. Hold on now. I'm coming\n back.\" He inched away from the edge, then got up and brushed himself\n off. He returned her compact. \"I guess you know where we go next.\"\n\n\n \"The other end of the creek?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "Nor had there been any defense plants in Superior that might have blown\n up. The town's biggest factory made kitchen sinks and the next biggest\n made bubble gum.\nA United Airlines pilot found Superior early on the morning of November\n 1. The pilot, Captain Eric Studley, who had never seen a flying saucer\n and hoped never to see one, was afraid now that he had. The object\n loomed out of a cloudbank at twelve thousand feet and Studley changed\n course to avoid it. He noted with only minimum satisfaction that his\n co-pilot also saw the thing and wondered why it wasn't moving at the\n terrific speed flying saucers were allegedly capable of.\n\n\n Then he saw the church steeple on it.\n\n\n A few minutes later he had relayed a message from Superior, formerly of\n Ohio, addressed to whom it might concern:\n\n\n It said that Superior had seceded from Earth.", "One other radio message came from Superior, now airborne, on that first\n day. A ham radio operator reported an unidentified voice as saying\n plaintively:\n\n\n \"\nCold\nup here!\"\n\n\n Don Cort had been dozing in what passed for the club car on the Buckeye\n Cannonball when the train braked to a stop. He looked out the window,\n hoping this was Columbus, where he planned to catch a plane east. But it\n wasn't Columbus. All he could see were some lanterns jogging as trainmen\n hurried along the tracks.\n\n\n The conductor looked into the car. The redhead across the aisle in whom\n Don had taken a passing interest earlier in the evening asked, \"Why did\n we stop?\"\n\n\n \"Somebody flagged us down,\" the conductor said. \"We don't make a station\n stop at Superior on this run.\"", "Don creased the paper the other way, took a sip of coffee, nodded his\n thanks, and read:\nMayor Claims Secession From Earth\nMayor Hector Civek, in a proclamation issued locally by hand and\n dropped to the rest of the world in a plastic shatter-proof bottle, said\n today that Superior has seceded from Earth. His reasons were as vague as\n his explanation.\nThe \"reasons\" include these: (1) Superior has been discriminated against\n by county, state and federal agencies; (2) Cavalier Institute has been\n held up to global derision by orthodox (presumably meaning accredited)\n colleges and universities; and (3) chicle exporters have conspired\n against the Superior Bubble Gum Company by unreasonably raising prices.", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "\"The college. The institute, really; it's not accredited. What did you\n say your name was, miss?\"\n\n\n \"Jen Jervis,\" she said. \"Geneva Jervis, formally.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Jervis. I'm Civek. You know Mr. Cort, I suppose.\"\n\n\n The girl smiled sideways. \"We have a nodding acquaintance.\" Don nodded\n and grinned.\n\n\n \"There's plenty of room in the dormitories,\" Civek said. \"People don't\n exactly pound on the gates and scream to be admitted to Cavalier.\"\n\n\n \"Are you connected with the college?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"Me? No. I'm the mayor of Superior. The old town's really come up in the\n world, hasn't it?\"", "The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight.\n Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with\n the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South\n Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees,\n with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.\n\n\n \"Where is the water going?\" Don asked. \"I can't make it out.\"\n\n\n \"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people.\"\n\n\n \"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look.\"\n\n\n \"Don't! You'll fall off!\"", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "A truck driver named Pierce Knaubloch was the first to report it. He had\n been highballing west along Route 202, making up for the time he'd spent\n over a second cup of coffee in a diner, when he screeched to a stop. If\n he'd gone another twenty-five feet he'd have gone into the pit where\n Superior had been.\n\n\n Knaubloch couldn't see the extent of the pit because it was too dark,\n but it looked big. Bigger than if a nitro truck had blown up, which was\n his first thought. He backed up two hundred feet, set out flares, then\n sped off to a telephone.\n\n\n The state police converged on the former site of Superior from several\n directions. Communicating by radiophone across the vast pit, they\n confirmed that the town undoubtedly was missing. They put in a call to\n the National Guard.", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate." ], [ "Don opened the compact and carefully transferred it to his right hand.\n He held it out beyond the edge and peered into it, focusing it on the\n end of the creek. \"Now I've got it. The water\nisn't\ngoing off the\n edge!\"\n\n\n \"It isn't? Then where is it going?\"\n\n\n \"Down, of course, but it's as if it's going into a well, or a vertical\n tunnel, just short of the edge.\"\n\n\n \"Why? How?\"\n\n\n \"I can't see too well, but that's my impression. Hold on now. I'm coming\n back.\" He inched away from the edge, then got up and brushed himself\n off. He returned her compact. \"I guess you know where we go next.\"\n\n\n \"The other end of the creek?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight.\n Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with\n the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South\n Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees,\n with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.\n\n\n \"Where is the water going?\" Don asked. \"I can't make it out.\"\n\n\n \"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people.\"\n\n\n \"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look.\"\n\n\n \"Don't! You'll fall off!\"", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying.", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "The old man chuckled. \"I'm afraid you have.\"\n\n\n They came to it at last, stopping well back from it. Professor Garet\n swelled with pride, it seemed, as he made a theatrical gesture.\n\n\n \"Behold,\" he said. \"Something even Columbus couldn't find. The edge of\n the world.\"\n\n\n True, everything seemed to stop, and they could see stars shining low on\n the horizon where stars could not properly be expected to be seen.\n\n\n Don Cort and the fireman walked cautiously toward the edge while the\n professor ambled ahead with the familiarity of one who had been there\n before. But there was a wind and they did not venture too close.\n Nevertheless, Don could see that it apparently was a neat, sharp edge,\n not one of your old ragged, random edges such as might have been caused\n by an explosion. This one had the feeling of design behind it.", "\"If you don't get this junk off the line,\" the engineer said, \"I'll plow\n right through it. Off the edge! you crazy or something?\"\n\n\n \"Look for yourself,\" the old man in the white helmet said. \"Go ahead.\n Look.\"\n\n\n The engineer was exasperated. He turned to the fireman. \"You look. Humor\n the old man. Then let's go.\"\n\n\n The bearded man—he called himself Professor Garet—went off with the\n fireman. Don followed them. They had tramped a quarter of a mile along\n the gravel when the fireman stopped. \"Okay,\" he said \"where's the edge?\n I don't see nothing.\" The tracks seemed to stretch forever into the\n darkness.\n\n\n \"It's another half mile or so,\" the professor said.\n\n\n \"Well, let's hurry up. We haven't got all night.\"", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "\"Overnight,\" Geneva Jervis said. \"If what Mr. Cort and the fireman say\n is true. I haven't seen the edge myself.\"\n\n\n \"You'll have a better chance to look at it in the morning,\" the mayor\n said, \"if we don't settle back in the meantime.\"\n\n\n \"Was there any sort of explosion?\" Don asked.\n\n\n \"No. There wasn't any sensation at all, as far as I noticed. I was\n watching the late show—or trying to. My house is down in a hollow and\n reception isn't very good, especially with old English movies. Well, all\n of a sudden the picture sharpened up and I could see just as plain. Then\n the phone rang and it was Professor Garet.\"\n\n\n \"The old fellow with the whiskers and the riding boots?\" Jen Jervis\n asked.\n\n\n \"Yes. Osbert Garet, Professor of Magnology at the Cavalier Institute of\n Applied Sciences.\"", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "The \"explanation\" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by\n Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not\n understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously\n handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to\n set.\nDon said, \"I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark.\"", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt,\n emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described\n the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth\n of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be\n kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more\n densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.\n\n\n \"You may call me Alis,\" she said. \"And I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\n Don grinned. \"Going on?\"\n\n\n \"Three months past. How old are\nyou\n, Mr. Cort?\"\n\n\n \"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go\n with you to the end of the world.\"", "Smaller print on the sign said:\nProtecting mouth of South Creek, one of\n two sources of water for Superior. Electrical charge in fence is\n sufficient to kill.\nIt was signed:\nVincent Grande, Chief of Police,\n Hector Civek, Mayor\n.\n\n\n \"What's the other source, besides the faucet in your bathroom?\" Don\n asked.\n\n\n \"North Lake, maybe,\" Alis said. \"People fish there but nobody's allowed\n to swim.\"\n\n\n \"Is the lake entirely within the town limits?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know.\"\n\n\n \"If it were on the edge, and if I took a rowboat out on it, I wonder\n what would happen?\"\n\n\n \"I know one thing—I wouldn't be there holding your ankle while you\n found out.\"", "If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had\n been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in\n his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered,\n with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome\n nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between\n his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully.\n\n\n But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he\n carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist.\n\n\n \"Will we be here long?\" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss\n his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd\n get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one\n reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing." ], [ "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt,\n emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described\n the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth\n of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be\n kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more\n densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.\n\n\n \"You may call me Alis,\" she said. \"And I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\n Don grinned. \"Going on?\"\n\n\n \"Three months past. How old are\nyou\n, Mr. Cort?\"\n\n\n \"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go\n with you to the end of the world.\"", "Alis had been creaming and sugaring Don's coffee. She pushed it across\n to him and said, \"It's not on page one. Ed Clark and Mayor Civek don't\n get along, so you'll find the mayor's statement in a box on page three,\n bottom.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "The mess hall, or whatever they called it, was cafeteria style and he\n got in line with a tray for juice, eggs and coffee. He saw no one he\n knew, but as he was looking for a table a willowy blonde girl smiled and\n gestured to the empty place opposite her.\n\n\n \"You're Mr. Cort,\" she said. \"Won't you join me?\"\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" he said, unloading his tray. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\n \"The mystery man with the handcuff. You'd be hard to miss. I'm\n Alis—that's A-l-i-s, not A-l-i-c-e—Garet. Are you with the FBI? Or did\n you escape from jail?\"\n\n\n \"How do you do. No, just a bank messenger. What an unusual name.\n Professor Garet's daughter?\"", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "\"Sure I do. Non-Einsteinian Relativity 1, at nine o'clock. But I'm a\n demon class-cutter, which is why I'm still a Senior at my advanced age.\n On to the brink!\"\nThey walked south from the campus and came to the railroad track. The\n train was standing there with nowhere to go. It had been abandoned\n except for the conductor, who had dutifully spent the night aboard.\n\n\n \"What's happening?\" he asked when he saw them. \"Any word from down\n there?\"\n\n\n \"Not that I know of,\" Don said. He introduced him to Alis Garet. \"What\n are you going to do?\"\n\n\n \"What\ncan\nI do?\" the conductor asked.\n\n\n \"You can go over to Cavalier and have breakfast,\" Alis said. \"Nobody's\n going to steal your old train.\"", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary.", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "It was eight o'clock, according to the watch on the unhandcuffed wrist,\n and things were going on. He had a view of the campus from his window. A\n bright sun shone on young people moving generally toward a squat\n building, and other people going in random directions. The first were\n students going to breakfast, he supposed, and the others were faculty\n members. The air was very clear and the long morning shadows distinct.\n Only then did he remember completely that he and the whole town of\n Superior were up in the air.\n\n\n He went through the dormitory. A few students were still sleeping. The\n others had gone from their unmade beds. He shivered as he stepped\n outdoors. It was crisp, if not freezing, and his breath came out\n visibly. First he'd eat, he decided, so he'd be strong enough to go take\n a good look over the edge, in broad daylight, to the Earth below.", "\"You're still quite acceptable, if a bit whiskery.\" She stopped, still\n holding his arm, and he turned so they were face to face. \"So kiss me,\"\n she said, \"before you deteriorate.\"\n\n\n They were in the midst of an extremely pleasant kiss when the brief case\n at the end of Don's handcuff began to talk to him.", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight.\n Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with\n the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South\n Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees,\n with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.\n\n\n \"Where is the water going?\" Don asked. \"I can't make it out.\"\n\n\n \"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people.\"\n\n\n \"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look.\"\n\n\n \"Don't! You'll fall off!\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "\"Can't say,\" the conductor told him. He let the door close again and\n went down to the tracks.\n\n\n Don hesitated, shrugged at the redhead, said, \"Excuse me,\" and followed\n the conductor. About a dozen people were milling around the train as it\n sat in the dark, hissing steam. Don made his way up to the locomotive\n and found a bigger knot of people gathered in front of the cowcatcher.\n\n\n Some sort of barricade had been put up across the tracks and it was\n covered with every imaginable kind of warning device. There were red\n lanterns, both battery and electric; flashlights; road flares; and even\n an old red shirt.\n\n\n Don saw two men who must have been the engineer and the fireman talking\n to an old bearded gentleman wearing a civil defense helmet, a topcoat\n and riding boots.\n\n\n \"You'd go over the edge, I tell you,\" the old gentleman was saying." ], [ "She sat up straight and tucked her sweater tightly into her skirt,\n emphasizing her good figure. To a male friend Don would have described\n the figure as outstanding. She had mocking eyes, a pert nose and a mouth\n of such moist red softness that it seemed perpetually waiting to be\n kissed. All in all she could have been the queen of a campus much more\n densely populated with co-eds than Cavalier was.\n\n\n \"You may call me Alis,\" she said. \"And I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\n Don grinned. \"Going on?\"\n\n\n \"Three months past. How old are\nyou\n, Mr. Cort?\"\n\n\n \"Don's the name I've had for twenty-six years. Please use it.\"\n\n\n \"Gladly. And now, Don, unless you want another cup of coffee, I'll go\n with you to the end of the world.\"", "\"I'll be careful.\" He walked cautiously toward the edge. Alis followed\n him, a few feet behind. He stopped a yard from the brink and waited for\n a spell of dizziness to pass. The Earth was spread out like a\n topographer's map, far below. Don took another wary step, then sat down.\n\n\n \"Chicken,\" said Alis. She laughed uncertainly, then she sat down, too.\n\n\n \"I still can't see where the water goes,\" Don said. He stretched out on\n his stomach and began to inch forward. \"You stay there.\"\n\n\n Finally he had inched to a point where, by stretching out a hand, he\n could almost reach the edge. He gave another wriggle and the fingers of\n his right hand closed over the brink. For a moment he lay there,\n panting, head pressed to the ground.\n\n\n \"How do you feel?\" Alis asked.", "\"Scared. When I get my courage back I'll pick up my head and look.\"\n\n\n Alis put a hand out tentatively, then purposefully took hold of his\n ankle and held it tight. \"Just in case a high wind comes along,\" she\n said.\n\n\n \"Thanks. It helps. Okay, here we go.\" He lifted his head. \"Damn.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"It still isn't clear. Do you have a pocket mirror?\"\n\n\n \"I have a compact.\" She took it out of her bag with her free hand and\n tossed it to him. It rolled and Don had to grab to keep it from going\n over the edge. Alis gave a little shriek. Don was momentarily unnerved\n and had to put his head back on the ground. \"Sorry,\" she said.", "The girl's hair was a subtle red, but false. When Don had entered the\n club car he'd seen her hatless head from above and noticed that the hair\n along the part was dark. Her eyes had been on a book and Don had the\n opportunity for a brief study of her face. The cheeks were full and\n untouched by make-up. There were lines at the corners of her mouth which\n indicated a tendency to arrange her expression into one of disapproval.\n The lips were full, like the cheeks, but it was obvious that the scarlet\n lipstick had contrived a mouth a trifle bigger than the one nature had\n given her.\n\n\n Her glance upward at that moment interrupted his examination, which had\n been about to go on to her figure. Later, though, he was able to observe\n that it was more than adequate.", "They were musing about the geography when a plane came out of a\n cloudbank and, a second later, veered sharply. They could make out UAL\n on the underside of a wing. As it turned they imagined they could see\n faces peering out of the windows. They waved and thought they saw one or\n two people wave back. Then the plane climbed toward the east and was\n gone.\n\n\n \"Well,\" Don said as they turned to go back to Cavalier, \"now we know\n that they know. Maybe we'll begin to get some answers. Or, if not\n answers, then transportation.\"\n\n\n \"Transportation?\" Alis squeezed the arm she was holding. \"Why? Don't you\n like it here?\"\n\n\n \"If you mean don't I like you, the answer is yes, of course I do. But if\n I don't get out of this handcuff soon so I can take a bath and get into\n clean clothes, you're not going to like me.\"", "\"The same,\" she said. \"Also the only. A pity, because if there'd been\n two of us I'd have had a fifty-fifty chance of going to OSU. As it is,\n I'm duty-bound to represent the second generation at the nut factory.\"\n\n\n \"Nut factory? You mean Cavalier?\" Don struggled to manipulate knife and\n fork without knocking things off the table with his clinging brief case.\n\n\n \"Here, let me cut your eggs for you,\" Alis said. \"You'd better order\n them scrambled tomorrow. Yes, Cavalier. Home of the crackpot theory and\n the latter-day alchemist.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure it's not that bad. Thanks. As for tomorrow, I hope to be out\n of here by then.\"\n\n\n \"How do you get down from an elephant? Old riddle. You don't; you get\n down from ducks. How do you plan to get down from Superior?\"", "Alis had been creaming and sugaring Don's coffee. She pushed it across\n to him and said, \"It's not on page one. Ed Clark and Mayor Civek don't\n get along, so you'll find the mayor's statement in a box on page three,\n bottom.\"", "\"On such short notice?\" Don was intrigued. Last night the redhead from\n the club car had repelled an advance that hadn't been made, and this\n morning a blonde was apparently making an advance that hadn't been\n solicited. He wondered where Geneva Jervis was, but only vaguely.\n\n\n \"I'll admit to the\ndouble entendre\n,\" Alis said. \"What I meant—for\n now—was that we can stroll out to where Superior used to be attached to\n the rest of Ohio and see how the Earth is getting along without us.\"\n\n\n \"Delighted. But don't you have any classes?\"", "\"He's a doll,\" Alis said. \"He's about the only one in town who stands up\n to Father.\"\n\n\n \"Does your father claim that\nhe\nlevitated Superior off the face of the\n Earth?\"\n\n\n \"Not to me he doesn't. I'm one of those banes of his existence, a\n skeptic. He gave up trying to magnolize me when I was sixteen. I had a\n science teacher in high school—not in Superior, incidentally—who gave\n me all kinds of embarrassing questions to ask Father. I asked them,\n being a natural-born needler, and Father has disowned me intellectually\n ever since.\"\n\n\n \"How old are you, Miss Garet, if I may ask?\"", "The brink, as Alis called it, looked even more awesome by daylight.\n Everything stopped short. There were the remnants of a cornfield, with\n the withered stalks cut down, then there was nothing. There was South\n Creek surging along, then nothing. In the distance a clump of trees,\n with a few autumn leaves still clinging to their branches, simply ended.\n\n\n \"Where is the water going?\" Don asked. \"I can't make it out.\"\n\n\n \"Down, I'd say. Rain for the Earth-people.\"\n\n\n \"I should think it'd be all dried up by now. I'm going to have a look.\"\n\n\n \"Don't! You'll fall off!\"", "\"Ed Clark's something of an eccentric, like everybody else in Superior,\"\n Alis said.\n\n\n Don read the story, which seemed to him a capricious treatment of an\n apparently grave situation.\nResidents having business beyond the outskirts of town today are\n advised not to. It's a long way down. Where Superior was surrounded by\n Ohio, as usual, today Superior ends literally at the town line.\nA Citizens' Emergency Fence-Building Committee is being formed, but in\n the meantime all are warned to stay well away from the edge. The law of\n gravity seems to have been repealed for the town but it is doubtful if\n the same exemption would apply to a dubious individual bent on\n investigating....\nDon skimmed the rest. \"I don't see anything about it being deliberate.\"", "South Creek did not bisect Superior, as Don thought it might, but flowed\n in an arc through a southern segment of it. They had about two miles to\n go, past South Creek Bridge—which used to lead to Ladenburg, Alis\n said—past Raleigh Country Club (a long drive would really put the ball\n out of play, Don thought) and on to the edge again.\n\n\n But as they approached what they were forced to consider the source of\n the creek, they found a wire fence at the spot. \"This is new,\" Alis\n said.\n\n\n The fence, which had a sign on it,\n warning—electrified\n , was\n semicircular, with each end at the edge and tarpaulins strung behind it\n so they could see the mouth of the creek. The water flowed from under\n the tarp and fence.\n\n\n \"Look how it comes in spurts,\" Alis said.\n\n\n \"As if it's being pumped.\"", "If the girl had given Don Cort more than that one glance, or if it had\n been a trained, all-encompassing glance, she would have seen a man in\n his mid-twenties—about her age—lean, tall and straight-shouldered,\n with once-blond hair now verging on dark brown, a face neither handsome\n nor ugly, and a habit of drawing the inside of his left cheek between\n his teeth and nibbling at it thoughtfully.\n\n\n But it was likely that all she noticed then was the brief case he\n carried, attached by a chain to a handcuff on his left wrist.\n\n\n \"Will we be here long?\" Don asked the conductor. He didn't want to miss\n his plane at Columbus. The sooner he got to Washington, the sooner he'd\n get rid of the brief case. The handcuff it was attached to was one\n reason why his interest in the redhead had been only passing.", "The \"explanation\" consists of a 63-page treatise on applied magnology by\n Professor Osbert Garet of Cavalier which the editor (a) does not\n understand; (b) lacks space to publish; and which (it being atrociously\n handwritten) he (c) has not the temerity to ask his linotype operator to\n set.\nDon said, \"I'm beginning to like this Ed Clark.\"", "Standing on tiptoe and repressing a touch of giddiness, Don looked over\n the edge. He didn't have to stand on tiptoe any more than he had to sit\n on the edge of his seat during the exciting part of a movie, but the\n situation seemed to call for it. Over the edge could be seen a big\n section of Ohio. At least he supposed it was Ohio.\n\n\n Don looked at the fireman, who had an unbelieving expression on his\n face, then at the bearded old man, who was smiling and nodding.\n\n\n \"You see what I mean,\" he said. \"You would have gone right over. I\n believe you would have had a two-mile fall.\"\n\"Of course you could have stayed aboard the train,\" the man driving the\n old Pontiac said, \"but I really think you'll be more comfortable at\n Cavalier.\"\n\n\n Don Cort, sitting in the back seat of the car with the redhead from the\n club car, asked, \"Cavalier?\"", "\"You're still quite acceptable, if a bit whiskery.\" She stopped, still\n holding his arm, and he turned so they were face to face. \"So kiss me,\"\n she said, \"before you deteriorate.\"\n\n\n They were in the midst of an extremely pleasant kiss when the brief case\n at the end of Don's handcuff began to talk to him.", "The conductor reckoned as how he might just do that, and did.\n\n\n \"You know,\" Don said, \"I was half-asleep last night but before the train\n stopped I thought it was running alongside a creek for a while.\"\n\n\n \"South Creek,\" Alis said. \"That's right. It's just over there.\"\n\n\n \"Is it still? I mean hasn't it all poured off the edge by now? Was that\n Superior's water supply?\"\n\n\n Alis shrugged. \"All I know is you turn on the faucet and there's water.\n Let's go look at the creek.\"\n\n\n They found it coursing along between the banks.\n\n\n \"Looks just about the same,\" she said.\n\n\n \"That's funny. Come on; let's follow it to the edge.\"", "\"Nope,\" Civek said. \"No airport. No place for a plane to land, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not a plane,\" Don said, \"but a helicopter could land just about\n anywhere.\"\n\n\n \"No helicopters here, either.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe not. But I'll bet they're swarming all over you by morning.\"\n\n\n \"Hm,\" said Hector Civek. Don couldn't quite catch his expression in the\n rearview mirror. \"I suppose they could, at that. Well, here's Cavalier.\n You go right in that door, where the others are going. There's Professor\n Garet. I've got to see him—excuse me.\"\n\n\n The mayor was off across the campus. Don looked at Geneva Jervis, who\n was frowning. \"Are you thinking,\" he asked, \"that Mayor Civek was\n perhaps just a little less than completely honest with us?\"", "\"I'm thinking,\" she said, \"that I should have stayed with Aunt Hattie\n another night, then taken a plane to Washington.\"\n\n\n \"Washington?\" Don said. \"That's where I'm going. I mean where I\nwas\ngoing before Superior became airborne. What do you do in Washington,\n Miss Jervis?\"\n\n\n \"I work for the Government. Doesn't everybody?\"\n\n\n \"Not everybody. Me, for instance.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" she said. \"Judging by that satchel you're handcuffed to, I'd have\n thought you were a courier for the Pentagon. Or maybe State.\"\n\n\n He laughed quickly and loudly because she was getting uncomfortably\n close. \"Oh, no. Nothing so glamorous. I'm a messenger for the Riggs\n National Bank, that's all. Where do you work?\"", "He took her bag in his free hand and they were met by a gray-haired\n woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Garet. \"We'll try to make you\n comfortable,\" she said. \"What a night, eh? The professor is simply\n beside himself. We haven't had so much excitement since the\n cosmolineator blew up.\"\n\n\n They had a glimpse of the professor, still in his CD helmet, going\n around a corner, gesticulating wildly to someone wearing a white\n laboratory smock.\nII\nDon Cort had slept, but not well. He had tried to fold the brief case to\n pull it through his sleeve so he could take his coat off, but whatever\n was inside the brief case was too big. Cavalier had given him a room to\n himself at one end of a dormitory and he'd taken his pants off but had\n had to sleep with his coat and shirt on. He got up, feeling gritty, and\n did what little dressing was necessary." ] ]
train	51286	[ "Why wasn't Matilda married?", "How did Matilda's mother feel about Matilda?", "What about Haron didn't excite Matilda?", "What didn't surprise Matilda about Haron's house?", "Why did Mr. Gorka let these women stay in his house?", "How didn't Matilda feel when Haron was talking?", "What is not a reason for Matilda to tell the librarian what happened?", "Why did the librarian really give every woman Mr. Gorka's address?", "Why was Mr. Gorka so strange?", "Why couldn't most people tell Matilda where Haron lived?" ]	[ [ "she hadn't met a man that wanted to marry her", "she wasn't interested in dating people", "she found flaws in every man she dated", "she only liked to write to men, not meet them" ], [ "she wanted Matilda to get married and finally move out", "she loves her daughter but wishes she'd settle with a man", "she was jealous of how her daughter handled the men she met", "she thinks Matilda is very wise in the decisions she makes" ], [ "he was egotistical", "he lived nearby", "his physical appearance", "his name" ], [ "the outside was poorly kept up", "she was fed exactly what she wanted", "it had space for six women to stay", "she was locked in her room" ], [ "he wanted to find a suitable wife", "he wanted to find a woman that would enjoy listening to him speak", "he planned to capture these women and keep them ", "he wanted to use telepathy on them" ], [ "enlightened", "frustrated", "surprised", "confused" ], [ "she had been asked to relay a message to his wife", "she wanted to tell someone her crazy story", "she wanted to make sure the librarian stayed away from him", "she had made a promise to return" ], [ "to find a woman that would really listen to him", "she wanted to hear their stories", "to prove him wrong", "to help him find a suitable companion" ], [ "he was insane", "his expectations were so high", "he wasn't who Matilda thought he was", "he was already married" ], [ "he was a very secretive person", "he hadn't been in Cedar Falls for long", "he wanted to hide from the interested women", "he used another name when out in public" ] ]	[ 3, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 3, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed\n Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over\n a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible\n bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she\n had been waiting for him.\n\n\n Matilda, you see, had patience.", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusive\n Ursula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yet\n Matilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would read\n them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine\n names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity\n to her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed,\n Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws,\n that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws\n impatiently told her to go out and get dates.\nThat particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the\n garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was\n rocking on the glider and Matilda said hello.\n\n\n The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand\n in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "\"I thought so,\" she said. \"I knew this was coming when I saw that look\n in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?\"\n\n\n Matilda smiled. \"It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darned\n stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiled\n politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth\n college reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down the\n invitation.\"\n\n\n The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. \"That was thoughtful of Herman\n to hide his feelings.\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash!\" said her daughter. \"He has no true feelings. He's sorry that\n he had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffy\n Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others.\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"" ], [ "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "The widow Penshaws smiled somewhat toothlessly, having neglected to put\n in both her uppers and lowers this early in the morning. \"I'm fixing\n breakfast, of course....\"\n\n\n Then the widow Penshaws told Matilda that she could never hope to sneak\n about the house without her mother knowing about it, and that even\n if she were going out in response to one of those foolish ads in the\n magazines, she would still need a good breakfast to start with like\n only mother could cook. Matilda moodily thanked the widow Penshaws.\nDriving the fifty miles to Cedar Falls in a little less than an hour,\n Matilda hummed Mendelssohn's Wedding March all the way. It was her\n favorite piece of music. Once, she told herself: Matilda Penshaws, you\n are being premature about the whole thing. But she laughed and thought\n that if she was, she was, and, meanwhile, she could only get to Cedar\n Falls and find out.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals.", "She also had a fetish. Matilda had received her A.B. from exclusive\n Ursula Johns College and Radcliff had yielded her Masters degree, yet\n Matilda was an avid follower of the pen pal columns. She would read\n them carefully and then read them again, looking for the masculine\n names which, through a system known only to Matilda, had an affinity\n to her own. To the gentlemen upon whom these names were affixed,\n Matilda would write, and she often told her mother, the widow Penshaws,\n that it was in this way she would find her husband. The widow Penshaws\n impatiently told her to go out and get dates.\nThat particular night, Matilda pulled her battered old sedan into the\n garage and walked up the walk to the porch. The widow Penshaws was\n rocking on the glider and Matilda said hello.\n\n\n The first thing the widow Penshaws did was to take Matilda's left hand\n in her own and examine the next-to-the-last finger.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "\"I thought so,\" she said. \"I knew this was coming when I saw that look\n in your eye at dinner. Where is Herman's engagement ring?\"\n\n\n Matilda smiled. \"It wouldn't have worked out, Ma. He was too darned\n stuffy. I gave him his ring and said thanks anyway and he smiled\n politely and said he wished I had told him sooner because his fifteenth\n college reunion was this weekend and he had already turned down the\n invitation.\"\n\n\n The widow Penshaws nodded regretfully. \"That was thoughtful of Herman\n to hide his feelings.\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash!\" said her daughter. \"He has no true feelings. He's sorry that\n he had to miss his college reunion. That's all he has to hide. A stuffy\n Victorian prude and even less of a man than the others.\"", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"" ], [ "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "The fact that in all probability such a man did not exist disturbed\n Matilda not in the least. She had been known to say that there are over\n a billion men in the world, a goodly percentage of whom are eligible\n bachelors, and that the right one would come along simply because she\n had been waiting for him.\n\n\n Matilda, you see, had patience.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button." ], [ "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft\n sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed\n almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup,\n mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a\n parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.\nMatilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her\n salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact\n that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be\n attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was\n extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic\n servant.", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"" ], [ "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "\"I am Mrs. Gorka.\"\n\n\n The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer\n and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. \"You\n see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.\"\n\n\n Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for\n anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two.\n\n\n \"We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star\n system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He\n says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the\n accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he\n loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of\n the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given\n the opportunity just to listen to him.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "\"If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still\n could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me\n faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will\n do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one\n of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each\n have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture\n considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share\n of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?\"", "\"You want any food or drink,\" the servant told her, \"and you just press\n that button. The results will surprise you.\"\n\n\n \"What about Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to\n home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.\"\n\n\n A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He\n closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears\n had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open\n it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who's really been around, whose\n universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a\n provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be\n intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a\n lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful\n opportunity cultural experience ... Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, Ill.\n\n\n The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had\n never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something\n about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded\n as though he would have reason indeed. He only wanted the best because\n he was the best. Like calls to like." ], [ "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "\"Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and\n teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you\n press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines\n how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the\n adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that\n you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if\n Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.\n\n\n \"Ready?\"\n\n\n \"Uh—ready.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"What would you like me to talk about?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, anything.\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "She heard the whir of machinery. A moment later there was a soft\n sliding sound. Through the slot first came a delicious aroma, followed\n almost instantly by a tray. On the tray were a bowl of turtle soup,\n mashed potatoes, green peas, bread, a strange cocktail, root-beer, a\n parfait—and a thick tenderloin sizzling in hot butter sauce.\nMatilda gasped once and felt about to gasp again—but by then her\n salivary glands were working overtime, and she ate her meal. The fact\n that it was precisely what she would have wanted could, of course, be\n attributed to coincidence, and the further fact that everything was\n extremely palatable made her forget all about Haron Gorka's neurotic\n servant.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"" ], [ "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "This she did, but it was unrewarding. Cedar Falls had what might be\n called a microscopic library, and Matilda thought that if this small\n building were filled with microfilm rather than books, the library\n still would be lacking. Hence she retraced her steps and nodded to the\n old librarian as she passed.\nThen Matilda frowned. Twenty years from now, this could be Matilda\n Penshaws—complete with plain gray dress, rimless spectacles, gray\n hair, suspicious eyes, and a broom-stick figure....", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "Matilda was not yet that far gone in years or appearance. Dressed\n properly, she could hope to make a favorable impression in person, and\n she felt it was important to beat the influx of mail to Cedar Falls.\nMatilda got out of bed at seven, tiptoed into the bathroom, showered\n with a merest wary trickle of water, tiptoed back into her bedroom,\n dressed in her very best cotton over the finest of uplifting and\n figure-moulding underthings, made sure her stocking seams were\n perfectly straight, brushed her suede shoes, admired herself in the\n mirror, read the ad again, wished for a moment she were a bit younger,\n and tiptoed downstairs.\n\n\n The widow Penshaws met her at the bottom of the stairwell.\n\n\n \"Mother,\" gasped Matilda. Matilda always gasped when she saw something\n unexpected. \"What on earth are you doing up?\"", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "She shut off the shower, brushed her teeth, gargled, patted herself\n dry with a towel, and jumped into bed, careful to lock the door of her\n bedroom. She dared not let the widow Penshaws know that she slept in\n the nude; the widow Penshaws would object to a girl sleeping in the\n nude, even if the nearest neighbor was three hundred yards away.\n\n\n Matilda switched her bed lamp on and dabbed some citronella on each\n ear lobe and a little droplet on her chin (how she hated insects!).\n Then she propped up her pillows—two pillows partially stopped her\n post-nasal drip; and took the latest issue of the\nLiterary Review\noff the night table.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"But, Matilda, that's your fifth broken engagement in three years. It\n ain't that you ain't popular, but you just don't want to cooperate.\n You don't\nfall\nin love, Matilda—no one does. Love osmoses into you\n slowly, without you even knowing, and it keeps growing all the time.\"\n\n\n Matilda admired her mother's use of the word osmosis, but she found\n nothing which was not objectionable about being unaware of the impact\n of love. She said good-night and went upstairs, climbed out of her\n light summer dress and took a cold shower.\n\n\n She began to hum to herself. She had not yet seen the pen pal section\n of the current\nLiterary Review\n, and because the subject matter of\n that magazine was somewhat highbrow and cosmopolitan, she could expect\n a gratifying selection of pen pals.", "\"You want any food or drink,\" the servant told her, \"and you just press\n that button. The results will surprise you.\"\n\n\n \"What about Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"When he wants you, he will send for you. Meanwhile, make yourself to\n home, lady, and I will tell him you are here.\"\n\n\n A little doubtful now, Matilda thanked him and watched him leave. He\n closed the door softly behind his retreating feet, but Matilda's ears\n had not missed the ominous click. She ran to the door and tried to open\n it, but it would not budge. It was locked—from the outside.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "poaching in a strictly forbidden territory!\nThe best that could be said for Matilda Penshaws was that she was\n something of a paradox. She was thirty-three years old, certainly not\n aged when you consider the fact that the female life expectancy is now\n up in the sixties, but the lines were beginning to etch their permanent\n paths across her face and now she needed certain remedial undergarments\n at which she would have scoffed ten or even five years ago. Matilda was\n also looking for a husband.\n\n\n This, in itself, was not unusual—but Matilda was so completely\n wrapped up in the romantic fallacy of her day that she sought a prince\n charming, a faithful Don Juan, a man who had been everywhere and tasted\n of every worldly pleasure and who now wanted to sit on a porch and\n talk about it all to Matilda." ], [ "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "\"I am Mrs. Gorka.\"\n\n\n The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer\n and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. \"You\n see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.\"\n\n\n Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for\n anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two.\n\n\n \"We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star\n system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He\n says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the\n accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he\n loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of\n the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given\n the opportunity just to listen to him.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "Intelligent, somewhat egotistical male who's really been around, whose\n universal experience can make the average cosmopolite look like a\n provincial hick, is in need of several female correspondents: must be\n intelligent, have gumption, be capable of listening to male who has a\n lot to say and wants to say it. All others need not apply. Wonderful\n opportunity cultural experience ... Haron Gorka, Cedar Falls, Ill.\n\n\n The man was egotistical, all right; Matilda could see that. But she had\n never minded an egotistical man, at least not when he had something\n about which he had a genuine reason to be egotistical. The man sounded\n as though he would have reason indeed. He only wanted the best because\n he was the best. Like calls to like." ], [ "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "She would not admit even to herself that she was disappointed with\n Haron Gorka. It was not that he was homely and unimpressive; it was\n just that he was so\nordinary\n-looking. She almost would have preferred\n the monster of her dreams.\nHe wore a white linen suit and he had mousy hair, drab eyes, an\n almost-Roman nose, a petulant mouth with the slight arch of the egotist\n at each corner.\n\n\n He said, \"Greetings. You have come—\"\n\n\n \"In response to your ad. How do you do, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n She hoped she wasn't being too formal. But, then, there was no sense in\n assuming that he would like informality. She could only wait and see\n and adjust her own actions to suit him. Meanwhile, it would be best to\n keep on the middle of the road.\n\n\n \"I am fine. Are you ready?\"\n\n\n \"Ready?\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"If I can't enjoy an association with Haron Gorka directly, I still\n could get the vicarious pleasure of your contact with him. Report to me\n faithfully and you'll get his address. That's what the other five will\n do, and with half a dozen of you, I'll get an overall picture. Each one\n of you will tell me about Haron Gorka, sparing no details. You each\n have a distinct personality, of course, and it will color each picture\n considerably. But with six of you reporting, I should receive my share\n of vicarious enjoyment. Is it—ah—a deal?\"", "\"Eh? What say? Oh, yes, naturally. A combination of telepathy and\n teleportation. The synthetic cookery is attuned to your mind when you\n press the buzzer, and the strength of your psychic impulses determines\n how closely the meal will adjust to your desires. The fact that the\n adjustment here was near perfect is commendable. It means either that\n you have a high psi-quotient, or that you were very hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" said Matilda vaguely. Perhaps it might be better, after all, if\n Haron Gorka were to talk to her as he saw fit.\n\n\n \"Ready?\"\n\n\n \"Uh—ready.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Well, what, Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"What would you like me to talk about?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, anything.\"", "\"I am Mrs. Gorka.\"\n\n\n The librarian stood up and came around the desk. She opened a drawer\n and took out her hat and perched it jauntily atop her gray hair. \"You\n see, my dear, Haron expects too much. He expects entirely too much.\"\n\n\n Matilda did not say a word. One madman a day would be quite enough for\n anybody, but here she found herself confronted with two.\n\n\n \"We've been tripping for centuries, visiting every habitable star\n system from our home near Canopus. But Haron is too demanding. He\n says I am a finicky traveler, that he could do much better alone, the\n accommodations have to be just right for me, and so forth. When he\n loses his temper, he tries to convince me that any number of females of\n the particular planet would be more than thrilled if they were given\n the opportunity just to listen to him.", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart." ], [ "\"Are you? Well. Well, well.\" The librarian did something with the back\n of her hair, but it looked the same as before. \"Maybe you're right.\n Maybe you're right at that.\" Then she sighed. \"But I guess a miss is as\n good as a mile.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"I mean anyone would like to correspond with Haron Gorka. Or to know\n him well. To be considered his friend. Haron Gorka....\"\n\n\n The librarian seemed about to soar off into the air someplace, and if\n five women had been here first, Matilda was now definitely in a hurry.\n\n\n \"Um, where can I find Mr. Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not supposed to do this, you know. We're not permitted to give the\n addresses of any of our people. Against regulations, my dear.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other five women?\"", "It must be said to Matilda's favor that she sobbed only once. After\n that she realized that what is done is done and here, past thirty,\n she wasn't going to be girlishly timid about it. Besides, it was not\n her fault if, in his unconcern, Haron Gorka had unwittingly hired a\n neurotic servant.\n\n\n For a time Matilda paced back and forth in her room, and of what was\n going on outside she could hear nothing. In that case, she would\n pretend that there was nothing outside the little room, and presently\n she lay down on the bed to take a nap. This didn't last long, however:\n she had a nightmare in which Haron Gorka appeared as a giant with two\n heads, but, upon awaking with a start, she immediately ascribed that to\n her overwrought nerves.", "Matilda assured her that it was, and, breathlessly, she wrote down the\n address. She thanked the librarian and then she went out to her car,\n whistling to herself.\nHaron Gorka lived in what could have been an agrarian estate, except\n that the land no longer was being tilled. The house itself had fallen\n to ruin. This surprised Matilda, but she did not let it keep her\n spirits in check. Haron Gorka, the man, was what counted, and the\n librarian's account of him certainly had been glowing enough. Perhaps\n he was too busy with his cultural pursuits to pay any real attention to\n his dwelling. That was it, of course: the conspicuous show of wealth or\n personal industry meant nothing at all to Haron Gorka. Matilda liked\n him all the more for it.", "On the other hand—why not? Why couldn't the librarian help her? Why\n hadn't she thought of it before? Certainly a man as well-educated as\n Haron Gorka would be an avid reader, and unless he had a permanent\n residence here in Cedar Palls, one couldn't expect that he'd have his\n own library with him. This being the case, a third-rate collection\n of books was far better than no collection at all, and perhaps the\n librarian would know Mr. Haron Gorka.\n\n\n Matilda cleared her throat. \"Pardon me,\" she began. \"I'm looking for—\"\n\n\n \"Haron Gorka.\" The librarian nodded.\n\n\n \"How on earth did you know?\"", "As she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the driveway, she saw\n the servant leaving, too. Far down the road, he was walking slowly.\n Then Haron Gorka had severed that relationship, too, and now he was all\n alone.\n\n\n As she drove back to town, the disappointment melted slowly away. There\n were, of course, two alternatives. Either Haron Gorka was an eccentric\n who enjoyed this sort of outlandish tomfoolery, or else he was plainly\n insane. She could still picture him ranting on aimlessly to no one in\n particular about places which had no existence outside of his mind, his\n voice high-pitched and eager.\nIt was not until she had passed the small library building that she\n remembered what she had promised the librarian. In her own way, the\n aging woman would be as disappointed as Matilda, but a promise was a\n promise, and Matilda turned the car in a wide U-turn and parked it\n outside the library.", "The name—Haron Gorka: its oddness was somehow beautiful to Matilda.\n Haron Gorka—the nationality could be anything. And that was it. He had\n no nationality for all intents and purposes; he was an international\n man, a figure among figures, a paragon....\n\n\n Matilda sighed happily as she put out the light. The moon shone in\n through the window brightly, and at such times Matilda generally would\n get up, go to the cupboard, pull out a towel, take two hairpins from\n her powder drawer, pin the towel to the screen of her window, and hence\n keep the disturbing moonlight from her eyes. But this time it did not\n disturb her, and she would let it shine. Cedar Falls was a small town\n not fifty miles from her home, and she'd get there a hop, skip, and\n jump ahead of her competitors, simply by arriving in person instead of\n writing a letter.", "The woman sat at her desk as Matilda had remembered her, gray,\n broom-stick figure, rigid. But now when she saw Matilda she perked up\n visibly.\n\n\n \"Hello, my dear,\" she said.\n\n\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"You're back a bit sooner than I expected. But, then, the other five\n have returned, too, and I imagine your story will be similar.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know what they told you,\" Matilda said. \"But this is what\n happened to me.\"\n\n\n She quickly then related everything which had happened, completely and\n in detail. She did this first because it was a promise, and second\n because she knew it would make her feel better.\n\n\n \"So,\" she finished, \"Haron Gorka is either extremely eccentric or\n insane. I'm sorry.\"", "And so she got there.\n\n\n The man in the wire cage at the Cedar Falls post office was a\n stereotype. Matilda always liked to think in terms of stereotypes. This\n man was small, roundish, florid of face, with a pair of eyeglasses\n which hung too far down on his nose. Matilda knew he would peer over\n his glasses and answer questions grudgingly.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" said Matilda.\n\n\n The stereotype grunted and peered at her over his glasses. Matilda\n asked him where she could find Haron Gorka.\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"I said, where can I find Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Is that in the United States?\"\n\n\n \"It's not a that; it's a he. Where can I find him? Where does he live?\n What's the quickest way to get there?\"", "When she finished her meal a pleasant lethargy possessed her, and in a\n little while Matilda was asleep again. This time she did not dream at\n all. It was a deep sleep and a restful one, and when she awoke it was\n with the wonderful feeling that everything was all right.\nThe feeling did not last long. Standing over her was Haron Gorka's\n servant, and he said, \"Mr. Gorka will see you now.\"\n\n\n \"Now?\"\n\n\n \"Now. That's what you're here for, isn't it?\"\n\n\n He had a point there, but Matilda hardly even had time to fix her hair.\n She told the servant so.\n\n\n \"Miss,\" he replied, \"I assure you it will not matter in the least to\n Haron Gorka. You are here and he is ready to see you and that is all\n that matters.\"\n\n\n \"You sure?\" Matilda wanted to take no chances.", "The stereotype pushed up his glasses and looked at her squarely. \"Now\n take it easy, ma'am. First place, I don't know any Haron Gorka—\"\n\n\n Matilda kept the alarm from creeping into her voice. She muttered an\noh\nunder her breath and took out the ad. This she showed to the\n stereotype, and he scratched his bald head. Then he told Matilda almost\n happily that he was sorry he couldn't help her. He grudgingly suggested\n that if it really were important, she might check with the police.\n\n\n Matilda did, only they didn't know any Haron Gorka, either. It turned\n out that no one did: Matilda tried the general store, the fire\n department, the city hall, the high school, all three Cedar Falls gas\n stations, the livery stable, and half a dozen private dwellings at\n random. As far us the gentry of Cedar Falls was concerned, Haron Gorka\n did not exist.", "\"That's easy. You're the sixth young woman who came here inquiring\n about that man today. Six of you—five others in the morning, and now\n you in the afternoon. I never did trust this Mr. Gorka....\"\n\n\n Matilda jumped as if she had been struck strategically from the rear.\n \"You know him? You know Haron Gorka?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Of course I know him. He's our steadiest reader here at\n the library. Not a week goes by that he doesn't take out three, four\n books. Scholarly gentleman, but not without charm. If I were twenty\n years younger—\"\n\n\n Matilda thought a little flattery might be effective. \"Only ten,\" she\n assured the librarian. \"Ten years would be more than sufficient, I'm\n sure.\"", "Matilda felt bad, but she had no intention of returning home this\n early. If she could not find Haron Gorka, that was one thing; but she\n knew that she'd rather not return home and face the widow Penshaws, at\n least not for a while yet. The widow Penshaws meant well, but she liked\n to analyze other people's mistakes, especially Matilda's.\n\n\n Accordingly, Matilda trudged wearily toward Cedar Falls' small and\n unimposing library. She could release some of her pent-up aggression by\n browsing through the dusty slacks.", "There were five cars parked in the long driveway, and now Matilda's\n made the sixth. In spite of herself, she smiled. She had not been the\n only one with the idea to visit Haron Gorka in person. With half a\n dozen of them there, the laggards who resorted to posting letters would\n be left far behind. Matilda congratulated herself for what she thought\n had been her ingenuity, and which now turned out to be something which\n she had in common with five other women. You live and learn, thought\n Matilda. And then, quite annoyedly, she berated herself for not having\n been the first. Perhaps the other five all were satisfactory; perhaps\n she wouldn't be needed; perhaps she was too late....\nAs it turned out, she wasn't. Not only that, she was welcomed with open", "\"Stop!\"\n\n\n \"What's that? Making fun of you?\" Haron Gorka's voice had been so\n eager as he spoke, high-pitched, almost like a child's, and now he\n seemed disappointed. He smiled, but it was a sad smile, a smile of\n resignation, and he said, \"Very well. I'm wrong again. You are the\n sixth, and you're no better than the other five. Perhaps you are even\n more outspoken. When you see my wife, tell her to come back. Again she\n is right and I am wrong....\"\n\n\n Haron Gorka turned his back.\n\n\n Matilda could do nothing but leave the room, walk back through the\n house, go outside and get into her car. She noticed not without\n surprise that the other five cars were now gone. She was the last of\n Haron Gorka's guests to depart.", "\"Yes. Come.\"\n\n\n She followed him out of the little room and across what should have\n been a spacious dining area, except that everything seemed covered with\n dust. Of the other women Matilda could see nothing, and she suddenly\n realized that each of them probably had a cubicle of a room like her\n own, and that each in her turn had already had her first visit with\n Haron Gorka. Well, then, she must see to it that she impressed him\n better than did all the rest, and, later, when she returned to tell the\n old librarian of her adventures, she could perhaps draw her out and\n compare notes.", "They were mad, all right, and now Matilda wondered if, actually,\n they were husband and wife. It could readily be; maybe the madness\n was catching. Maybe if you thought too much about such things, such\n travels, you could get that way. Of course, Herman represented the\n other extreme, and Herman was even worse in his own way—but hereafter\n Matilda would seek the happy medium.\n\n\n And, above all else, she had had enough of her pen pal columns. They\n were, she realized, for kids.\nShe ate dinner in Cedar Falls and then she went out to her car again,\n preparing for the journey back home. The sun had set and it was a clear\n night, and overhead the great broad sweep of the Milky Way was a pale\n rainbow bridge in the sky.\n\n\n Matilda paused. Off in the distance there was a glow on the horizon,\n and that was the direction of Haron Gorka's place.", "\"Certainly. You came in response to my ad. You want to hear me talk, do\n you not?\"\n\n\n \"I—do.\" Matilda had had visions of her prince charming sitting back\n and relaxing with her, telling her of the many things he had done and\n seen. But first she certainly would have liked to get to\nknow\nthe\n man. Well, Haron Gorka obviously had more experience along these lines\n than she did. He waited, however, as if wondering what to say, and\n Matilda, accustomed to social chatter, gave him a gambit.\n\n\n \"I must admit I was surprised when I got exactly what I wanted for\n dinner,\" she told him brightly.", "\"He's neither,\" the librarian contradicted. \"Perhaps he is slightly\n eccentric by your standards, but really, my dear, he is neither.\"\n\n\n \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\n \"Did he leave a message for his wife?\"\n\n\n \"Why, yes. Yes, he did. But how did you know? Oh, I suppose he told the\n five.\"\n\n\n \"No. He didn't. But you were the last and I thought he would give you a\n message for his wife—\"\n\n\n Matilda didn't understand. She didn't understand at all, but she told\n the little librarian what the message was. \"He wanted her to return,\"\n she said.\n\n\n The librarian nodded, a happy smile on her lips. \"You wouldn't believe\n me if I told you something.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"", "\"They convinced me that I ought to give them his address.\"\n\n\n Matilda reached into her pocket-book and withdrew a five dollar bill.\n \"Was this the way?\" she demanded. Matilda was not very good at this\n sort of thing.\n\n\n The librarian shook her head.\n\n\n Matilda nodded shrewdly and added a twin brother to the bill in her\n hand. \"Then is this better?\"\n\n\n \"That's worse. I wouldn't take your money—\"\n\n\n \"Sorry. What then?\"", "arms. Not by Haron Gorka; that she really might have liked. Instead,\n someone she could only regard as a menial met her, and when he asked\n had she come in response to the advertisement, she nodded eagerly.\n He told her that was fine and he ushered her straight into a room\n which evidently was to be her living quarters. It contained a small\n undersized bed, a table, and a chair, and, near a little slot in the\n wall, there was a button." ] ]
train	20032	[ "What do critiques 2 and 5 have in common?", "What theme would critiques 6 and 7 agree with?", "What would likely happen if Harris begins legally selling women's eggs?", "What isn't something Harris claims he'll do?", "What wouldn't 10 and 11 critics agree on?", "What would 12 and 13 critics agree on?", "What does 14 mention that no other critiques mention?", "Which word would the author not use to describe Harris?", "Which isn't true?" ]	[ [ "they both believe that the models won't be truthful", "they both believe that egg auctions will create beautiful babies", "they both believe that people will get their hopes too high", "they both believe that bad genes could come through" ], [ "beauty isn't everything", "people will do anything for beauty", "beauty is beneficial", "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" ], [ "he would have an influx of buyers", "he would have more egg donors than egg buyers", "he would make millions off of commissions", "no one would show interest in his website" ], [ "provide pictures of the egg donors", "guarantee the quality of the eggs he's selling", "take commission on all eggs sold", "make money off of monthly subscriptions" ], [ "Harris will do anything to make money", "Harris doesn't care about his donors", "Harris has gotten attention because of this plan", "Harris will make a lot of money from his website" ], [ "the internet needs to have a limit as to what it can do", "people are going to buy eggs and be disappointed", "buying and selling eggs online is unethical", "purchasing eggs online is a bad idea" ], [ "parents may be disappointed by the child born", "people aren't thinking about the long-term", "the children born may not be beautiful", "this may have a negative impact on the children" ], [ "shallow", "selfish", "intelligent", "motivated" ], [ "Ron Harris is looking for fame and fortune", "models aren't interested in giving Harris their eggs", "the critics don't agree with each other", "the critics believe the egg auction is bad" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 4, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"" ], [ "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"" ], [ "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices." ], [ "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"" ], [ "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"" ], [ "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself." ], [ "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"" ], [ "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other.", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"" ], [ "Harris constantly refers to the donors as his \"girls\" and describes them like cattle--\"We have a legitimate bid of $42,000 on one of the girls.\" He gets a 20 percent commission on each winning bid, though he takes no responsibility for executing financial transactions or medical procedures. \"We have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items,\" he stipulates. His role, he explains, is simply to \"find beautiful girls, take beautiful photographs of them, [and] put them up on the Web.\" To some critics, the mystery isn't, as Harris suggests, how women throughout history have exploited their sexual power over men, but how pimps like him have come away with the profit.", "7. Beauty is less meaningful than intelligence. Harris says he's not the first person to market good genes. Others, he notes, have sold sperm and solicited eggs on the basis of the donor's intelligence. Harris' detractors reply that beauty is \"superficial\" and conveys a \"harmful preoccupation with exterior appearances over intelligence and content of character.\" This critique is usually offered by a blow-dried TV interviewer who, after thanking Harris for his time, urges viewers to stay tuned for the movie starlet who will join the program after a brief commercial break.", "5. Egg auctions will fail to promote the survival of the unfittest. Many models, if not most, have had cosmetic surgery. A model who is perfectly ruthless will conceal this fact when selling her eggs. (One of Harris' \"angels\" has already been caught lying about her age.) How does Harris know whether his models have had collagen injections and nose jobs? \"There's no way to know that. You can ask the girl and hope she tells you the truth,\" he says. Annas concludes that since there's \"no way to know how much of their beauty is a product of their genes, plastic surgery, a makeup artist, or exercise,\" only a \"naive\" person would buy their eggs on the basis of the photographs displayed on the site. \"You don't want to see the models,\" he points out. \"You want to see pictures of their parents.\" On this theory, children produced by the egg auction are likely to be the offspring of liars on one side and fools on the other.", "This critique challenges two precepts of Harris' worldview. First, while pretending to accept human nature as a given, he violates it by peddling strangers' eggs and encouraging the production of children who will probably never know their mothers. Family association, loyalty, and love are among the best parts of human nature. Slavish catering to physically attractive strangers is among the worst. If we're going to challenge human nature, the critics ask, why not start with the latter rather than the former? \n\n Second, Harris assumes that the perfection parents want in their children coincides with Darwinian perfection. \"Every organism is trying to evolve to its most perfect state,\" he writes. What he doesn't seem to understand is that human beings aren't quite like other animals, just as the rest of the world isn't exactly like the modeling and soft-porn industries of Southern California. Humans have evolved to a stage at which our ideas about virtue, perfection, and success have become more than material. At least, most of us have.", "15. Other people's eggs don't pass on your genes. In defense of his auction, Harris quotes author Helen Fisher's statement that \"having sex is the most important act of your life. This is how we get our genes to the next generation.\" But Harris seems to have overlooked the crucial words: \"our genes.\" \"The drive to send your own genes into tomorrow is much stronger than the [drive] to pick out of a sperm bank or egg site,\" Fisher observes. This consideration may not affect single men, but it can be a decisive turnoff for couples. On this view, Harris' mistake is not that he focuses too much on selfishness, but that he neglects it. He forgets that you don't care about reproducing unless what you're reproducing is yourself.", "6. Beauty doesn't convey health. Harris casually asserts that beauty \"shows healthiness and longevity.\" On his site, he writes, \" 'Natural Selection' is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful.\" Skeptics question this assumed equivalence, noting that traits men find attractive in women these days--thinness, for example--are often unhealthy. When asked on the Today show how much \"medical screening\" he has given his egg donors, Harris answered, \"None.\"", "16. The power of beauty should be transcended, not exploited. Harris preaches that the world rewards beauty because it's human nature to favor those who are pleasant to look at, and therefore the way to have successful children is to make sure they're attractive. The most ambitious response is to attack the whole \"prejudice\" in favor of beauty. \"The standards of beauty do vary with the culture. And they are social facts, not really genetics facts,\" says Hastings Center ethicist Bruce Jennings. Therefore, \"we should think about\" whether to \"accept the existing prejudices and then try to eugenically manipulate them\" or to transcend those prejudices.", "10. The auction exploits desperate sellers. By late Monday, Harris had only a handful of bids, and only one was verified as legitimate. On the other hand, 50 women had asked him to put their eggs up for auction. Gradually, the media concluded that the donors were the true victims. USA Today described the models as \"struggling actresses,\" reported that they were unaware of the health risks of donating eggs, and quoted one as saying, \"I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse .\" Harris' sole verified bidder told the paper that selling eggs was \"better than prostitution.\"", "11. The auction exploits voyeurs. The Washington Post thinks Harris isn't targeting either buyers or sellers. He's not serious about selling eggs, says the Post . He's just using the sex appeal of his models and the intriguing perversity of a human egg auction to drum up publicity and attract Internet traffic to his site, from which he can sell advertising and subscriptions ($24.95 a month to view profiles of the models), hawk his forthcoming book ( Naked Power ), and direct prurient visitors to his various porn sites. A spokesman for fertility doctors suspects that ronsangels.com is really aimed at \"adolescent boys.\"", "8. Beauty is less useful than intelligence. Harris advertises beauty not as an end but as a means to \"success,\" since people who are physically desirable get more attention, power, and favorable treatment. Having chided Harris for exalting social advantage over \"character,\" critics turn around and adopt his ruthless logic. While conceding that beauty is useful, they argue that intelligence is a better weapon in today's meritocratic information economy--and that although Harris claims his models are \"beautiful, healthy and intelligent,\" he offers no evidence of brains, such as IQ or SAT scores. London's Independent envisions \"Bimbo births.\" A fertility expert shrugs, \"If people want to spend $150,000 for the eggs of a gorgeous woman who has an IQ of 68, let them.\"", "14. Egg buyers will reap unintended consequences. Sophisticated skeptics point out that Harris' application of Darwin's theories to human professional success overlooks the interaction of genetics and human psychology. To begin with, if a child produced by Harris' auction fails to turn out as pretty as the buyer expected, the buyer may shun the child, or the child may grow to hate herself for disappointing her parents. (On the Today show, Harris said of this theory, \"That's a pretty cynical view of human nature.\") Second, if the child turns out pretty but doesn't want to be a beauty queen, her parents may force her in that direction anyway, thereby stifling her true talents and preventing her from becoming successful. Third, the child's good looks may attract too much attention of the wrong kind, eventually destroying her. Critics cite Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe as examples.", "2. Egg auctions will fail to produce designer babies. While fretting about what will happen if Harris succeeds, fertility experts simultaneously debunk that scenario. \"Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture,\" observes ethicist George Annas. The experts give four reasons. First, the child of an ugly man and a pretty woman is just as likely to be ugly as to be pretty. Second, everyone carries \"recessive\" genes, which are invisible in this generation but may become visible in the next. A model with a small nose can pass on genes for a big nose. Third, even if both parents are attractive, a child can combine their features unattractively. For example, a girl can inherit her mother's weak nose and her father's strong brow.", "3. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the fittest. Doomsayers predict that once \"beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them,\" the rich will transform themselves into a \"super-race\" reminiscent of the Nazis. To this, Harris replies, \"It is not our intention to suggest that we make a super society of only beautiful people. This site simply mirrors our current society, in that beauty usually goes to the highest bidder.\" But this reply only fuels concern that gradually, society will separate into \"genetic haves and have nots.\"", "9. The auction exploits desperate buyers. Harris preaches pure capitalism, saying it's \"unfair to put a limit on a girl's ability to make money\" by auctioning her eggs. In turn, fertility clinic operators accuse Harris of \"taking advantage of couples trying to conceive\" and exploiting \"desperate people ... susceptible to the dreams he is trying to sell.\" USA Today laments, \"This is about human need. And human greed.\"", "13. The Internet cheats people of their monstrous purchases. The only thing worse than buying human eggs on the Internet, according to the critics, is not getting the eggs you paid for. \"When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud,\" a computer crime expert warns USA Today . Lori Andrews, a reproductive technology lawyer, warns CNN viewers that \"there's very little that you can do to prove that these eggs actually came from the donors that were expected,\" and \"the Internet just adds ... a layer that it makes it even more difficult to scrutinize where the eggs are coming from.\"", "12. The Internet facilitates monstrous purchases. Technology watchdogs call the egg auction another chapter in the cultural slide marked by Jennycam (a Web site featuring live video of a young woman undressing and doing other normal activities in her apartment), the promised Webcast of a man and woman losing their virginity together (which turned out to be a hoax), and a human kidney auction that was conducted and aborted on eBay last month. \"Ever since the Internet, it seems to snowball more rapidly, this depersonalization of people and selling of eggs,\" one fertility expert complains to the New York Times . USA Today says the egg auction \"just might force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?\"", "4. Egg auctions will promote the survival of the unfittest. Harris writes that only men with \"substantial financial resources\" are fit to give his models' offspring \"a financially secure and stable life.\" But skeptics wonder whether women who sell their eggs to the highest bidder--and men who buy these eggs for the sole purpose of spawning good-looking children--may produce children just as dysfunctional as themselves. As Calgary Sun columnist Sydney Sharpe put it, \"Any woman ... who enters into this mephistophelian pact has a few screws loose. Maybe her kid will, too. Not to mention the buyers who sign her up.\"", "1. Egg auctions will produce designer babies. Harris cites his experience as a horse breeder and asks, \"We bid for everything else in this society--why not eggs?\" Alarmists, agreeing that Harris \"can put you into your own designer baby by selling eggs,\" predict that his success will steer \"the future of human breeding\" toward \"genetic engineering.\"", "eBabe \n\n This week, soft-porn entrepreneur Ron Harris began auctioning the eggs of fashion models on the Internet. His site, ronsangels.com (named after the 1970s' babe show Charlie's Angels ), invites visitors to \"bid on eggs from beautiful, healthy and intelligent women.\" Like Dr. Richard Seed, who recently declared his intention to clone human beings, Harris has attracted the attention of the media and politicians who are \"looking into\" whether he can be stopped. Most people agree that Harris is a creep and that his site is an outrage. What they don't agree on is why. Here's what the critics have to say about the auction--and each other." ] ]
train	51407	[ "The first paragraph in the passage foreshadows which theme of \"Sea Legs\"? ", "What is the purpose of paraoxynebutal?", "Which activity is part of the psychometric evaluation?", "What happened to Morgan Brockman by the end of the passage?", "Why is it important to watch the ones who don't become physically ill during the conditioning process?", "Upon landing, Craig is greeted by whom?", "The denizens of Terra would most likely make fun of Craig for his ______.", "Sensatia most likely refers to ________." ]	[ [ "Society tends to neglect those who have served", "If you don't like it, you can always leave", "The grass is always greener on the other side", "People shouldn't count on places to stay the same" ], [ "It relaxes the sympathetic nervous system", "It puts a human to sleep for up to 12 days", "It helps people adjust to changes in gravity", "It opens the airways to allow for easier breathing" ], [ "A trial period of exposure to gravity conditions on Terra", "Role playing worst case scenarios on Terra", "Exposure to video and audio footage from Terra", "Lengthy interviews with multiple officials who have been to Terra" ], [ "He died on the way to Terra", "His ex-wife Ethel had him assassinated", "He refused to leave his cot after conditioning", "He was arrested for being a Freedomite" ], [ "They could be tapped as leaders for Freedomite missions", "It is a sign that they are deviant extraterrestrials", "Their bodies' familiarity with gravity naturally makes them suspicious ", "Their bodies may naturally produce paraoxynebutal" ], [ "A reporter and his cameraman", "Two members of Terra's welcoming committee", "Two screening technicians", "A psychologist and his assistant" ], [ "clothing", "accent", "posture", "walking" ], [ "illicit drugs", "microphone shorters", "pornography", "virtual reality equipment" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 1, 1, 3, 3, 1, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "SEA LEGS\nBy FRANK QUATTROCCHI\n\n\n Illustrated by EMSH\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction November 1951.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nRootless and footloose, a man in space can't help\n \nbut dream of coming home. But something nobody should\n \ndo is bet on the validity of a homesick dream!\nFlight Officer Robert Craig surrendered the tube containing his service\n record tapes and stood waiting while the bored process clerk examined\n the seal.\n\n\n \"Your clearance,\" said the clerk.", "\"I know all about this, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have\n experienced it briefly.\"\n\n\n \"I expect to have some trouble at first.\" Craig was disturbed by the\n wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?\n\n\n \"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'\" asked\n Wyandotte. \"Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling\n horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal\n didn't roll any more.", "\"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had\n 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried\n up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never\n stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.\n\n\n \"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It\n sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't\n become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves\n you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup\n out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of\n split leather.", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of\n ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some\n conditioning.\"\n\n\n \"Conditioning?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to\n a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade....\"\n\n\n \"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why\n all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps\n suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of\n conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important\n part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity\n principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose\n function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first.\"", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "\"\nWouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.\n\"\nRobert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the\n cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it\n difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he\n refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were\n then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a\n small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the\n carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched\n as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for\n irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it\n on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew\n what a stinking life it was.", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "\"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed.\"\n\n\n \"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar\n System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it\n a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe.\"\n\n\n But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some\n personal belongings from a kit.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Grav 1?\" Craig asked.\n\n\n The old man's face clouded for an instant. \"In the old days, they used\n to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran\n down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it.\"\n\n\n Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of\n apology, but the old man continued.", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "\"Metal?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"You know,\nmetal\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, my identification key.\"\n\n\n \"Here,\" commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.\n\n\n Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear\n that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical\n process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite\n personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten\n the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was\n motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.\n\n\n \"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary\n position on the raised podium in the center of the lock.\"", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig\n straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand\n transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular\n punches and was covered with rough hand printing.\n\n\n Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have\n shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your\n turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.\n\n\n There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some\n fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story\n I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along\n with me, but she wouldn't go.", "Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell\n me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I\n knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but\n I couldn't.\n\n\n I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever\n got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way\n out across the Galaxy, while she's home.\n\n\n Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit\n transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,\n but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about\n what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when\n you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on\n something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how\n to tell her." ], [ "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "\"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of\n ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some\n conditioning.\"\n\n\n \"Conditioning?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to\n a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade....\"\n\n\n \"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why\n all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps\n suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of\n conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important\n part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity\n principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose\n function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first.\"", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"Sure. What else can it be?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig,\" the psychologist said slowly, \"you have my authorization\n for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You\n will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will\n definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too.\"\nOn the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive\n doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,\n had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,\n begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.\n\n\n \"The twelfth day is the worst,\" a grizzled spaceman told Craig. \"That's\n when the best of 'em want out.\"\n\n\n Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old\n man's face into focus.", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "\"\nWouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.\n\"\nRobert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the\n cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it\n difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he\n refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were\n then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a\n small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the\n carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched\n as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for\n irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it\n on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew\n what a stinking life it was.", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "\"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had\n 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried\n up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never\n stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.\n\n\n \"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It\n sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't\n become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves\n you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup\n out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of\n split leather.", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "\"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might.\"\nCraig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe\n business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its\n plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.\n\n\n \"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete.\"\n\n\n \"They look pretty complicated.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit.\"\n\n\n Craig looked them over quickly.\n\n\n \"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city\n at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost\n dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some....\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain\n admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is\n impossible for me to be of any assistance to you.\"", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"", "The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig\n straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand\n transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular\n punches and was covered with rough hand printing.\n\n\n Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have\n shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your\n turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.\n\n\n There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some\n fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story\n I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along\n with me, but she wouldn't go.", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "\"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed.\"\n\n\n \"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar\n System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it\n a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe.\"\n\n\n But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some\n personal belongings from a kit.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Grav 1?\" Craig asked.\n\n\n The old man's face clouded for an instant. \"In the old days, they used\n to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran\n down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it.\"\n\n\n Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of\n apology, but the old man continued.", "\"Metal?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"You know,\nmetal\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, my identification key.\"\n\n\n \"Here,\" commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.\n\n\n Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear\n that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical\n process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite\n personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten\n the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was\n motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.\n\n\n \"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary\n position on the raised podium in the center of the lock.\"", "\"For five I'll tell you where it is,\" he said in a subdued tone.\n\n\n \"Tell me where what is?\"\n\n\n \"You know, the mike.\"\n\n\n \"Mike?\"\n\n\n \"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up.\"\n\n\n \"You mean a microphone?\" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his\n wallet.\n\n\n \"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss\n convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here.\"\n\n\n \"Where is the microphone?\" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.\n He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the\n information.\n\n\n \"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.\n Or I'll do it for another two.\"" ], [ "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "\"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might.\"\nCraig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe\n business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its\n plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.\n\n\n \"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete.\"\n\n\n \"They look pretty complicated.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit.\"\n\n\n Craig looked them over quickly.\n\n\n \"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city\n at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost\n dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some....\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain\n admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is\n impossible for me to be of any assistance to you.\"", "\"Sure. What else can it be?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig,\" the psychologist said slowly, \"you have my authorization\n for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You\n will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will\n definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too.\"\nOn the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive\n doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,\n had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,\n begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.\n\n\n \"The twelfth day is the worst,\" a grizzled spaceman told Craig. \"That's\n when the best of 'em want out.\"\n\n\n Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old\n man's face into focus.", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "\"Metal?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"You know,\nmetal\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, my identification key.\"\n\n\n \"Here,\" commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.\n\n\n Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear\n that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical\n process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite\n personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten\n the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was\n motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.\n\n\n \"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary\n position on the raised podium in the center of the lock.\"", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "\"I know all about this, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have\n experienced it briefly.\"\n\n\n \"I expect to have some trouble at first.\" Craig was disturbed by the\n wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?\n\n\n \"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'\" asked\n Wyandotte. \"Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling\n horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal\n didn't roll any more.", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"", "\"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of\n ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some\n conditioning.\"\n\n\n \"Conditioning?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to\n a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade....\"\n\n\n \"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why\n all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps\n suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of\n conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important\n part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity\n principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose\n function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first.\"", "\"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed.\"\n\n\n \"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar\n System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it\n a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe.\"\n\n\n But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some\n personal belongings from a kit.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Grav 1?\" Craig asked.\n\n\n The old man's face clouded for an instant. \"In the old days, they used\n to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran\n down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it.\"\n\n\n Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of\n apology, but the old man continued.", "Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in\n the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a\n time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men\n behind Craig fidgeted.\n\n\n \"You got to get this punched by Territorial,\" said the clerk. \"Take it\n back to your unit's clearance office.\"\n\n\n \"Look again, Sergeant,\" Craig said, repressing his irritation.\n\n\n \"It ain't notched.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it isn't.\"\n\n\n The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. \"It's\n so damn notched,\" he complained. \"You ought to take care of that card;\n can't get on without one.\"\n\n\n Craig hesitated before moving.\n\n\n \"Next,\" said the clerk, \"What you waiting for?\"", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "\"Yeah, son. They've dropped it down a notch.\"\n\n\n \"Dropped ... it ... down?\"\n\n\n \"Maybe that ain't scientific, but it's the way I always think of it.\"\n\n\n \"Can't they ... drop it down continuously?\"\n\n\n \"They tried that a few times—once when I was aboard. You wouldn't like\n it, kid. You wouldn't like it at all.\"\n\n\n \"How ... many times ... do they drop it?\"\n\n\n \"Four times during the day, three at night. Twenty days.\"", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just\n inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried\n in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually\n there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully\n pliant as before.\n\n\n \"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,\"\n commanded the same voice he had heard before. \"Turn your arm until the\n scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight\n pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been\n disregarding.\"\n\n\n Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His\n respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When\n he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of\n flesh-colored plastic material.\n\n\n He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for\n instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway." ], [ "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "Her name is Ethel Brockman. I know she'll still use my name. Her\n address is or was East 71, North 101, Number 4. You can trace her\n easy if she moved. Women don't generally shove off and not leave a\n forwarding address. Not Ethel, at least.\n\n\n Craig put the battered card in his pocket and walked back through the\n door to the passenger room. How did you explain to an old woman why her\n husband deserted her fifty years before? Some kind of story about one's\n duty to the Universe? No, the old man had not been in Intergalactic. He\n had been a tramp spaceman. Well, why\nhad\nhe left?", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "\"\nWouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.\n\"\nRobert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the\n cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it\n difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he\n refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were\n then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a\n small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the\n carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched\n as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for\n irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it\n on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew\n what a stinking life it was.", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig\n straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand\n transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular\n punches and was covered with rough hand printing.\n\n\n Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have\n shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your\n turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.\n\n\n There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some\n fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story\n I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along\n with me, but she wouldn't go.", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "\"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had\n 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried\n up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never\n stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.\n\n\n \"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It\n sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't\n become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves\n you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup\n out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of\n split leather.", "Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in\n the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a\n time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men\n behind Craig fidgeted.\n\n\n \"You got to get this punched by Territorial,\" said the clerk. \"Take it\n back to your unit's clearance office.\"\n\n\n \"Look again, Sergeant,\" Craig said, repressing his irritation.\n\n\n \"It ain't notched.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it isn't.\"\n\n\n The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. \"It's\n so damn notched,\" he complained. \"You ought to take care of that card;\n can't get on without one.\"\n\n\n Craig hesitated before moving.\n\n\n \"Next,\" said the clerk, \"What you waiting for?\"", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "\"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. Well, I hope you ain't disappointed.\"\n\n\n \"My father was born there, but I never saw it. Never hit the Solar\n System, matter of fact. Never saw much of anything close up. I stood it\n a long time, old man, this hitting atmospheres all over the Universe.\"\n\n\n But the spaceman seemed to have lost interest. He was unpacking some\n personal belongings from a kit.\n\n\n \"What are you doing in Grav 1?\" Craig asked.\n\n\n The old man's face clouded for an instant. \"In the old days, they used\n to say us old-timers acted like clocks. They used to say we just ran\n down. Now they got some fancy psychology name for it.\"\n\n\n Craig regretted his question. He would have muttered some word of\n apology, but the old man continued.", "\"Sure. What else can it be?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig,\" the psychologist said slowly, \"you have my authorization\n for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You\n will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will\n definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too.\"\nOn the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive\n doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,\n had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,\n begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.\n\n\n \"The twelfth day is the worst,\" a grizzled spaceman told Craig. \"That's\n when the best of 'em want out.\"\n\n\n Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old\n man's face into focus.", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just\n inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried\n in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually\n there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully\n pliant as before.\n\n\n \"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,\"\n commanded the same voice he had heard before. \"Turn your arm until the\n scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight\n pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been\n disregarding.\"\n\n\n Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His\n respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When\n he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of\n flesh-colored plastic material.\n\n\n He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for\n instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.", "\"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might.\"\nCraig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe\n business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its\n plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.\n\n\n \"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete.\"\n\n\n \"They look pretty complicated.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit.\"\n\n\n Craig looked them over quickly.\n\n\n \"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city\n at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost\n dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some....\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain\n admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is\n impossible for me to be of any assistance to you.\"", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell\n me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I\n knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but\n I couldn't.\n\n\n I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever\n got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way\n out across the Galaxy, while she's home.\n\n\n Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit\n transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,\n but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about\n what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when\n you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on\n something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how\n to tell her.", "\"What will they do, exile him?\"\n\n\n \"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space\n card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"For twelve murders?\" asked Craig incredulously.\n\n\n \"That's enough, son.\" The old man eyed Craig for an instant before\n looking away. \"Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on\n doing when you get to Terra, for instance?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen\n engaged in an animated conversation.\n\n\n \"It's a good job. There's a future to it.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?" ], [ "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of\n ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some\n conditioning.\"\n\n\n \"Conditioning?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to\n a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade....\"\n\n\n \"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why\n all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps\n suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of\n conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important\n part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity\n principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose\n function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first.\"", "\"Sure. What else can it be?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig,\" the psychologist said slowly, \"you have my authorization\n for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You\n will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will\n definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too.\"\nOn the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive\n doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,\n had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,\n begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.\n\n\n \"The twelfth day is the worst,\" a grizzled spaceman told Craig. \"That's\n when the best of 'em want out.\"\n\n\n Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old\n man's face into focus.", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't\n understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the\n plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper\n nor trace of dirt.\nThe Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming\n metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a\n time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city\n only very briefly between questions.\n\n\n \"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined,\" Craig was saying. \"Haven't\n seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions....\"\n\n\n \"Conditions?\"\n\n\n \"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what\n part is closest to where I'll work.\"", "\"For five I'll tell you where it is,\" he said in a subdued tone.\n\n\n \"Tell me where what is?\"\n\n\n \"You know, the mike.\"\n\n\n \"Mike?\"\n\n\n \"All right, mister, three units, then. I wasn't trying to hold you up.\"\n\n\n \"You mean a microphone?\" asked Craig, mechanically fishing for his\n wallet.\n\n\n \"Sure, they don't put in screens here. Wanted to, but the boss\n convinced 'em there aren't any Freedomites ever stay here.\"\n\n\n \"Where is the microphone?\" Craig asked as he found a ten unit note.\n He was too puzzled to wonder what he was expected to do with the\n information.\n\n\n \"It's in the bed illuminator. You can short it out with a razor blade.\n Or I'll do it for another two.\"", "\"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had\n 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried\n up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never\n stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.\n\n\n \"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It\n sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't\n become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves\n you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup\n out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of\n split leather.", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "The other turned to the secretary. \"You'll see that he is assisted in\n filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will\n enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig.\"\n\n\n \"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?\" asked the girl,\n without looking at Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes.\" The man laughed. \"You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that\n you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your\n present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be\n made uncomfortable.\"\n\n\n Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.\n\n\n \"A hick,\" he supplied.", "Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in\n the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a\n time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men\n behind Craig fidgeted.\n\n\n \"You got to get this punched by Territorial,\" said the clerk. \"Take it\n back to your unit's clearance office.\"\n\n\n \"Look again, Sergeant,\" Craig said, repressing his irritation.\n\n\n \"It ain't notched.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it isn't.\"\n\n\n The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. \"It's\n so damn notched,\" he complained. \"You ought to take care of that card;\n can't get on without one.\"\n\n\n Craig hesitated before moving.\n\n\n \"Next,\" said the clerk, \"What you waiting for?\"", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "\"I know all about this, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have\n experienced it briefly.\"\n\n\n \"I expect to have some trouble at first.\" Craig was disturbed by the\n wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?\n\n\n \"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'\" asked\n Wyandotte. \"Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling\n horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal\n didn't roll any more.", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"" ], [ "Craig remained on the final step of the ramp, puzzled. The man turned\n to a companion at his right.\n\n\n \"We can see that this gentleman has come from a long, long way off,\n can't we?\"\n\n\n The other man did not look up. He was peering into what seemed to Craig\n to be a kind of camera.\n\n\n \"We can allow the gentlemen to continue now, can't we? It wasn't that\n we believed for a minute, you understand ... purely routine.\"\n\n\n Both men were gone in an instant, leaving Craig completely bewildered.\n\n\n \"You goin' to move on, buddy, or you want to go back?\"\n\n\n Craig turned to face a line of his fellow passengers up the ramp behind\n him.\n\n\n \"Who was that?\" Craig asked.\n\n\n \"Customs. Bet you never got such a smooth screening before, eh?\"", "\"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel,\" the\n personnel man continued. \"Actually, we shall have to consider him in\n much the same way we would an extraterrestrial.\"\n\n\n The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.\n\n\n \"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service.\"\n The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.\n\n\n The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical\n look in her brown eyes.\n\n\n \"Three complete tours of duty, I believe.\"\n\n\n \"Four,\" corrected Craig. \"Four tours of three years each, minus a\n year's terminal leave.\"\n\n\n \"I take it you have no identification card?\" the man asked.\n\n\n \"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive.\"", "Fifty years in space.\nFifty\nyears! Zone V had been beyond anybody's\n imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian\n flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many\n times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....\n\n\n Damn the old man! How did one explain?\nCraig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his\n impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the\n planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los\n Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the\n atmosphere.\n\n\n He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A\n rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.\n\n\n \"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,\n of course. Purely routine.\"", "He found his clothing cleanly and neatly hung on plastic hangers just\n inside the door to the dressing room. The few personal items he carried\n in his pockets were still there. The Schtann flight jacket was actually\n there, looking like new, its space-blue unfaded and as wonderfully\n pliant as before.\n\n\n \"Insert your right arm into the instrument on the central table,\"\n commanded the same voice he had heard before. \"Turn your arm until the\n scratch is in contact with the metal plate. There will be a slight\n pain, but it is necessary to treat the small injury you have been\n disregarding.\"\n\n\n Craig obeyed and clenched his teeth against a sharp stinging. His\n respect for the robot-controlled equipment of bases had risen. When\n he withdrew his arm, the scratch was neatly coated with a layer of\n flesh-colored plastic material.\n\n\n He dressed quickly and was on the verge of asking the robot for\n instructions, when a man appeared in the open doorway.", "\"You mean he\nscreened\nme? What for?\"\n\n\n \"Hard to say,\" the other passenger said. \"You'll get used to this. They\n get it over with quick.\"\n\n\n Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His\n first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.\n\n\n \"Sir! Sir!\" cried a voice behind him.\n\n\n He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.\n\n\n \"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course.\"\n\n\n Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing\n off toward an exit.", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "The other turned to the secretary. \"You'll see that he is assisted in\n filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will\n enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig.\"\n\n\n \"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?\" asked the girl,\n without looking at Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes.\" The man laughed. \"You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that\n you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your\n present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be\n made uncomfortable.\"\n\n\n Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.\n\n\n \"A hick,\" he supplied.", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"", "\"I see,\" said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was\n about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his\n chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of\n the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig\n seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality\n about him, Craig thought.\n\n\n \"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service,\" the\n personnel man said finally.\n\n\n \"That so?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. \"You must\n find it very strange here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I've never seen a city so big.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, so big. And also....\" He seemed to consider many words before\n completing the sentence. \"And also different.\"", "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "Craig handed him a battered punch card and watched the man insert it in\n the reproducer. He felt anxiety as the much-handled card refused for a\n time to match the instrument's metal contact points. The line of men\n behind Craig fidgeted.\n\n\n \"You got to get this punched by Territorial,\" said the clerk. \"Take it\n back to your unit's clearance office.\"\n\n\n \"Look again, Sergeant,\" Craig said, repressing his irritation.\n\n\n \"It ain't notched.\"\n\n\n \"The hell it isn't.\"\n\n\n The man examined the card with squinting care and nodded finally. \"It's\n so damn notched,\" he complained. \"You ought to take care of that card;\n can't get on without one.\"\n\n\n Craig hesitated before moving.\n\n\n \"Next,\" said the clerk, \"What you waiting for?\"", "\"I am Captain Wyandotte,\" said the man in a pleasant voice.\n\n\n \"Well, what's next?\" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he\n had intended.\n\n\n The man smiled. \"Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat\n aggressive after Clerical, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose,\" said Craig defensively.\n\n\n \"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, but my father—\"\n\n\n \"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia\n II, didn't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all\n about him.\n\n\n \"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?\"", "\"\nWouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.\n\"\nRobert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the\n cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it\n difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he\n refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were\n then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a\n small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the\n carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched\n as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for\n irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it\n on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew\n what a stinking life it was.", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"", "\"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might.\"\nCraig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe\n business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its\n plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.\n\n\n \"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete.\"\n\n\n \"They look pretty complicated.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit.\"\n\n\n Craig looked them over quickly.\n\n\n \"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city\n at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost\n dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some....\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain\n admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is\n impossible for me to be of any assistance to you.\"", "The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig\n straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand\n transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular\n punches and was covered with rough hand printing.\n\n\n Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have\n shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your\n turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.\n\n\n There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some\n fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story\n I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along\n with me, but she wouldn't go.", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "It was an empty PON tube he had just discarded. He couldn't\n understand why the man had bothered until he realized that the\n plastaloid floor of the lobby displayed not the faintest scrap of paper\n nor trace of dirt.\nThe Import personnel man was toying with a small chip of gleaming\n metal. He did not look directly at Craig for more than an instant at a\n time, and commented on Craig's description of his trip through the city\n only very briefly between questions.\n\n\n \"It's a good deal bigger than I imagined,\" Craig was saying. \"Haven't\n seen much of it, of course. Thought I'd check in here with you first.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, naturally.\"\n\n\n \"Thought you could give me some idea of conditions....\"\n\n\n \"Conditions?\"\n\n\n \"For instance, what part of the city I should live in. That is, what\n part is closest to where I'll work.\"" ], [ "\"This is Mr. Craig's first landing on Terra, Miss Wendel,\" the\n personnel man continued. \"Actually, we shall have to consider him in\n much the same way we would an extraterrestrial.\"\n\n\n The girl glanced at Craig, casting him a cool, impersonal smile.\n\n\n \"He was formerly a flight officer in the Intergalactic Space Service.\"\n The statement was delivered in an almost exaggeratedly casual tone.\n\n\n The girl glanced at him once more, this time with a definite quizzical\n look in her brown eyes.\n\n\n \"Three complete tours of duty, I believe.\"\n\n\n \"Four,\" corrected Craig. \"Four tours of three years each, minus a\n year's terminal leave.\"\n\n\n \"I take it you have no identification card?\" the man asked.\n\n\n \"The one I held in the service. It's pretty comprehensive.\"", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"", "The other turned to the secretary. \"You'll see that he is assisted in\n filing his application, won't you? A provisional Code II. That will\n enable you to enter all Import offices freely, Mr. Craig.\"\n\n\n \"Will he need a food and—clothing ration also?\" asked the girl,\n without looking at Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes.\" The man laughed. \"You'll excuse us, Mr. Craig. We realize that\n you couldn't be expected to be familiar with Terra's fashions. In your\n present outfit you would certainly be typed as a ... well, you'd be\n made uncomfortable.\"\n\n\n Craig reddened in spite of himself. He had bought the suit on Ghandii.\n\n\n \"A hick,\" he supplied.", "\"Once I get set up, I'll probably try to open my own business.\"\n\n\n \"And spend your weekends on Luna.\"\n\n\n Craig half rose from his cot, jarred into anger.\n\n\n But the old spaceman turned, smiling wryly. \"Don't get hot, kid. I\n guess I spent too long in Zone V.\" He paused to examine his wrinkled\n hands. They were indelibly marked with lever callouses. \"You get to\n thinking anyone who stays closer'n eighty light years from Terra is a\n land-lubber.\"\n\n\n Craig relaxed, realizing he had acted childishly. \"Used to think the\n same. Then I took the exam and got this job.\"\n\n\n \"Whereabouts?\"\n\n\n \"Los Angeles.\"\n\n\n The old man looked up at Craig. \"You don't know much about Terra, do\n you, son?\"", "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "Fifty years in space.\nFifty\nyears! Zone V had been beyond anybody's\n imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian\n flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many\n times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....\n\n\n Damn the old man! How did one explain?\nCraig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his\n impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the\n planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los\n Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the\n atmosphere.\n\n\n He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A\n rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.\n\n\n \"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,\n of course. Purely routine.\"", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "\"You mean he\nscreened\nme? What for?\"\n\n\n \"Hard to say,\" the other passenger said. \"You'll get used to this. They\n get it over with quick.\"\n\n\n Craig made his way toward the spaceport administration building. His\n first physical contact with Terra had passed unnoticed.\n\n\n \"Sir! Sir!\" cried a voice behind him.\n\n\n He wheeled to see a man walking briskly toward him.\n\n\n \"You dropped this, sir. Quite by accident, of course.\"\n\n\n Craig examined the small object the man had given him before rushing\n off toward an exit.", "\"I'm ... all right,\" Craig mumbled at the voices. He struggled with the\n bonds of his cot. With terrible effort he forced his eyes open. Two\n white-clad figures, ridiculously out of proportion, hovered wraithlike\n over him. Four elongated eyes peered at him.\nAttendants coming for to take me home....\n\"Touch me and I'll kick your teeth in!\" he yelled. \"I'm going to Terra.\n Wish you were going to Terra?\"\n\n\n Then it was better. Oddly, he passed the twelfth day easily. By the\n fourteenth day, Craig knew he could stand Grav 1. The whine of the\n centrifuge's motors had diminished to a low hum. Either that or they\n had begun to produce ultra-sonic waves. Craig was not sure.", "\"Yet you are so completely sure you will want to live out your life\n there, that you are willing to give up space service for it.\"\n\n\n \"We've gone through this time and time again,\" Craig said wearily. \"I\n gave you my reasons for quitting space. We analyzed them. You agreed\n that you could not decide that for me and that my decision is logical.\n You tell me spacemen don't settle down on Terra. Yet you won't—or\n can't—tell me why. I've got a damned good job there—\"\n\n\n \"You may find that 'damned good jobs' become boring.\"\n\n\n \"So I'll transfer. I don't know what you're trying to get at, Captain,\n but you're not talking me out of going back. If the service needs men\n so badly, let them get somebody else. I've put in\nmy\ntime.\"\n\n\n \"Do you really think that's my reason?\"", "\"I see,\" said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was\n about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his\n chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of\n the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig\n seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality\n about him, Craig thought.\n\n\n \"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service,\" the\n personnel man said finally.\n\n\n \"That so?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. \"You must\n find it very strange here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I've never seen a city so big.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, so big. And also....\" He seemed to consider many words before\n completing the sentence. \"And also different.\"", "\"What will they do, exile him?\"\n\n\n \"Not to Chociante, if that's what you mean. They just jerked his space\n card and gave him a one-way ticket to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"For twelve murders?\" asked Craig incredulously.\n\n\n \"That's enough, son.\" The old man eyed Craig for an instant before\n looking away. \"Pick something to talk about. What do you figure on\n doing when you get to Terra, for instance?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going into Import. My father was in it for twenty years.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said the old spaceman, watching a group of young crewmen\n engaged in an animated conversation.\n\n\n \"It's a good job. There's a future to it.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah.\"\n\n\n Why did he have to explain anything at all to the old space tramp?", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "\"I am Captain Wyandotte,\" said the man in a pleasant voice.\n\n\n \"Well, what's next?\" asked Craig somewhat more belligerently than he\n had intended.\n\n\n The man smiled. \"Your reaction is quite natural. You are somewhat\n aggressive after Clerical, eh?\"\n\n\n \"I'm a little anxious to get home, I suppose,\" said Craig defensively.\n\n\n \"By 'home' you mean Terra. But you've never been there, have you?\"\n\n\n \"No, but my father—\"\n\n\n \"Your parents left Terra during the Second Colonization of Cassiopeia\n II, didn't they?\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Craig said. He was uncomfortable; Wyandotte seemed to know all\n about him.\n\n\n \"We might say you've been away quite a while, eh?\"", "\"Don't I take my 201 file?\"\n\n\n \"We send it on ahead. Go to Grav 1 desk.\"\n\n\n A murmur greeted the order. Craig experienced the thrill of knowing\n the envy of the others. Grav 1—that meant Terra. He crossed the long,\n dreary room, knowing the eyes of the other men were upon him.\n\n\n \"Your service tapes,\" the next noncom said. \"Where you going?\"\n\n\n \"Grav 1—Terra,\" fumbled Craig. \"Los Angeles.\"\n\n\n \"Los Angeles, eh? Where in Los Angeles?\"\n\n\n \"I—I—\" Craig muttered, fumbling in his pockets.\n\n\n \"No specific destination,\" supplied the man as he punched a key on a\n small instrument, \"Air-lock ahead and to your right. Strip and follow\n the robot's orders. Any metal?\"", "\"\nWouldn't be surprised. Here, grab his leg.\n\"\nRobert Craig folded the flight jacket tightly and stuffed it into the\n cylindrical carton. A sleeve unwound just as he did so, making it\n difficult to fit into the place he had made for it. Exasperated, he\n refolded it and jammed it in place. Smaller rolls of underclothing were\n then fitted in. When he was satisfied with the layer, he tossed in a\n small handful of crystals and began to fill the next layer. After the\n carton was completely filled, he ignited the sealing strip and watched\n as the plastic melted into a single, seamless whole. It was ready for\n irradiation. Probably in another ten years his son-to-be would put it\n on and play spaceman. But Craig swore he'd make sure that the kid knew\n what a stinking life it was.", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "Craig obeyed the robot voice and began reluctantly to remove his flight\n jacket. Its incredibly fine-grained leather would carry none of the\n strange, foreign associations for the base station clerk who would\n appropriate it. He would never know the beautiful, gentle beast that\n supplied this skin.\n\n\n \"You are retarding the progress of others. Please respond more quickly\n to your orders.\"\n\n\n Craig quickly removed the last of his clothing. It was impossible\n to hate a robot, but one could certainly hate those who set it into\n operation.\n\n\n \"You will find a red button at your feet. Lower your head and depress\n that button.\"\n\n\n Stepping on the button with his bare foot produced an instant of\n brilliant blue illumination. A small scratch on his arm stung briefly\n and he was somewhat blinded by the flash even through his eyelids, but\n that was all there was to the sterilizing process.\n\n\n \"Your clothing and effects will be in the dressing room immediately\n beyond the locked door.\"" ], [ "\"Never mind,\" Craig said wearily. He waited while the bellboy inserted\n a key into the door and opened it for him.\n\n\n \"I can get you a sensatia-tape,\" whispered the boy when they had\n entered. He nudged Craig wickedly. \"You know what they're like?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Craig said disgustedly. Traffic in the illicit mental-image\n tapes was known as far into space as lonely men had penetrated.\n Intergalactic considered them as great a menace to mental and moral\n stability as the hectopiates. Craig wearily got the man out of the\n room, took a PON pill, and eased himself into the bed.\n\n\n It had been a weird day and he had not liked it. There was no telling\n how long it would take him to shake his—sea legs, the psychologist\n had called it. One thing was sure: Terra aggressively went after its\n strangers.", "A nightmare of visual sensations ebbed into Craig's mind. He was\n vaguely aware of the moans of other men in the vaultlike room. Wave\n upon wave of nausea swept him as he watched the seam lines bend and\n warp fantastically. He snapped his eyelids shut, only to begin feeling\n the nightmarish bodily sensations once more. He felt the cot slowly\n rise longitudinally, felt himself upside down, then the snap of turning\n right side up once more—and he knew that neither he nor the cot had\n moved so much as an inch.\n\n\n Craig heard the voices around him, muffled, as though talking through\n wadding.\n\n\n \"... got it bad.\"\n\n\n \"We better take him out.\"\n\n\n \"... pretty bad.\"\n\n\n \"He'll go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"... never make it the twelfth.\"\n\n\n \"We better yank him.\"", "\"It meant more than that. There were excellent psychological reasons\n for the old stereotype, the 'drunken sailor.' A port city was a\n frightening thing to an old sailor—but let's begin our little job at\n the beginning. I'll turn you over to psychometry for the usual tests\n and pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, 0900.\"\nDuring the days that followed, the psychologist seemed to Craig to\n become progressively more didactic. He would deliver long speeches\n about the \"freedom of open space.\" He spoke repetitiously of the\n \"growing complexity of Terran society.\" And yet the man could not\n be pinned down to any specific condition the spaceman would find\n intolerable.", "\"Maybe you've read some of the old sea stories, or more'n likely had\n 'em read to you. Sailors could go to sea until they just sort of dried\n up. The sea tanned their skins and stiffened their bones, but it never\n stiffened their hearts. When they got old, it just pulled them in.\n\n\n \"But space is different. Space is raw and new. It tugs at your guts. It\n sends the blood rushing through your veins. It's like loving. You don't\n become a part of space the way you do the old sea, though. It leaves\n you strictly alone. Except that it sucks you dry, takes all the soup\n out of you, leaves you brittle and old—old as a dehydrated piece of\n split leather.", "\"Then one day it shoots a spurt of blood around in one of your old\n veins. Something gives. Space is through with you then. And if you can\n stand this whirligig conditioning, you're through with space.\"\n\"\nYou can't figure it. Some of 'em urp all over and turn six shades of\n green.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYou got to watch the ones that don't.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nYeah, you got to watch the ones that don't. Especially the old ones.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe's old. You think it was his heart?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nWho knows?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nThey'll dump him, won't they?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nAfter a tracer is sent through. But it won't do any good.\n\"\n\n\n \"\nHe probably outlived everybody that ever knew him.\n\"", "\"How ... how do they know when you ought ... to come out?\" he asked\n between waves of nausea.\n\n\n \"Blood pressure. They get you just before you go into shock.\"\n\n\n \"How can they tell?\" Craig fought down his growing panic. \"I can't.\"\n\n\n \"That strap around your belly. You mean you ain't noticed it?\"\n\n\n \"Haven't noticed much of anything.\"\n\n\n \"Well, it's keyed to give them some kind of signal.\"\n\n\n The old man lapsed into silence. Craig wished him to continue. He\n desperately wanted something to distract his mind from the ghastly\n conditioning process.\n\n\n Slowly at first, the lines formed by seams in the metal ceiling began\n to bend. Here it came again!\n\n\n \"Old man!\" shouted Craig.", "\"I know all about this, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"You've undoubtedly read popularizations in tapezines. But you have\n experienced it briefly.\"\n\n\n \"I expect to have some trouble at first.\" Craig was disturbed by the\n wordy psychologist. What was the man actually saying?\n\n\n \"Do you know what sailors of ancient times meant by 'sea legs?'\" asked\n Wyandotte. \"Men on a rolling ocean acclimated themselves to a rolling\n horizontal. They had trouble when they went ashore and the horizontal\n didn't roll any more.", "\"Quite natural. But it being your first time—in quite a number of\n ways, I might add—it will be necessary for you to undergo some\n conditioning.\"\n\n\n \"Conditioning?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"Yes. You have spent eleven years in space. Your body is conditioned to\n a normal state of free fall, or at best to a state of acceleration.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, I know. Once on Gerymeade....\"\n\n\n \"You were ill, couldn't keep your balance, felt dizzy. That is why\n all spacemen carry PON, paraoxylnebutal, with them. It helps\n suppress certain physiological reactions to an entirely new set of\n conditions. Channels of the ear, for example. They play an important\n part in our awareness of balance. They operate on a simple gravity\n principle. Without gravity they act up for a time, then gradually lose\n function. Returning to gravity is rather frightening at first.\"", "Craig began to hate the delay that kept him from Terra. Through the\n ports of the headquarters base satellite, he scanned the constellations\n for the scores of worlds he had visited during his eleven years in\n space. They were incredibly varied, even those that supported life. He\n had weathered difficult landings on worlds with rip-tide gravities, had\n felt the pull of the incredible star-tides imparted by twin and even\n triple star systems. He had been on Einstein IV, the planet of eight\n moons, and had felt the pulse of all eight of the satellites at once\n that no PON could completely nullify.\n\n\n But even if he could accept the psychologist's authority for the\n cumulative effect of a gravity system, he could not understand the\n unspoken warning he felt underlying all that the man said.\n\n\n \"Of course it has changed,\" Craig was protesting. \"Anyway, I never\n really knew very much about Terra. So what? I know it won't be as it\n was in tapezines either.\"", "\"I wouldn't go that far, but some people might.\"\nCraig noted the pleasant way the girl filled her trim, rather severe\n business suit. He amused himself by calculating stress patterns in its\n plain woven material as she assembled the forms for him.\n\n\n \"Here, Mr. Craig. I believe these are complete.\"\n\n\n \"They look pretty complicated.\"\n\n\n \"Not at all. The questions are quite explicit.\"\n\n\n Craig looked them over quickly.\n\n\n \"I guess so. Say, Miss Wendel, I was wondering—I don't know the city\n at all. Maybe you could go with me to have dinner. It must be almost\n dinnertime now. You could sort of check me out on some....\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible. You couldn't gain\n admittance to any office you need to visit tonight. Therefore, it is\n impossible for me to be of any assistance to you.\"", "\"I was entered as a spaceman when I was 16,\" Craig said. \"I've never\n been down for any period as yet.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you haven't been in a gravity system?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I've landed a few times, even walked around for a while....\"\n\n\n \"With the help of paraoxylnebutal,\" supplied the captain.\n\n\n \"Well, sure.\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig, I suppose you've guessed that the next step in our little\n torture system here is psych.\"\n\n\n \"So I gathered.\"\n\n\n The captain laughed reassuringly. \"No, don't put up your guard again.\n The worst is over. Short of Gravitational conditioning, there is\n nothing to stop you from going to Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Sorry, I guess I'm a little touchy. This is my first time....\"", "Earth was a lot different then than it is now. They don't have to tell\n me; I know. I saw it coming and so did Ethel. We talked about it and I\n knew I had to go. She wouldn't or couldn't go. Wanted me to stay, but\n I couldn't.\n\n\n I tried to send her some units once in a while. Don't know if she ever\n got them. Sometimes I forgot to send them at all. You know, you're way\n out across the Galaxy, while she's home.\n\n\n Go see her if you can, son. Will you? Make sure she gets the unit\n transfer I made out. It isn't much out of seventy years of living,\n but she may need it. And maybe you can tell her a little bit about\n what it means to be out there. Tell her it's open and free and when\n you got hold of those levers and you're trying for an orbit on\n something big and new and green.... Hell, you remember. You know how\n to tell her.", "At 1300 hours, the ferry bumped heavily alongside the starboard lock.\n It was the signal for relief in the passengers' quarters; many were\n beginning to feel a reaction to the short free-fall flight from the\n headquarters satellite.\n\n\n The audio called out: \"Flight Officer Robert Craig. Flight Officer\n Robert Craig. Report to Orderly 12. Report to Orderly 12 through the\n aft door.\"\n\n\n With pangs of anxiety he could not completely suppress, Craig obeyed.\n\n\n Orderly 12 handed him a message container.\n\n\n \"Who's it from? Somebody on Terra?\"\n\n\n \"From a private spaceman named Morgan Brockman.\"\n\n\n \"\nBrockman?\n\"\n\n\n \"He was with you in the grav tank.\"\n\n\n \"The old man!\"", "The message container produced a battered punch card. Craig\n straightened it and was about to reach into his pocket for a hand\n transcriber. But then he noticed the card bore only a few irregular\n punches and was covered with rough hand printing.\n\n\n Son, when the flunkies get around to giving you this, they'll have\n shot me out the tube. How do I know? Same way you know when your\n turbos are going to throw a blade. It's good this way.\n\n\n There's something you can do for me if you want to. Way back, some\n fifty years ago, there was a woman. She was my wife. It's a long story\n I won't bother you with. Anyway, I left her. Wanted to take her along\n with me, but she wouldn't go.", "Most of the men had passed through the torments of gravitational\n conditioning. The huge headquarters base centrifuge aboard the man-made\n satellite had gradually caused their bodies to respond once more to a\n single source of pull. They were now ready to become inhabitants of\n planets again, instead of free-falling ships.\n\n\n On the eighteenth day, automatic machinery freed them from their\n imprisoning cots. Clumsily and awkwardly at first, the men began to\n walk, to hold their heads and arms in proper attitudes. They laughed\n and joked about it and kidded those who were slow at adjusting.\n Then they again began taking paraoxylnebutal in preparation for the\n free-fall flight to Terra.\n\n\n Only one of the score of men in the centrifuge tank remained\n voluntarily in his cot.\n\n\n \"Space article violator,\" the old man informed Craig. \"Psycho, I think.\n Went amuck with some extraterritorials. Killed a dozen.\"", "Fifty years in space.\nFifty\nyears! Zone V had been beyond anybody's\n imagination that long ago. He must have been in on the first Cetusian\n flights and shot the early landings in Cetus II. God only knew how many\n times he had battled Zone 111b pirates....\n\n\n Damn the old man! How did one explain?\nCraig descended the ramp from the huge jet and concentrated on his\n impressions. One day he would recall this moment, his first on the\n planet Terra. He tried to recall his first thrill at seeing Los\n Angeles, 1500 square miles of it, from the ship as it entered the\n atmosphere.\n\n\n He was about to step off the last step when a man appeared hurriedly. A\n rather plump man, he displayed a toothy smile on his puffy red face.\n\n\n \"A moment, sir. Just a little greeting from the Terra. You understand,\n of course. Purely routine.\"", "\"I haven't been here very long,\" said Craig. \"Matter of fact, I haven't\n been anywhere very long. This is my first real experience with life on\n a planet. As an adult, anyway.\"\n\n\n The personnel man seated himself once more and pressed a button on a\n small instrument. A secretary entered the office from a door to Craig's\n left.\n\n\n \"Miss Wendel, this is Mr. Craig. Mr. Craig, my secretary. Mr. Craig\n will enter Minerals and Metals, Zone V.\"\n\n\n They exchanged formal greetings. She was a moderately pretty girl of\n medium height and, to Craig, a pleasantly rounded figure. He would have\n attempted to catch her eye had she not immediately occupied herself\n with unfolding the legs of a small instrument she was carrying.", "\"Metal?\" asked Craig.\n\n\n \"You know,\nmetal\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well, my identification key.\"\n\n\n \"Here,\" commanded the clerk, extending a plastic envelope.\n\n\n Craig moved in the direction indicated. He fought the irrational fear\n that he had missed an important step in the complicated clerical\n process. He cursed the grudging attitude of the headquarters satellite\n personnel and felt the impotence of a spaceman who had long forgotten\n the bureaucracy of a rear area base. The knowledge that much of it was\n motivated by envy soothed him as he clumsily let himself into the lock.\n\n\n \"Place your clothing in the receptacle provided and assume a stationary\n position on the raised podium in the center of the lock.\"", "\"Sure. What else can it be?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Craig,\" the psychologist said slowly, \"you have my authorization\n for you to return to Terra as a private citizen of that planet. You\n will be given a very liberal supply of PON—which you will\n definitely need. Good luck. You'll need that too.\"\nOn the eighth day, two attendants, who showed the effects of massive\n doses of PON to protect themselves from the centrifugal force,\n had to carry a man out of the tank. Many others asked to be removed,\n begged to be allowed to withdraw their resignations.\n\n\n \"The twelfth day is the worst,\" a grizzled spaceman told Craig. \"That's\n when the best of 'em want out.\"\n\n\n Craig clenched the iron rung of his bed and struggled to bring the old\n man's face into focus.", "\"I see,\" said the man noncommittally. It seemed to Craig that he was\n about to add something. He did not, however, but instead rose from his\n chair and walked to the large window overlooking an enormous section of\n the city far below. He stared out the window for a time, leaving Craig\n seated uncomfortably in the silent room. There was a distracted quality\n about him, Craig thought.\n\n\n \"You are the first man we have had from the Intergalactic Service,\" the\n personnel man said finally.\n\n\n \"That so?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\" He turned to face Craig briefly before continuing. \"You must\n find it very strange here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I've never seen a city so big.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, so big. And also....\" He seemed to consider many words before\n completing the sentence. \"And also different.\"" ] ]
train	27588	[ "What is Trella's relationship to Dom Blessing?", "What is Dom Blessings's relationship to Dr. Mansard?", "Why doesn't Trella tell Quest about her mission? ", "How does Jakdane feel about Trella?", "Why couldn't Dr. Mansard and his wife leave Jupiter?", "What is the Jupiter weapon?", "Why does Quest say he is lucky?", "Why is Jakdane going to Earth?" ]	[ [ "Trella is Dom Blessing's employer.", "Trella is Dom Blessing's sister.", "Trella is Dom Blessing's employee.", "Trella is Dom Blessing's mistress." ], [ "Dom Blessing was Dr. Mansard's assistant.", "Dom Blessing was Dr. Mansard's business partner.", "Dom Blessing was Dr. Mansard's employer.", "Dom Blessing was Dr. Mansard's best friend." ], [ "Trella is afraid Quest won't love her if he finds out about her mission.", "Trella is worried Quest will take his father's papers and leave her.", "Trella was told specifically to stay away from Quest.", "Trella's employer wants the mission kept confidential." ], [ "Jakdane thinks of Trella as a little sister.", "Jakdane has always had a crush on Trella, but they are just friends.", "Jakdane is obsessed with Trella. That is why he's on the same ship to Earth.", "Jakdane thinks Trella might be stalking him. She is on the same ship to Earth." ], [ "A human would not survive the force of acceleration that would be needed to break free of Jupiter's gravity.", "Dr. Mansard and his wife ran out of oxygen before they could complete the repairs to their ship.", "Dr. Mansard and his wife were torn apart by gravitational forces when they tried to leave Jupiter.", "Dr. Mansard and his wife were unable to repair their ship after crash landing on Jupiter." ], [ "Asrange is the Jupiter weapon.", "The surgiscope is the Jupiter weapon.", "No one knows what the Jupiter weapon is, but the plans are in Dr. Mansard's notes.", "The Jupiter weapon is Quest himself." ], [ "Quest considers himself lucky that Trella is in love with him.", "Quest considers himself lucky that he is not actually an android.", "Quest considers himself lucky that Asrange did not kill him.", "Quest considers himself lucky that he did not commit murder. He is not a murderer at heart." ], [ "Jakdane is a corporate spy from Moon 5 on a mission to infiltrate Dom Blessing's organization.", "Jakdane is following Trella to Earth because he is stalking her.", "Jakdane is transferring from his company's office on Ganymede to the corporate headquarters on Earth.", "Jakdane is the captain of the ship that Trella and Quest are taking to earth. " ] ]	[ 3, 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The car whipped into the\n street, careened, and rolled over\n and over, bringing up against a\n tree on the other side in a twisted\n tangle of wreckage.\n\n\n With a horrified gasp, Trella\n ran down the driveway toward\n the smoking heap of metal.\n Quest was already beside it,\n probing it. As she reached his\n side, he lifted the torn body of\n Dom Blessing. Blessing was\n dead.\n\n\n “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly.\n “I would have murdered\n him.”\n\n\n “But why, Quest? I knew he\n was afraid of you, but he didn't\n tell me why.”", "“It has been pleasant knowing\n you, Trella,” he said when they\n left the G-boat at White Sands.\n A faraway look came into his\n blue eyes, and he added: “I'm\n sorry things couldn't have been\n different, somehow.”\n\n\n “Let's don't be sorry for what\n we can't help,” she said gently,\n taking his hand in farewell.\n\n\n Trella took a fast plane from\n White Sands, and twenty-four\n hours later walked up the front\n steps of the familiar brownstone\n house on the outskirts of Washington.\n\n\n Dom Blessing himself met her\n at the door, a stooped, graying\n 58\n man who peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “You have the papers, eh?”\n he said, spying the brief case.\n “Good, good. Come in and we'll\n see what we have, eh?”", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing.", "Trella was silent, shocked.\n There was something here she\n hadn't known about, hadn't even\n suspected. For some reason, Dom\n Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund\n Mansard … or his heir … or\n his mechanical servant.\nShe was sure that Blessing\n was wrong, that Quest, whether\n man or android, intended no\n 59\n harm to him. Surely, Quest\n would have said something of\n such bitterness during their long\n time together on Ganymede and\n aspace, since he did not know of\n Trella's connection with Blessing.\n But, since this was to be\n the atmosphere of Blessing's\n house, she was glad that he decided\n to assign her to take the\n Mansard papers to the New\n York laboratory.\n\n\n Quest came the day before she\n was scheduled to leave.", "Trella was in the living room\n with Blessing, discussing the instructions\n she was to give to the\n laboratory officials in New York.\n The two bodyguards were with\n them. The other guards were at\n their posts.\n\n\n Trella heard the doorbell ring.\n The heavy oaken front door was\n kept locked now, and the guards\n in the anteroom examined callers\n through a tiny window.\n\n\n Suddenly alarm bells rang all\n over the house. There was a terrific\n crash outside the room as\n the front door splintered. There\n were shouts and the sound of a\n shot.\n\n\n “The steel doors!” cried Blessing,\n turning white. “Let's get\n out of here.”\n\n\n He and his bodyguards ran\n through the back of the house\n out of the garage.\n\n\n Blessing, ahead of the rest,\n leaped into one of the cars and\n started the engine.", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“A wealthy man must be careful,”\n said Blessing cheerfully.\n “When we don't understand all\n the implications of new circumstances,\n we must be prepared for\n anything, eh?”\n\n\n There was only one new circumstance\n Trella could think\n of. Without actually intending\n to, she exclaimed:\n\n\n “You aren't afraid of Quest?\n Why, an android can't hurt a\n human!”\n\n\n Blessing peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “And what if he isn't an android,\n eh? And if he is—what if\n old Mansard didn't build in the\n prohibition against harming humans\n that's required by law?\n What about that, eh?”", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "The door from the house shattered\n and Quest burst through.\n The two guards turned and fired\n together.\n\n\n He could be hurt by bullets.\n He was staggered momentarily.\n\n\n Then, in a blur of motion, he\n sprang forward and swept the\n guards aside with one hand with\n such force that they skidded\n across the floor and lay in an\n unconscious heap against the\n rear of the garage. Trella had\n opened the door of the car, but\n it was wrenched from her hand\n as Blessing stepped on the accelerator\n and it leaped into the\n driveway with spinning wheels.\n\n\n Quest was after it, like a\n chunky deer, running faster\n than Trella had ever seen a man\n run before.\n\n\n Blessing slowed for the turn\n at the end of the driveway and\n glanced back over his shoulder.\n Seeing Quest almost upon him,\n he slammed down the accelerator\n and twisted the wheel hard.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "Trella sighed. Cowardice was\n a state of mind. It was peculiarly\n inappropriate, but not unbelievable,\n that the strongest and\n most agile man on Ganymede\n should be a coward. Well, she\n thought with a rush of sympathy,\n he couldn't help being\n what he was.\nThey had reached the more\n brightly lighted section of the\n city now. Trella could get a cab\n from here, but the Stellar Hotel\n wasn't far. They walked on.\n\n\n Trella had the desk clerk call\n a cab to deliver the unconscious\n Motwick to his home. She and\n Quest had a late sandwich in the\n coffee shop.\n\n\n “I landed here only a week\n ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly\n admiring her honey-colored\n hair and comely face. “I'm heading\n for Earth on the next spaceship.”", "Tentatively, she pushed her\n chair back from the table and\n arose. She had to brush close by\n the other table to get to the bar.\n As she did, the dark, slick-haired\n man reached out and grabbed\n her around the waist with a\n steely arm.\n\n\n Trella swung with her whole\n body, and slapped him so hard\n he nearly fell from his chair. As\n she walked swiftly toward the\n bar, he leaped up to follow her.\n\n\n There were only two other\n people in the Golden Satellite:\n the fat, mustached bartender\n and a short, square-built man at\n the bar. The latter swung\n around at the pistol-like report\n of her slap, and she saw that,\n though no more than four and a\n half feet tall, he was as heavily\n muscled as a lion.\n\n\n 51\n His face was clean and open,\n with close-cropped blond hair\n and honest blue eyes. She ran to\n him.", "“It was conditioned into me,”\n answered Quest “I didn't know\n 60\n it until just now, when it ended,\n but my father conditioned me\n psychologically from my birth\n to the task of hunting down\n Dom Blessing and killing him. It\n was an unconscious drive in me\n that wouldn't release me until\n the task was finished.\n\n\n “You see, Blessing was my father's\n assistant on Ganymede.\n Right after my father completed\n development of the surgiscope,\n he and my mother blasted off for\n Io. Blessing wanted the valuable\n rights to the surgiscope, and he\n sabotaged the ship's drive so it\n would fall into Jupiter.", "“Bruises? Man, that club\n could have broken your skull!\n Or a couple of ribs, at the very\n least.”\n\n\n “I'm all right,” insisted\n Quest; and when the skeptical\n Jakdane insisted on examining\n him carefully, he had to admit\n it. There was hardly a mark on\n him from the blows.\n\n\n “If it didn't hurt you any\n more than that, why didn't you\n take that stick away from him?”\n demanded Jakdane. “You could\n have, easily.”\n\n\n “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably,\n and turned his face\n away.\n\n\n Later, alone with Trella on\n the control deck, Jakdane gave\n her some sober advice.\n\n\n “If you think you're in love\n with Quest, forget it,” he said.", "She was not at all happy about\n being so strongly attracted to a\n man several inches shorter than\n she. She was particularly unhappy\n about feeling drawn to a\n man who was a coward.\n\n\n The ship that they boarded on\n Moon Nine was one of the newer\n ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second\n velocity\n and take a hyperbolic path to\n Earth, but it would still require\n fifty-four days to make the trip.\n So Trella was delighted to find\n that the ship was the\nCometfire\nand its skipper was her old\n friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired\n Jakdane Gille.\n\n\n “Jakdane,” she said, flirting\n with him with her eyes as in\n 54\n days gone by, “I need a chaperon\n this trip, and you're ideal for\n the job.”", "Evading her attempts to stay\n behind him, the squat man began\n to move down the bar away\n from the approaching Kregg.\n The dark man moved in on\n Trella again as Kregg overtook\n his quarry and swung a huge\n fist like a sledgehammer.\n\n\n Exactly what happened, Trella\n wasn't sure. She had the impression\n that Kregg's fist connected\n squarely with the short man's\n chin\n before\n he dodged to one\n side in a movement so fast it\n was a blur. But that couldn't\n have been, because the short\n man wasn't moved by that blow\n that would have felled a steer,\n and Kregg roared in pain, grabbing\n his injured fist.\n\n\n “The bar!” yelled Kregg. “I\n hit the damn bar!”", "question: Was he human?\nTrella\n feared she was in\n for trouble even before Motwick's\n head dropped forward on\n his arms in a drunken stupor.\n The two evil-looking men at the\n table nearby had been watching\n her surreptitiously, and now\n they shifted restlessly in their\n chairs.\n\n\n Trella had not wanted to come\n to the Golden Satellite. It was a\n squalid saloon in the rougher\n section of Jupiter's View, the\n terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede.\n Motwick,\n already\n drunk,\n had insisted.\n\n\n A woman could not possibly\n make her way through these\n streets alone to the better section\n of town, especially one clad\n in a silvery evening dress. Her\n only hope was that this place\n had a telephone. Perhaps she\n could call one of Motwick's\n friends; she had no one on Ganymede\n she could call a real friend\n herself.", "At this juncture, the bartender\n took a hand. Leaning far\n over the bar, he swung a full\n bottle in a complete arc. It\n smashed on Kregg's head,\n splashing the floor with liquor,\n and Kregg sank stunned to his\n knees. The dark man, who had\n grabbed Trella's arm, released\n her and ran for the door.\n\n\n Moving agilely around the end\n of the bar, the bartender stood\n over Kregg, holding the jagged-edged\n bottleneck in his hand\n menacingly.\n\n\n “Get out!” rumbled the bartender.\n “I'll have no coppers\n raiding my place for the likes of\n you!”\n\n\n Kregg stumbled to his feet\n and staggered out. Trella ran to\n the unconscious Motwick's side." ], [ "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing.", "Trella was silent, shocked.\n There was something here she\n hadn't known about, hadn't even\n suspected. For some reason, Dom\n Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund\n Mansard … or his heir … or\n his mechanical servant.\nShe was sure that Blessing\n was wrong, that Quest, whether\n man or android, intended no\n 59\n harm to him. Surely, Quest\n would have said something of\n such bitterness during their long\n time together on Ganymede and\n aspace, since he did not know of\n Trella's connection with Blessing.\n But, since this was to be\n the atmosphere of Blessing's\n house, she was glad that he decided\n to assign her to take the\n Mansard papers to the New\n York laboratory.\n\n\n Quest came the day before she\n was scheduled to leave.", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“A wealthy man must be careful,”\n said Blessing cheerfully.\n “When we don't understand all\n the implications of new circumstances,\n we must be prepared for\n anything, eh?”\n\n\n There was only one new circumstance\n Trella could think\n of. Without actually intending\n to, she exclaimed:\n\n\n “You aren't afraid of Quest?\n Why, an android can't hurt a\n human!”\n\n\n Blessing peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “And what if he isn't an android,\n eh? And if he is—what if\n old Mansard didn't build in the\n prohibition against harming humans\n that's required by law?\n What about that, eh?”", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "This was an instrument with\n a three-dimensional screen as its\n heart. The screen was a cubical\n frame in which an apparently\n solid image was built up of an\n object under an electron microscope.\nThe actual cutting instrument\n of the surgiscope was an ion\n stream. By operating a tool in\n the three-dimensional screen,\n corresponding movements were\n made by the ion stream on the\n object under the microscope.\n The\n principle\n was the same as\n that used in operation of remote\n control “hands” in atomic laboratories\n to handle hot material,\n and with the surgiscope very\n delicate operations could be performed\n at the cellular level.\n\n\n Dr. Mansard and his wife had\n disappeared into the turbulent\n atmosphere of Jupiter just after\n his invention of the surgiscope,\n and it had been developed by\n Dom Blessing. Its success had\n built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated,\n which Blessing headed.", "The car whipped into the\n street, careened, and rolled over\n and over, bringing up against a\n tree on the other side in a twisted\n tangle of wreckage.\n\n\n With a horrified gasp, Trella\n ran down the driveway toward\n the smoking heap of metal.\n Quest was already beside it,\n probing it. As she reached his\n side, he lifted the torn body of\n Dom Blessing. Blessing was\n dead.\n\n\n “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly.\n “I would have murdered\n him.”\n\n\n “But why, Quest? I knew he\n was afraid of you, but he didn't\n tell me why.”", "“It was conditioned into me,”\n answered Quest “I didn't know\n 60\n it until just now, when it ended,\n but my father conditioned me\n psychologically from my birth\n to the task of hunting down\n Dom Blessing and killing him. It\n was an unconscious drive in me\n that wouldn't release me until\n the task was finished.\n\n\n “You see, Blessing was my father's\n assistant on Ganymede.\n Right after my father completed\n development of the surgiscope,\n he and my mother blasted off for\n Io. Blessing wanted the valuable\n rights to the surgiscope, and he\n sabotaged the ship's drive so it\n would fall into Jupiter.", "Trella was in the living room\n with Blessing, discussing the instructions\n she was to give to the\n laboratory officials in New York.\n The two bodyguards were with\n them. The other guards were at\n their posts.\n\n\n Trella heard the doorbell ring.\n The heavy oaken front door was\n kept locked now, and the guards\n in the anteroom examined callers\n through a tiny window.\n\n\n Suddenly alarm bells rang all\n over the house. There was a terrific\n crash outside the room as\n the front door splintered. There\n were shouts and the sound of a\n shot.\n\n\n “The steel doors!” cried Blessing,\n turning white. “Let's get\n out of here.”\n\n\n He and his bodyguards ran\n through the back of the house\n out of the garage.\n\n\n Blessing, ahead of the rest,\n leaped into one of the cars and\n started the engine.", "“It has been pleasant knowing\n you, Trella,” he said when they\n left the G-boat at White Sands.\n A faraway look came into his\n blue eyes, and he added: “I'm\n sorry things couldn't have been\n different, somehow.”\n\n\n “Let's don't be sorry for what\n we can't help,” she said gently,\n taking his hand in farewell.\n\n\n Trella took a fast plane from\n White Sands, and twenty-four\n hours later walked up the front\n steps of the familiar brownstone\n house on the outskirts of Washington.\n\n\n Dom Blessing himself met her\n at the door, a stooped, graying\n 58\n man who peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “You have the papers, eh?”\n he said, spying the brief case.\n “Good, good. Come in and we'll\n see what we have, eh?”", "It was not inconceivable that\n she should have unknowingly\n fallen in love with an android.\n Humans could love androids,\n with real affection, even knowing\n that they were artificial.\n There were instances of android\n nursemaids who were virtually\n members of the families owning\n them.\n\n\n She was glad now that she\n had not told Quest of her mission\n to Ganymede. He thought\n he was Dr. Mansard's son, but\n an android had no legal right of\n inheritance from his owner. She\n would leave it to Dom Blessing\n to decide what to do about Quest.\n\n\n Thus she did not, as she had\n intended originally, speak to\n Quest about seeing him again\n after she had completed her assignment.\n Even if Jakdane was\n wrong and Quest was human—as\n now seemed unlikely—Quest\n had told her he could not love\n her. Her best course was to try\n to forget him.\n\n\n Nor did Quest try to arrange\n with her for a later meeting.", "The door from the house shattered\n and Quest burst through.\n The two guards turned and fired\n together.\n\n\n He could be hurt by bullets.\n He was staggered momentarily.\n\n\n Then, in a blur of motion, he\n sprang forward and swept the\n guards aside with one hand with\n such force that they skidded\n across the floor and lay in an\n unconscious heap against the\n rear of the garage. Trella had\n opened the door of the car, but\n it was wrenched from her hand\n as Blessing stepped on the accelerator\n and it leaped into the\n driveway with spinning wheels.\n\n\n Quest was after it, like a\n chunky deer, running faster\n than Trella had ever seen a man\n run before.\n\n\n Blessing slowed for the turn\n at the end of the driveway and\n glanced back over his shoulder.\n Seeing Quest almost upon him,\n he slammed down the accelerator\n and twisted the wheel hard.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "“That means you, too, lady,”\n said the bartender beside her.\n “You and your boy friend get\n out of here. You oughtn't to\n have come here in the first\n place.”\n\n\n “May I help you, Miss?” asked\n a deep, resonant voice behind\n her.\n\n\n She straightened from her\n anxious examination of Motwick.\n The squat man was standing\n there, an apologetic look on\n his face.\n\n\n She looked contemptuously at\n the massive muscles whose help\n had been denied her. Her arm\n ached where the dark man had\n grasped it. The broad face before\n 52\n her was not unhandsome,\n and the blue eyes were disconcertingly\n direct, but she despised\n him for a coward.", "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "He looked at her in astonishment,\n stunned by her words.\n\n\n “What in space makes you\n think that?” he demanded.\n\n\n “Why, Quest, it's obvious,”\n she cried, tears in her eyes.\n “Everything about you … your\n build, suited for Jupiter's gravity …\n your strength … the\n fact that you were able to live\n in Jupiter's atmosphere after\n the oxygen equipment failed.\n I know you think Dr. Mansard\n was your father, but androids\n often believe that.”\n\n\n He grinned at her.\n\n\n “I'm no android,” he said confidently.\n “Do you forget my father\n was inventor of the surgiscope?\n He knew I'd have to grow\n up on Jupiter, and he operated\n on the genes before I was born.\n He altered my inherited characteristics\n to adapt me to the climate\n of Jupiter … even to\n being able to breathe a chlorine\n atmosphere as well as an oxygen\n atmosphere.”", "“Why? Because he's a coward?\n I know that ought to make\n me despise him, but it doesn't\n any more.”\n\n\n “Not because he's a coward.\n Because he's an android!”\n\n\n “What? Jakdane, you can't be\n serious!”\n\n\n “I am. I say he's an android,\n an artificial imitation of a man.\n It all figures.\n\n\n “Look, Trella, he said he was\n born on Jupiter. A human could\n stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside\n a dome or a ship, but what\n human could stand the rocket acceleration\n necessary to break\n free of Jupiter? Here's a man\n strong enough to break a spaceship\n safety belt just by getting\n up out of his chair against it,\n tough enough to take a beating\n with a heavy stick without being\n injured. How can you believe\n he's really human?”", "The transparent dome of Jupiter's\n View was faintly visible\n in the reflected night lights of\n the colonial city, but the lights\n were overwhelmed by the giant,\n vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself,\n riding high in the sky.\n\n\n “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,”\n said her companion. “I'm just in\n from Jupiter.”\n\n\n “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said,\n favoring him with a green-eyed\n glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or\n Moon Five?”\n\n\n “No,” he said, grinning at\n her. He had an engaging grin,\n with even white teeth. “I meant\n Jupiter.”\n\n\n “You're lying,” she said flatly.\n “No one has ever landed on\n Jupiter. It would be impossible\n to blast off again.”" ], [ "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "Trella was silent, shocked.\n There was something here she\n hadn't known about, hadn't even\n suspected. For some reason, Dom\n Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund\n Mansard … or his heir … or\n his mechanical servant.\nShe was sure that Blessing\n was wrong, that Quest, whether\n man or android, intended no\n 59\n harm to him. Surely, Quest\n would have said something of\n such bitterness during their long\n time together on Ganymede and\n aspace, since he did not know of\n Trella's connection with Blessing.\n But, since this was to be\n the atmosphere of Blessing's\n house, she was glad that he decided\n to assign her to take the\n Mansard papers to the New\n York laboratory.\n\n\n Quest came the day before she\n was scheduled to leave.", "Trella sighed. Cowardice was\n a state of mind. It was peculiarly\n inappropriate, but not unbelievable,\n that the strongest and\n most agile man on Ganymede\n should be a coward. Well, she\n thought with a rush of sympathy,\n he couldn't help being\n what he was.\nThey had reached the more\n brightly lighted section of the\n city now. Trella could get a cab\n from here, but the Stellar Hotel\n wasn't far. They walked on.\n\n\n Trella had the desk clerk call\n a cab to deliver the unconscious\n Motwick to his home. She and\n Quest had a late sandwich in the\n coffee shop.\n\n\n “I landed here only a week\n ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly\n admiring her honey-colored\n hair and comely face. “I'm heading\n for Earth on the next spaceship.”", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "The car whipped into the\n street, careened, and rolled over\n and over, bringing up against a\n tree on the other side in a twisted\n tangle of wreckage.\n\n\n With a horrified gasp, Trella\n ran down the driveway toward\n the smoking heap of metal.\n Quest was already beside it,\n probing it. As she reached his\n side, he lifted the torn body of\n Dom Blessing. Blessing was\n dead.\n\n\n “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly.\n “I would have murdered\n him.”\n\n\n “But why, Quest? I knew he\n was afraid of you, but he didn't\n tell me why.”", "“Bruises? Man, that club\n could have broken your skull!\n Or a couple of ribs, at the very\n least.”\n\n\n “I'm all right,” insisted\n Quest; and when the skeptical\n Jakdane insisted on examining\n him carefully, he had to admit\n it. There was hardly a mark on\n him from the blows.\n\n\n “If it didn't hurt you any\n more than that, why didn't you\n take that stick away from him?”\n demanded Jakdane. “You could\n have, easily.”\n\n\n “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably,\n and turned his face\n away.\n\n\n Later, alone with Trella on\n the control deck, Jakdane gave\n her some sober advice.\n\n\n “If you think you're in love\n with Quest, forget it,” he said.", "“It seems I was taking unnecessary\n precautions when I asked\n you to be a chaperon,” she said.\n “I kept waiting for Quest to do\n something, and when he didn't\n I told him I loved him.”\n\n\n “What did he say?”\n\n\n “It's very peculiar,” she said\n unhappily. “He said he\n can't\n love me. He said he wants to\n love me and he feels that he\n should, but there's something in\n him that refuses to permit it.”\n\n\n She expected Jakdane to salve\n her wounded feelings with a\n sympathetic pleasantry, but he\n did not. Instead, he just looked\n at her very thoughtfully and\n said no more about the matter.\n\n\n He explained his attitude\n after Asrange ran amuck.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "“A wealthy man must be careful,”\n said Blessing cheerfully.\n “When we don't understand all\n the implications of new circumstances,\n we must be prepared for\n anything, eh?”\n\n\n There was only one new circumstance\n Trella could think\n of. Without actually intending\n to, she exclaimed:\n\n\n “You aren't afraid of Quest?\n Why, an android can't hurt a\n human!”\n\n\n Blessing peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “And what if he isn't an android,\n eh? And if he is—what if\n old Mansard didn't build in the\n prohibition against harming humans\n that's required by law?\n What about that, eh?”", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "“It has been pleasant knowing\n you, Trella,” he said when they\n left the G-boat at White Sands.\n A faraway look came into his\n blue eyes, and he added: “I'm\n sorry things couldn't have been\n different, somehow.”\n\n\n “Let's don't be sorry for what\n we can't help,” she said gently,\n taking his hand in farewell.\n\n\n Trella took a fast plane from\n White Sands, and twenty-four\n hours later walked up the front\n steps of the familiar brownstone\n house on the outskirts of Washington.\n\n\n Dom Blessing himself met her\n at the door, a stooped, graying\n 58\n man who peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “You have the papers, eh?”\n he said, spying the brief case.\n “Good, good. Come in and we'll\n see what we have, eh?”", "The door from the house shattered\n and Quest burst through.\n The two guards turned and fired\n together.\n\n\n He could be hurt by bullets.\n He was staggered momentarily.\n\n\n Then, in a blur of motion, he\n sprang forward and swept the\n guards aside with one hand with\n such force that they skidded\n across the floor and lay in an\n unconscious heap against the\n rear of the garage. Trella had\n opened the door of the car, but\n it was wrenched from her hand\n as Blessing stepped on the accelerator\n and it leaped into the\n driveway with spinning wheels.\n\n\n Quest was after it, like a\n chunky deer, running faster\n than Trella had ever seen a man\n run before.\n\n\n Blessing slowed for the turn\n at the end of the driveway and\n glanced back over his shoulder.\n Seeing Quest almost upon him,\n he slammed down the accelerator\n and twisted the wheel hard.", "“For the protection of humans,\n there are two psychological\n traits built into every robot\n and android,” said Jakdane\n gently. “The first is that they\n can never, under any circumstances,\n attack a human being,\n even in self defense. The second\n is that, while they may understand\n sexual desire objectively,\n they can never experience it\n themselves.\n\n\n “Those characteristics fit your\n man Quest to a T, Trella. There\n is no other explanation for him:\n he must be an android.”\nTrella did not want to believe\n Jakdane was right, but his reasoning\n was unassailable. Looking\n upon Quest as an android,\n many things were explained: his\n great strength, his short, broad\n build, his immunity to injury,\n his refusal to defend himself\n against a human, his inability to\n return Trella's love for him.", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing.", "She was not at all happy about\n being so strongly attracted to a\n man several inches shorter than\n she. She was particularly unhappy\n about feeling drawn to a\n man who was a coward.\n\n\n The ship that they boarded on\n Moon Nine was one of the newer\n ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second\n velocity\n and take a hyperbolic path to\n Earth, but it would still require\n fifty-four days to make the trip.\n So Trella was delighted to find\n that the ship was the\nCometfire\nand its skipper was her old\n friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired\n Jakdane Gille.\n\n\n “Jakdane,” she said, flirting\n with him with her eyes as in\n 54\n days gone by, “I need a chaperon\n this trip, and you're ideal for\n the job.”", "In his haste, Quest missed the\n companionway in his leap and\n was cornered against one of the\n bunks. Asrange descended on\n him like an avenging angel and,\n holding onto the bunk with one\n hand, rained savage blows on his\n head and shoulders with the\n heavy stick.\n\n\n Quest made no effort to retaliate.\n He cowered under the attack,\n holding his hands in front\n of him as if to ward it off. In a\n moment, Jakdane and the other\n crewman had reached Asrange\n and pulled him off.\nWhen they had Asrange in\n irons, Jakdane turned to Quest,\n who was now sitting unhappily\n at the table.\n\n\n “Take it easy,” he advised.\n “I'll wake the psychosurgeon\n and have him look you over. Just\n stay there.”\n\n\n Quest shook his head.\n\n\n “Don't bother him,” he said.\n “It's nothing but a few bruises.”", "It was not inconceivable that\n she should have unknowingly\n fallen in love with an android.\n Humans could love androids,\n with real affection, even knowing\n that they were artificial.\n There were instances of android\n nursemaids who were virtually\n members of the families owning\n them.\n\n\n She was glad now that she\n had not told Quest of her mission\n to Ganymede. He thought\n he was Dr. Mansard's son, but\n an android had no legal right of\n inheritance from his owner. She\n would leave it to Dom Blessing\n to decide what to do about Quest.\n\n\n Thus she did not, as she had\n intended originally, speak to\n Quest about seeing him again\n after she had completed her assignment.\n Even if Jakdane was\n wrong and Quest was human—as\n now seemed unlikely—Quest\n had told her he could not love\n her. Her best course was to try\n to forget him.\n\n\n Nor did Quest try to arrange\n with her for a later meeting." ], [ "“I never thought of myself in\n quite that light, but maybe\n I'm getting old,” he answered,\n laughing. “What's your trouble,\n Trella?”\n\n\n “I'm in love with that huge\n chunk of man who came aboard\n with me, and I'm not sure I\n ought to be,” she confessed. “I\n may need protection against myself\n till we get to Earth.”\n\n\n “If it's to keep you out of another\n fellow's clutches, I'm your\n man,” agreed Jakdane heartily.\n “I always had a mind to save\n you for myself. I'll guarantee\n you won't have a moment alone\n with him the whole trip.”\n\n\n “You don't have to be that\n thorough about it,” she protested\n hastily. “I want to get a little\n enjoyment out of being in love.\n But if I feel myself weakening\n too much, I'll holler for help.”", "“It seems I was taking unnecessary\n precautions when I asked\n you to be a chaperon,” she said.\n “I kept waiting for Quest to do\n something, and when he didn't\n I told him I loved him.”\n\n\n “What did he say?”\n\n\n “It's very peculiar,” she said\n unhappily. “He said he\n can't\n love me. He said he wants to\n love me and he feels that he\n should, but there's something in\n him that refuses to permit it.”\n\n\n She expected Jakdane to salve\n her wounded feelings with a\n sympathetic pleasantry, but he\n did not. Instead, he just looked\n at her very thoughtfully and\n said no more about the matter.\n\n\n He explained his attitude\n after Asrange ran amuck.", "She was not at all happy about\n being so strongly attracted to a\n man several inches shorter than\n she. She was particularly unhappy\n about feeling drawn to a\n man who was a coward.\n\n\n The ship that they boarded on\n Moon Nine was one of the newer\n ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second\n velocity\n and take a hyperbolic path to\n Earth, but it would still require\n fifty-four days to make the trip.\n So Trella was delighted to find\n that the ship was the\nCometfire\nand its skipper was her old\n friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired\n Jakdane Gille.\n\n\n “Jakdane,” she said, flirting\n with him with her eyes as in\n 54\n days gone by, “I need a chaperon\n this trip, and you're ideal for\n the job.”", "“Bruises? Man, that club\n could have broken your skull!\n Or a couple of ribs, at the very\n least.”\n\n\n “I'm all right,” insisted\n Quest; and when the skeptical\n Jakdane insisted on examining\n him carefully, he had to admit\n it. There was hardly a mark on\n him from the blows.\n\n\n “If it didn't hurt you any\n more than that, why didn't you\n take that stick away from him?”\n demanded Jakdane. “You could\n have, easily.”\n\n\n “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably,\n and turned his face\n away.\n\n\n Later, alone with Trella on\n the control deck, Jakdane gave\n her some sober advice.\n\n\n “If you think you're in love\n with Quest, forget it,” he said.", "“Why? Because he's a coward?\n I know that ought to make\n me despise him, but it doesn't\n any more.”\n\n\n “Not because he's a coward.\n Because he's an android!”\n\n\n “What? Jakdane, you can't be\n serious!”\n\n\n “I am. I say he's an android,\n an artificial imitation of a man.\n It all figures.\n\n\n “Look, Trella, he said he was\n born on Jupiter. A human could\n stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside\n a dome or a ship, but what\n human could stand the rocket acceleration\n necessary to break\n free of Jupiter? Here's a man\n strong enough to break a spaceship\n safety belt just by getting\n up out of his chair against it,\n tough enough to take a beating\n with a heavy stick without being\n injured. How can you believe\n he's really human?”", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“For the protection of humans,\n there are two psychological\n traits built into every robot\n and android,” said Jakdane\n gently. “The first is that they\n can never, under any circumstances,\n attack a human being,\n even in self defense. The second\n is that, while they may understand\n sexual desire objectively,\n they can never experience it\n themselves.\n\n\n “Those characteristics fit your\n man Quest to a T, Trella. There\n is no other explanation for him:\n he must be an android.”\nTrella did not want to believe\n Jakdane was right, but his reasoning\n was unassailable. Looking\n upon Quest as an android,\n many things were explained: his\n great strength, his short, broad\n build, his immunity to injury,\n his refusal to defend himself\n against a human, his inability to\n return Trella's love for him.", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "The man's eyes went wide and\n he snarled. So quickly it seemed\n impossible, he had unbuckled\n himself from his seat and hurled\n himself backward from the table\n with an incoherent cry. He\n seized the first object his hand\n touched—it happened to be a\n heavy wooden cane leaning\n against Jakdane's bunk—propelled\n himself like a projectile at\n Quest.\n\n\n Quest rose from the table in\n a sudden uncoiling of movement.\n He did not unbuckle his safety\n belt—he rose and it snapped like\n a string.\n\n\n For a moment Trella thought\n he was going to meet Asrange's\n assault. But he fled in a long\n leap toward the companionway\n leading to the astrogation deck\n 56\n above. Landing feet-first in the\n middle of the table and rebounding,\n Asrange pursued with the\n stick upraised.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "Trella sighed. Cowardice was\n a state of mind. It was peculiarly\n inappropriate, but not unbelievable,\n that the strongest and\n most agile man on Ganymede\n should be a coward. Well, she\n thought with a rush of sympathy,\n he couldn't help being\n what he was.\nThey had reached the more\n brightly lighted section of the\n city now. Trella could get a cab\n from here, but the Stellar Hotel\n wasn't far. They walked on.\n\n\n Trella had the desk clerk call\n a cab to deliver the unconscious\n Motwick to his home. She and\n Quest had a late sandwich in the\n coffee shop.\n\n\n “I landed here only a week\n ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly\n admiring her honey-colored\n hair and comely face. “I'm heading\n for Earth on the next spaceship.”", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "It was not inconceivable that\n she should have unknowingly\n fallen in love with an android.\n Humans could love androids,\n with real affection, even knowing\n that they were artificial.\n There were instances of android\n nursemaids who were virtually\n members of the families owning\n them.\n\n\n She was glad now that she\n had not told Quest of her mission\n to Ganymede. He thought\n he was Dr. Mansard's son, but\n an android had no legal right of\n inheritance from his owner. She\n would leave it to Dom Blessing\n to decide what to do about Quest.\n\n\n Thus she did not, as she had\n intended originally, speak to\n Quest about seeing him again\n after she had completed her assignment.\n Even if Jakdane was\n wrong and Quest was human—as\n now seemed unlikely—Quest\n had told her he could not love\n her. Her best course was to try\n to forget him.\n\n\n Nor did Quest try to arrange\n with her for a later meeting.", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "Trella looked at him. He was\n not badly hurt, any more than\n an elephant would have been,\n but his tunic was stained with\n red blood where the bullets had\n struck him. Normal android\n blood was green.\n\n\n “How can you be sure?” she\n asked doubtfully.\n\n\n “Androids are made,” he answered\n with a laugh. “They\n don't grow up. And I remember\n my boyhood on Jupiter very\n well.”\n\n\n He took her in his arms again,\n and this time she did not resist.\n His lips were very human.\nTHE END", "Tentatively, she pushed her\n chair back from the table and\n arose. She had to brush close by\n the other table to get to the bar.\n As she did, the dark, slick-haired\n man reached out and grabbed\n her around the waist with a\n steely arm.\n\n\n Trella swung with her whole\n body, and slapped him so hard\n he nearly fell from his chair. As\n she walked swiftly toward the\n bar, he leaped up to follow her.\n\n\n There were only two other\n people in the Golden Satellite:\n the fat, mustached bartender\n and a short, square-built man at\n the bar. The latter swung\n around at the pistol-like report\n of her slap, and she saw that,\n though no more than four and a\n half feet tall, he was as heavily\n muscled as a lion.\n\n\n 51\n His face was clean and open,\n with close-cropped blond hair\n and honest blue eyes. She ran to\n him.", "In his haste, Quest missed the\n companionway in his leap and\n was cornered against one of the\n bunks. Asrange descended on\n him like an avenging angel and,\n holding onto the bunk with one\n hand, rained savage blows on his\n head and shoulders with the\n heavy stick.\n\n\n Quest made no effort to retaliate.\n He cowered under the attack,\n holding his hands in front\n of him as if to ward it off. In a\n moment, Jakdane and the other\n crewman had reached Asrange\n and pulled him off.\nWhen they had Asrange in\n irons, Jakdane turned to Quest,\n who was now sitting unhappily\n at the table.\n\n\n “Take it easy,” he advised.\n “I'll wake the psychosurgeon\n and have him look you over. Just\n stay there.”\n\n\n Quest shook his head.\n\n\n “Don't bother him,” he said.\n “It's nothing but a few bruises.”", "Asrange was the third passenger.\n He was a lean, saturnine\n individual who said little and\n kept to himself as much as possible.\n He was distantly polite in\n his relations with both crew and\n other passengers, and never\n showed the slightest spark of\n emotion … until the day Quest\n squirted coffee on him.\n\n\n It was one of those accidents\n that can occur easily in space.\n The passengers and the two\n crewmen on that particular waking\n shift (including Jakdane)\n were eating lunch on the center-deck.\n Quest picked up his bulb\n of coffee, but inadvertently\n pressed it before he got it to his\n lips. The coffee squirted all over\n the front of Asrange's clean\n white tunic.\n\n\n “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest\n in distress.", "“It has been pleasant knowing\n you, Trella,” he said when they\n left the G-boat at White Sands.\n A faraway look came into his\n blue eyes, and he added: “I'm\n sorry things couldn't have been\n different, somehow.”\n\n\n “Let's don't be sorry for what\n we can't help,” she said gently,\n taking his hand in farewell.\n\n\n Trella took a fast plane from\n White Sands, and twenty-four\n hours later walked up the front\n steps of the familiar brownstone\n house on the outskirts of Washington.\n\n\n Dom Blessing himself met her\n at the door, a stooped, graying\n 58\n man who peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “You have the papers, eh?”\n he said, spying the brief case.\n “Good, good. Come in and we'll\n see what we have, eh?”", "The car whipped into the\n street, careened, and rolled over\n and over, bringing up against a\n tree on the other side in a twisted\n tangle of wreckage.\n\n\n With a horrified gasp, Trella\n ran down the driveway toward\n the smoking heap of metal.\n Quest was already beside it,\n probing it. As she reached his\n side, he lifted the torn body of\n Dom Blessing. Blessing was\n dead.\n\n\n “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly.\n “I would have murdered\n him.”\n\n\n “But why, Quest? I knew he\n was afraid of you, but he didn't\n tell me why.”" ], [ "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“My parents landed on Jupiter,\n and I blasted off from it,”\n he said soberly. “I was born\n there. Have you ever heard of\n Dr. Eriklund Mansard?”\n\n\n “I certainly have,” she said,\n her interest taking a sudden\n upward turn. “He developed the\n surgiscope, didn't he? But his\n ship was drawn into Jupiter and\n lost.”\n\n\n “It was drawn into Jupiter,\n but he landed it successfully,”\n said Quest. “He and my mother\n lived on Jupiter until the oxygen\n equipment wore out at last. I\n was born and brought up there,\n and I was finally able to build\n a small rocket with a powerful\n enough drive to clear the\n planet.”\n\n\n She looked at him. He was\n short, half a head shorter than\n she, but broad and powerful as\n a man might be who had grown\n up in heavy gravity. He trod the\n street with a light, controlled\n step, seeming to deliberately\n hold himself down.", "The transparent dome of Jupiter's\n View was faintly visible\n in the reflected night lights of\n the colonial city, but the lights\n were overwhelmed by the giant,\n vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself,\n riding high in the sky.\n\n\n “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,”\n said her companion. “I'm just in\n from Jupiter.”\n\n\n “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said,\n favoring him with a green-eyed\n glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or\n Moon Five?”\n\n\n “No,” he said, grinning at\n her. He had an engaging grin,\n with even white teeth. “I meant\n Jupiter.”\n\n\n “You're lying,” she said flatly.\n “No one has ever landed on\n Jupiter. It would be impossible\n to blast off again.”", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "“Why? Because he's a coward?\n I know that ought to make\n me despise him, but it doesn't\n any more.”\n\n\n “Not because he's a coward.\n Because he's an android!”\n\n\n “What? Jakdane, you can't be\n serious!”\n\n\n “I am. I say he's an android,\n an artificial imitation of a man.\n It all figures.\n\n\n “Look, Trella, he said he was\n born on Jupiter. A human could\n stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside\n a dome or a ship, but what\n human could stand the rocket acceleration\n necessary to break\n free of Jupiter? Here's a man\n strong enough to break a spaceship\n safety belt just by getting\n up out of his chair against it,\n tough enough to take a beating\n with a heavy stick without being\n injured. How can you believe\n he's really human?”", "He looked at her in astonishment,\n stunned by her words.\n\n\n “What in space makes you\n think that?” he demanded.\n\n\n “Why, Quest, it's obvious,”\n she cried, tears in her eyes.\n “Everything about you … your\n build, suited for Jupiter's gravity …\n your strength … the\n fact that you were able to live\n in Jupiter's atmosphere after\n the oxygen equipment failed.\n I know you think Dr. Mansard\n was your father, but androids\n often believe that.”\n\n\n He grinned at her.\n\n\n “I'm no android,” he said confidently.\n “Do you forget my father\n was inventor of the surgiscope?\n He knew I'd have to grow\n up on Jupiter, and he operated\n on the genes before I was born.\n He altered my inherited characteristics\n to adapt me to the climate\n of Jupiter … even to\n being able to breathe a chlorine\n atmosphere as well as an oxygen\n atmosphere.”", "Trella was silent, shocked.\n There was something here she\n hadn't known about, hadn't even\n suspected. For some reason, Dom\n Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund\n Mansard … or his heir … or\n his mechanical servant.\nShe was sure that Blessing\n was wrong, that Quest, whether\n man or android, intended no\n 59\n harm to him. Surely, Quest\n would have said something of\n such bitterness during their long\n time together on Ganymede and\n aspace, since he did not know of\n Trella's connection with Blessing.\n But, since this was to be\n the atmosphere of Blessing's\n house, she was glad that he decided\n to assign her to take the\n Mansard papers to the New\n York laboratory.\n\n\n Quest came the day before she\n was scheduled to leave.", "This was an instrument with\n a three-dimensional screen as its\n heart. The screen was a cubical\n frame in which an apparently\n solid image was built up of an\n object under an electron microscope.\nThe actual cutting instrument\n of the surgiscope was an ion\n stream. By operating a tool in\n the three-dimensional screen,\n corresponding movements were\n made by the ion stream on the\n object under the microscope.\n The\n principle\n was the same as\n that used in operation of remote\n control “hands” in atomic laboratories\n to handle hot material,\n and with the surgiscope very\n delicate operations could be performed\n at the cellular level.\n\n\n Dr. Mansard and his wife had\n disappeared into the turbulent\n atmosphere of Jupiter just after\n his invention of the surgiscope,\n and it had been developed by\n Dom Blessing. Its success had\n built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated,\n which Blessing headed.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "It was not inconceivable that\n she should have unknowingly\n fallen in love with an android.\n Humans could love androids,\n with real affection, even knowing\n that they were artificial.\n There were instances of android\n nursemaids who were virtually\n members of the families owning\n them.\n\n\n She was glad now that she\n had not told Quest of her mission\n to Ganymede. He thought\n he was Dr. Mansard's son, but\n an android had no legal right of\n inheritance from his owner. She\n would leave it to Dom Blessing\n to decide what to do about Quest.\n\n\n Thus she did not, as she had\n intended originally, speak to\n Quest about seeing him again\n after she had completed her assignment.\n Even if Jakdane was\n wrong and Quest was human—as\n now seemed unlikely—Quest\n had told her he could not love\n her. Her best course was to try\n to forget him.\n\n\n Nor did Quest try to arrange\n with her for a later meeting.", "“It was conditioned into me,”\n answered Quest “I didn't know\n 60\n it until just now, when it ended,\n but my father conditioned me\n psychologically from my birth\n to the task of hunting down\n Dom Blessing and killing him. It\n was an unconscious drive in me\n that wouldn't release me until\n the task was finished.\n\n\n “You see, Blessing was my father's\n assistant on Ganymede.\n Right after my father completed\n development of the surgiscope,\n he and my mother blasted off for\n Io. Blessing wanted the valuable\n rights to the surgiscope, and he\n sabotaged the ship's drive so it\n would fall into Jupiter.", "“It seems I was taking unnecessary\n precautions when I asked\n you to be a chaperon,” she said.\n “I kept waiting for Quest to do\n something, and when he didn't\n I told him I loved him.”\n\n\n “What did he say?”\n\n\n “It's very peculiar,” she said\n unhappily. “He said he\n can't\n love me. He said he wants to\n love me and he feels that he\n should, but there's something in\n him that refuses to permit it.”\n\n\n She expected Jakdane to salve\n her wounded feelings with a\n sympathetic pleasantry, but he\n did not. Instead, he just looked\n at her very thoughtfully and\n said no more about the matter.\n\n\n He explained his attitude\n after Asrange ran amuck.", "“That means you, too, lady,”\n said the bartender beside her.\n “You and your boy friend get\n out of here. You oughtn't to\n have come here in the first\n place.”\n\n\n “May I help you, Miss?” asked\n a deep, resonant voice behind\n her.\n\n\n She straightened from her\n anxious examination of Motwick.\n The squat man was standing\n there, an apologetic look on\n his face.\n\n\n She looked contemptuously at\n the massive muscles whose help\n had been denied her. Her arm\n ached where the dark man had\n grasped it. The broad face before\n 52\n her was not unhandsome,\n and the blue eyes were disconcertingly\n direct, but she despised\n him for a coward.", "Trella sighed. Cowardice was\n a state of mind. It was peculiarly\n inappropriate, but not unbelievable,\n that the strongest and\n most agile man on Ganymede\n should be a coward. Well, she\n thought with a rush of sympathy,\n he couldn't help being\n what he was.\nThey had reached the more\n brightly lighted section of the\n city now. Trella could get a cab\n from here, but the Stellar Hotel\n wasn't far. They walked on.\n\n\n Trella had the desk clerk call\n a cab to deliver the unconscious\n Motwick to his home. She and\n Quest had a late sandwich in the\n coffee shop.\n\n\n “I landed here only a week\n ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly\n admiring her honey-colored\n hair and comely face. “I'm heading\n for Earth on the next spaceship.”", "“I'm sorry I couldn't fight\n those men for you, Miss, but I\n just couldn't,” he said miserably,\n as though reading her thoughts.\n “But no one will bother you on\n the street if I'm with you.”\n\n\n “A lot of protection you'd be\n if they did!” she snapped. “But\n I'm desperate. You can carry\n him to the Stellar Hotel for me.”\nThe gravity of Ganymede was\n hardly more than that of Earth's\n moon, but the way the man\n picked up the limp Motwick with\n one hand and tossed him over a\n shoulder was startling: as\n though he lifted a feather pillow.\n He followed Trella out the door\n of the Golden Satellite and fell\n in step beside her. Immediately\n she was grateful for his presence.\n The dimly lighted street\n was not crowded, but she didn't\n like the looks of the men she\n saw." ], [ "Transcriber's Note:\nEvery effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as\n possible; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to\n the original text are marked\n like this\n .\n The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text.\n\n\n This e-text was produced from\n Amazing Science Fiction Stories\n March 1959.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. copyright on this\n publication was renewed.\n\n\n 50\nTHE\n\n JUPITER\n\n WEAPON\nBy CHARLES L. FONTENAY\nHe was a living weapon of\n\n destruction—\n immeasurably\n\n powerful, utterly invulnerable.\n\n There was only one", "This was an instrument with\n a three-dimensional screen as its\n heart. The screen was a cubical\n frame in which an apparently\n solid image was built up of an\n object under an electron microscope.\nThe actual cutting instrument\n of the surgiscope was an ion\n stream. By operating a tool in\n the three-dimensional screen,\n corresponding movements were\n made by the ion stream on the\n object under the microscope.\n The\n principle\n was the same as\n that used in operation of remote\n control “hands” in atomic laboratories\n to handle hot material,\n and with the surgiscope very\n delicate operations could be performed\n at the cellular level.\n\n\n Dr. Mansard and his wife had\n disappeared into the turbulent\n atmosphere of Jupiter just after\n his invention of the surgiscope,\n and it had been developed by\n Dom Blessing. Its success had\n built Spaceway Instruments, Incorporated,\n which Blessing headed.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "“My parents landed on Jupiter,\n and I blasted off from it,”\n he said soberly. “I was born\n there. Have you ever heard of\n Dr. Eriklund Mansard?”\n\n\n “I certainly have,” she said,\n her interest taking a sudden\n upward turn. “He developed the\n surgiscope, didn't he? But his\n ship was drawn into Jupiter and\n lost.”\n\n\n “It was drawn into Jupiter,\n but he landed it successfully,”\n said Quest. “He and my mother\n lived on Jupiter until the oxygen\n equipment wore out at last. I\n was born and brought up there,\n and I was finally able to build\n a small rocket with a powerful\n enough drive to clear the\n planet.”\n\n\n She looked at him. He was\n short, half a head shorter than\n she, but broad and powerful as\n a man might be who had grown\n up in heavy gravity. He trod the\n street with a light, controlled\n step, seeming to deliberately\n hold himself down.", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "The transparent dome of Jupiter's\n View was faintly visible\n in the reflected night lights of\n the colonial city, but the lights\n were overwhelmed by the giant,\n vari-colored disc of Jupiter itself,\n riding high in the sky.\n\n\n “I'm Quest Mansard, Miss,”\n said her companion. “I'm just in\n from Jupiter.”\n\n\n “I'm Trella Nuspar,” she said,\n favoring him with a green-eyed\n glance. “You mean Io, don't you—or\n Moon Five?”\n\n\n “No,” he said, grinning at\n her. He had an engaging grin,\n with even white teeth. “I meant\n Jupiter.”\n\n\n “You're lying,” she said flatly.\n “No one has ever landed on\n Jupiter. It would be impossible\n to blast off again.”", "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "“Why? Because he's a coward?\n I know that ought to make\n me despise him, but it doesn't\n any more.”\n\n\n “Not because he's a coward.\n Because he's an android!”\n\n\n “What? Jakdane, you can't be\n serious!”\n\n\n “I am. I say he's an android,\n an artificial imitation of a man.\n It all figures.\n\n\n “Look, Trella, he said he was\n born on Jupiter. A human could\n stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside\n a dome or a ship, but what\n human could stand the rocket acceleration\n necessary to break\n free of Jupiter? Here's a man\n strong enough to break a spaceship\n safety belt just by getting\n up out of his chair against it,\n tough enough to take a beating\n with a heavy stick without being\n injured. How can you believe\n he's really human?”", "“I'm sorry I couldn't fight\n those men for you, Miss, but I\n just couldn't,” he said miserably,\n as though reading her thoughts.\n “But no one will bother you on\n the street if I'm with you.”\n\n\n “A lot of protection you'd be\n if they did!” she snapped. “But\n I'm desperate. You can carry\n him to the Stellar Hotel for me.”\nThe gravity of Ganymede was\n hardly more than that of Earth's\n moon, but the way the man\n picked up the limp Motwick with\n one hand and tossed him over a\n shoulder was startling: as\n though he lifted a feather pillow.\n He followed Trella out the door\n of the Golden Satellite and fell\n in step beside her. Immediately\n she was grateful for his presence.\n The dimly lighted street\n was not crowded, but she didn't\n like the looks of the men she\n saw.", "He looked at her in astonishment,\n stunned by her words.\n\n\n “What in space makes you\n think that?” he demanded.\n\n\n “Why, Quest, it's obvious,”\n she cried, tears in her eyes.\n “Everything about you … your\n build, suited for Jupiter's gravity …\n your strength … the\n fact that you were able to live\n in Jupiter's atmosphere after\n the oxygen equipment failed.\n I know you think Dr. Mansard\n was your father, but androids\n often believe that.”\n\n\n He grinned at her.\n\n\n “I'm no android,” he said confidently.\n “Do you forget my father\n was inventor of the surgiscope?\n He knew I'd have to grow\n up on Jupiter, and he operated\n on the genes before I was born.\n He altered my inherited characteristics\n to adapt me to the climate\n of Jupiter … even to\n being able to breathe a chlorine\n atmosphere as well as an oxygen\n atmosphere.”", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "“It was conditioned into me,”\n answered Quest “I didn't know\n 60\n it until just now, when it ended,\n but my father conditioned me\n psychologically from my birth\n to the task of hunting down\n Dom Blessing and killing him. It\n was an unconscious drive in me\n that wouldn't release me until\n the task was finished.\n\n\n “You see, Blessing was my father's\n assistant on Ganymede.\n Right after my father completed\n development of the surgiscope,\n he and my mother blasted off for\n Io. Blessing wanted the valuable\n rights to the surgiscope, and he\n sabotaged the ship's drive so it\n would fall into Jupiter.", "The man's eyes went wide and\n he snarled. So quickly it seemed\n impossible, he had unbuckled\n himself from his seat and hurled\n himself backward from the table\n with an incoherent cry. He\n seized the first object his hand\n touched—it happened to be a\n heavy wooden cane leaning\n against Jakdane's bunk—propelled\n himself like a projectile at\n Quest.\n\n\n Quest rose from the table in\n a sudden uncoiling of movement.\n He did not unbuckle his safety\n belt—he rose and it snapped like\n a string.\n\n\n For a moment Trella thought\n he was going to meet Asrange's\n assault. But he fled in a long\n leap toward the companionway\n leading to the astrogation deck\n 56\n above. Landing feet-first in the\n middle of the table and rebounding,\n Asrange pursued with the\n stick upraised.", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "question: Was he human?\nTrella\n feared she was in\n for trouble even before Motwick's\n head dropped forward on\n his arms in a drunken stupor.\n The two evil-looking men at the\n table nearby had been watching\n her surreptitiously, and now\n they shifted restlessly in their\n chairs.\n\n\n Trella had not wanted to come\n to the Golden Satellite. It was a\n squalid saloon in the rougher\n section of Jupiter's View, the\n terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede.\n Motwick,\n already\n drunk,\n had insisted.\n\n\n A woman could not possibly\n make her way through these\n streets alone to the better section\n of town, especially one clad\n in a silvery evening dress. Her\n only hope was that this place\n had a telephone. Perhaps she\n could call one of Motwick's\n friends; she had no one on Ganymede\n she could call a real friend\n herself.", "Trella looked at him. He was\n not badly hurt, any more than\n an elephant would have been,\n but his tunic was stained with\n red blood where the bullets had\n struck him. Normal android\n blood was green.\n\n\n “How can you be sure?” she\n asked doubtfully.\n\n\n “Androids are made,” he answered\n with a laugh. “They\n don't grow up. And I remember\n my boyhood on Jupiter very\n well.”\n\n\n He took her in his arms again,\n and this time she did not resist.\n His lips were very human.\nTHE END", "Asrange was the third passenger.\n He was a lean, saturnine\n individual who said little and\n kept to himself as much as possible.\n He was distantly polite in\n his relations with both crew and\n other passengers, and never\n showed the slightest spark of\n emotion … until the day Quest\n squirted coffee on him.\n\n\n It was one of those accidents\n that can occur easily in space.\n The passengers and the two\n crewmen on that particular waking\n shift (including Jakdane)\n were eating lunch on the center-deck.\n Quest picked up his bulb\n of coffee, but inadvertently\n pressed it before he got it to his\n lips. The coffee squirted all over\n the front of Asrange's clean\n white tunic.\n\n\n “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest\n in distress.", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing." ], [ "The door from the house shattered\n and Quest burst through.\n The two guards turned and fired\n together.\n\n\n He could be hurt by bullets.\n He was staggered momentarily.\n\n\n Then, in a blur of motion, he\n sprang forward and swept the\n guards aside with one hand with\n such force that they skidded\n across the floor and lay in an\n unconscious heap against the\n rear of the garage. Trella had\n opened the door of the car, but\n it was wrenched from her hand\n as Blessing stepped on the accelerator\n and it leaped into the\n driveway with spinning wheels.\n\n\n Quest was after it, like a\n chunky deer, running faster\n than Trella had ever seen a man\n run before.\n\n\n Blessing slowed for the turn\n at the end of the driveway and\n glanced back over his shoulder.\n Seeing Quest almost upon him,\n he slammed down the accelerator\n and twisted the wheel hard.", "“It seems I was taking unnecessary\n precautions when I asked\n you to be a chaperon,” she said.\n “I kept waiting for Quest to do\n something, and when he didn't\n I told him I loved him.”\n\n\n “What did he say?”\n\n\n “It's very peculiar,” she said\n unhappily. “He said he\n can't\n love me. He said he wants to\n love me and he feels that he\n should, but there's something in\n him that refuses to permit it.”\n\n\n She expected Jakdane to salve\n her wounded feelings with a\n sympathetic pleasantry, but he\n did not. Instead, he just looked\n at her very thoughtfully and\n said no more about the matter.\n\n\n He explained his attitude\n after Asrange ran amuck.", "The car whipped into the\n street, careened, and rolled over\n and over, bringing up against a\n tree on the other side in a twisted\n tangle of wreckage.\n\n\n With a horrified gasp, Trella\n ran down the driveway toward\n the smoking heap of metal.\n Quest was already beside it,\n probing it. As she reached his\n side, he lifted the torn body of\n Dom Blessing. Blessing was\n dead.\n\n\n “I'm lucky,” said Quest soberly.\n “I would have murdered\n him.”\n\n\n “But why, Quest? I knew he\n was afraid of you, but he didn't\n tell me why.”", "“Bruises? Man, that club\n could have broken your skull!\n Or a couple of ribs, at the very\n least.”\n\n\n “I'm all right,” insisted\n Quest; and when the skeptical\n Jakdane insisted on examining\n him carefully, he had to admit\n it. There was hardly a mark on\n him from the blows.\n\n\n “If it didn't hurt you any\n more than that, why didn't you\n take that stick away from him?”\n demanded Jakdane. “You could\n have, easily.”\n\n\n “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably,\n and turned his face\n away.\n\n\n Later, alone with Trella on\n the control deck, Jakdane gave\n her some sober advice.\n\n\n “If you think you're in love\n with Quest, forget it,” he said.", "“A wealthy man must be careful,”\n said Blessing cheerfully.\n “When we don't understand all\n the implications of new circumstances,\n we must be prepared for\n anything, eh?”\n\n\n There was only one new circumstance\n Trella could think\n of. Without actually intending\n to, she exclaimed:\n\n\n “You aren't afraid of Quest?\n Why, an android can't hurt a\n human!”\n\n\n Blessing peered at her over his\n spectacles.\n\n\n “And what if he isn't an android,\n eh? And if he is—what if\n old Mansard didn't build in the\n prohibition against harming humans\n that's required by law?\n What about that, eh?”", "She accompanied him through\n the bare, windowless anteroom\n which had always seemed to her\n such a strange feature of this\n luxurious house, and they entered\n the big living room. They sat\n before a fire in the old-fashioned\n fireplace and Blessing opened the\n brief case with trembling hands.\n\n\n “There are things here,” he\n said, his eyes sparkling as he\n glanced through the notebooks.\n “Yes, there are things here. We\n shall make something of these,\n Miss Trella, eh?”\n\n\n “I'm glad they're something\n you can use, Mr. Blessing,” she\n said. “There's something else I\n found on my trip, that I think\n I should tell you about.”\n\n\n She told him about Quest.\n\n\n “He thinks he's the son of Dr.\n Mansard,” she finished, “but apparently\n he is, without knowing\n it, an android Dr. Mansard built\n on Jupiter.”", "In his haste, Quest missed the\n companionway in his leap and\n was cornered against one of the\n bunks. Asrange descended on\n him like an avenging angel and,\n holding onto the bunk with one\n hand, rained savage blows on his\n head and shoulders with the\n heavy stick.\n\n\n Quest made no effort to retaliate.\n He cowered under the attack,\n holding his hands in front\n of him as if to ward it off. In a\n moment, Jakdane and the other\n crewman had reached Asrange\n and pulled him off.\nWhen they had Asrange in\n irons, Jakdane turned to Quest,\n who was now sitting unhappily\n at the table.\n\n\n “Take it easy,” he advised.\n “I'll wake the psychosurgeon\n and have him look you over. Just\n stay there.”\n\n\n Quest shook his head.\n\n\n “Don't bother him,” he said.\n “It's nothing but a few bruises.”", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "Trella was silent, shocked.\n There was something here she\n hadn't known about, hadn't even\n suspected. For some reason, Dom\n Blessing feared Dr. Eriklund\n Mansard … or his heir … or\n his mechanical servant.\nShe was sure that Blessing\n was wrong, that Quest, whether\n man or android, intended no\n 59\n harm to him. Surely, Quest\n would have said something of\n such bitterness during their long\n time together on Ganymede and\n aspace, since he did not know of\n Trella's connection with Blessing.\n But, since this was to be\n the atmosphere of Blessing's\n house, she was glad that he decided\n to assign her to take the\n Mansard papers to the New\n York laboratory.\n\n\n Quest came the day before she\n was scheduled to leave.", "Trella sighed. Cowardice was\n a state of mind. It was peculiarly\n inappropriate, but not unbelievable,\n that the strongest and\n most agile man on Ganymede\n should be a coward. Well, she\n thought with a rush of sympathy,\n he couldn't help being\n what he was.\nThey had reached the more\n brightly lighted section of the\n city now. Trella could get a cab\n from here, but the Stellar Hotel\n wasn't far. They walked on.\n\n\n Trella had the desk clerk call\n a cab to deliver the unconscious\n Motwick to his home. She and\n Quest had a late sandwich in the\n coffee shop.\n\n\n “I landed here only a week\n ago,” he told her, his eyes frankly\n admiring her honey-colored\n hair and comely face. “I'm heading\n for Earth on the next spaceship.”", "“It was conditioned into me,”\n answered Quest “I didn't know\n 60\n it until just now, when it ended,\n but my father conditioned me\n psychologically from my birth\n to the task of hunting down\n Dom Blessing and killing him. It\n was an unconscious drive in me\n that wouldn't release me until\n the task was finished.\n\n\n “You see, Blessing was my father's\n assistant on Ganymede.\n Right after my father completed\n development of the surgiscope,\n he and my mother blasted off for\n Io. Blessing wanted the valuable\n rights to the surgiscope, and he\n sabotaged the ship's drive so it\n would fall into Jupiter.", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "He looked at her in astonishment,\n stunned by her words.\n\n\n “What in space makes you\n think that?” he demanded.\n\n\n “Why, Quest, it's obvious,”\n she cried, tears in her eyes.\n “Everything about you … your\n build, suited for Jupiter's gravity …\n your strength … the\n fact that you were able to live\n in Jupiter's atmosphere after\n the oxygen equipment failed.\n I know you think Dr. Mansard\n was your father, but androids\n often believe that.”\n\n\n He grinned at her.\n\n\n “I'm no android,” he said confidently.\n “Do you forget my father\n was inventor of the surgiscope?\n He knew I'd have to grow\n up on Jupiter, and he operated\n on the genes before I was born.\n He altered my inherited characteristics\n to adapt me to the climate\n of Jupiter … even to\n being able to breathe a chlorine\n atmosphere as well as an oxygen\n atmosphere.”", "The man's eyes went wide and\n he snarled. So quickly it seemed\n impossible, he had unbuckled\n himself from his seat and hurled\n himself backward from the table\n with an incoherent cry. He\n seized the first object his hand\n touched—it happened to be a\n heavy wooden cane leaning\n against Jakdane's bunk—propelled\n himself like a projectile at\n Quest.\n\n\n Quest rose from the table in\n a sudden uncoiling of movement.\n He did not unbuckle his safety\n belt—he rose and it snapped like\n a string.\n\n\n For a moment Trella thought\n he was going to meet Asrange's\n assault. But he fled in a long\n leap toward the companionway\n leading to the astrogation deck\n 56\n above. Landing feet-first in the\n middle of the table and rebounding,\n Asrange pursued with the\n stick upraised.", "Asrange was the third passenger.\n He was a lean, saturnine\n individual who said little and\n kept to himself as much as possible.\n He was distantly polite in\n his relations with both crew and\n other passengers, and never\n showed the slightest spark of\n emotion … until the day Quest\n squirted coffee on him.\n\n\n It was one of those accidents\n that can occur easily in space.\n The passengers and the two\n crewmen on that particular waking\n shift (including Jakdane)\n were eating lunch on the center-deck.\n Quest picked up his bulb\n of coffee, but inadvertently\n pressed it before he got it to his\n lips. The coffee squirted all over\n the front of Asrange's clean\n white tunic.\n\n\n “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest\n in distress.", "“My parents landed on Jupiter,\n and I blasted off from it,”\n he said soberly. “I was born\n there. Have you ever heard of\n Dr. Eriklund Mansard?”\n\n\n “I certainly have,” she said,\n her interest taking a sudden\n upward turn. “He developed the\n surgiscope, didn't he? But his\n ship was drawn into Jupiter and\n lost.”\n\n\n “It was drawn into Jupiter,\n but he landed it successfully,”\n said Quest. “He and my mother\n lived on Jupiter until the oxygen\n equipment wore out at last. I\n was born and brought up there,\n and I was finally able to build\n a small rocket with a powerful\n enough drive to clear the\n planet.”\n\n\n She looked at him. He was\n short, half a head shorter than\n she, but broad and powerful as\n a man might be who had grown\n up in heavy gravity. He trod the\n street with a light, controlled\n step, seeming to deliberately\n hold himself down.", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope." ], [ "“Why? Because he's a coward?\n I know that ought to make\n me despise him, but it doesn't\n any more.”\n\n\n “Not because he's a coward.\n Because he's an android!”\n\n\n “What? Jakdane, you can't be\n serious!”\n\n\n “I am. I say he's an android,\n an artificial imitation of a man.\n It all figures.\n\n\n “Look, Trella, he said he was\n born on Jupiter. A human could\n stand the gravity of Jupiter, inside\n a dome or a ship, but what\n human could stand the rocket acceleration\n necessary to break\n free of Jupiter? Here's a man\n strong enough to break a spaceship\n safety belt just by getting\n up out of his chair against it,\n tough enough to take a beating\n with a heavy stick without being\n injured. How can you believe\n he's really human?”", "“I never thought of myself in\n quite that light, but maybe\n I'm getting old,” he answered,\n laughing. “What's your trouble,\n Trella?”\n\n\n “I'm in love with that huge\n chunk of man who came aboard\n with me, and I'm not sure I\n ought to be,” she confessed. “I\n may need protection against myself\n till we get to Earth.”\n\n\n “If it's to keep you out of another\n fellow's clutches, I'm your\n man,” agreed Jakdane heartily.\n “I always had a mind to save\n you for myself. I'll guarantee\n you won't have a moment alone\n with him the whole trip.”\n\n\n “You don't have to be that\n thorough about it,” she protested\n hastily. “I want to get a little\n enjoyment out of being in love.\n But if I feel myself weakening\n too much, I'll holler for help.”", "“It seems I was taking unnecessary\n precautions when I asked\n you to be a chaperon,” she said.\n “I kept waiting for Quest to do\n something, and when he didn't\n I told him I loved him.”\n\n\n “What did he say?”\n\n\n “It's very peculiar,” she said\n unhappily. “He said he\n can't\n love me. He said he wants to\n love me and he feels that he\n should, but there's something in\n him that refuses to permit it.”\n\n\n She expected Jakdane to salve\n her wounded feelings with a\n sympathetic pleasantry, but he\n did not. Instead, he just looked\n at her very thoughtfully and\n said no more about the matter.\n\n\n He explained his attitude\n after Asrange ran amuck.", "Through all these years since\n Dr. Mansard's disappearance,\n 55\n Blessing had been searching the\n Jovian moons for a second, hidden\n laboratory of Dr. Mansard.\n When it was found at last, he\n sent Trella, his most trusted\n secretary, to Ganymede to bring\n back to him the notebooks found\n there.\n\n\n Blessing would, of course, be\n happy to learn that a son of Dr.\n Mansard lived, and would see\n that he received his rightful\n share of the inheritance. Because\n of this, Trella was tempted\n to tell Quest the good news\n herself; but she decided against\n it. It was Blessing's privilege to\n do this his own way, and he\n might not appreciate her meddling.\nAt midtrip, Trella made a rueful\n confession to Jakdane.", "She was not at all happy about\n being so strongly attracted to a\n man several inches shorter than\n she. She was particularly unhappy\n about feeling drawn to a\n man who was a coward.\n\n\n The ship that they boarded on\n Moon Nine was one of the newer\n ships that could attain a hundred-mile-per-second\n velocity\n and take a hyperbolic path to\n Earth, but it would still require\n fifty-four days to make the trip.\n So Trella was delighted to find\n that the ship was the\nCometfire\nand its skipper was her old\n friend, dark-eyed, curly-haired\n Jakdane Gille.\n\n\n “Jakdane,” she said, flirting\n with him with her eyes as in\n 54\n days gone by, “I need a chaperon\n this trip, and you're ideal for\n the job.”", "Asrange was the third passenger.\n He was a lean, saturnine\n individual who said little and\n kept to himself as much as possible.\n He was distantly polite in\n his relations with both crew and\n other passengers, and never\n showed the slightest spark of\n emotion … until the day Quest\n squirted coffee on him.\n\n\n It was one of those accidents\n that can occur easily in space.\n The passengers and the two\n crewmen on that particular waking\n shift (including Jakdane)\n were eating lunch on the center-deck.\n Quest picked up his bulb\n of coffee, but inadvertently\n pressed it before he got it to his\n lips. The coffee squirted all over\n the front of Asrange's clean\n white tunic.\n\n\n “I'm sorry!” exclaimed Quest\n in distress.", "The man's eyes went wide and\n he snarled. So quickly it seemed\n impossible, he had unbuckled\n himself from his seat and hurled\n himself backward from the table\n with an incoherent cry. He\n seized the first object his hand\n touched—it happened to be a\n heavy wooden cane leaning\n against Jakdane's bunk—propelled\n himself like a projectile at\n Quest.\n\n\n Quest rose from the table in\n a sudden uncoiling of movement.\n He did not unbuckle his safety\n belt—he rose and it snapped like\n a string.\n\n\n For a moment Trella thought\n he was going to meet Asrange's\n assault. But he fled in a long\n leap toward the companionway\n leading to the astrogation deck\n 56\n above. Landing feet-first in the\n middle of the table and rebounding,\n Asrange pursued with the\n stick upraised.", "Trella remembered the thug\n Kregg striking Quest in the face\n and then crying that he had injured\n his hand on the bar.\n\n\n “But he said Dr. Mansard was\n his father,” protested Trella.\n\n\n “Robots and androids frequently\n look on their makers as\n their parents,” said Jakdane.\n “Quest may not even know he's\n 57\n artificial. Do you know how\n Mansard died?”\n\n\n “The oxygen equipment failed,\n Quest said.”\n\n\n “Yes. Do you know when?”\n\n\n “No. Quest never did tell me,\n that I remember.”\n\n\n “He told me: a year before\n Quest made his rocket flight to\n Ganymede! If the oxygen equipment\n failed, how do you think\n Quest\n lived in the poisonous atmosphere\n of Jupiter, if he's human?”\n\n\n Trella was silent.", "“For the protection of humans,\n there are two psychological\n traits built into every robot\n and android,” said Jakdane\n gently. “The first is that they\n can never, under any circumstances,\n attack a human being,\n even in self defense. The second\n is that, while they may understand\n sexual desire objectively,\n they can never experience it\n themselves.\n\n\n “Those characteristics fit your\n man Quest to a T, Trella. There\n is no other explanation for him:\n he must be an android.”\nTrella did not want to believe\n Jakdane was right, but his reasoning\n was unassailable. Looking\n upon Quest as an android,\n many things were explained: his\n great strength, his short, broad\n build, his immunity to injury,\n his refusal to defend himself\n against a human, his inability to\n return Trella's love for him.", "“Bruises? Man, that club\n could have broken your skull!\n Or a couple of ribs, at the very\n least.”\n\n\n “I'm all right,” insisted\n Quest; and when the skeptical\n Jakdane insisted on examining\n him carefully, he had to admit\n it. There was hardly a mark on\n him from the blows.\n\n\n “If it didn't hurt you any\n more than that, why didn't you\n take that stick away from him?”\n demanded Jakdane. “You could\n have, easily.”\n\n\n “I couldn't,” said Quest miserably,\n and turned his face\n away.\n\n\n Later, alone with Trella on\n the control deck, Jakdane gave\n her some sober advice.\n\n\n “If you think you're in love\n with Quest, forget it,” he said.", "“We'll be traveling companions,\n then,” she said. “I'm going\n back on that ship, too.”\n\n\n For some reason she decided\n against telling him that the\n assignment on which she had\n come to the Jupiter system was\n to gather his own father's notebooks\n and take them back to\n Earth.\nMotwick was an irresponsible\n playboy whom Trella had known\n briefly on Earth, and Trella was\n glad to dispense with his company\n for the remaining three\n weeks before the spaceship\n blasted off. She found herself\n enjoying the steadier companionship\n of Quest.\n\n\n As a matter of fact, she found\n herself enjoying his companionship\n more than she intended to.\n She found herself falling in love\n with him.\n\n\n Now this did not suit her at\n all. Trella had always liked her\n men tall and dark. She had determined\n that when she married\n it would be to a curly-haired six-footer.", "The\nCometfire\nswung around\n great Jupiter in an opening arc\n and plummeted ever more swiftly\n toward the tight circles of the\n inner planets. There were four\n crew members and three passengers\n aboard the ship's tiny personnel\n sphere, and Trella was\n thrown with Quest almost constantly.\n She enjoyed every minute\n of it.\n\n\n She told him only that she\n was a messenger, sent out to\n Ganymede to pick up some important\n papers and take them\n back to Earth. She was tempted\n to tell him what the papers were.\n Her employer had impressed upon\n her that her mission was confidential,\n but surely Dom\n Blessing\n could not object to Dr.\n Mansard's son knowing about it.\n\n\n All these things had happened\n before she was born, and she\n did not know what Dom Blessing's\n relation to Dr. Mansard\n had been, but it must have been\n very close. She knew that Dr.\n Mansard had invented the surgiscope.", "In his haste, Quest missed the\n companionway in his leap and\n was cornered against one of the\n bunks. Asrange descended on\n him like an avenging angel and,\n holding onto the bunk with one\n hand, rained savage blows on his\n head and shoulders with the\n heavy stick.\n\n\n Quest made no effort to retaliate.\n He cowered under the attack,\n holding his hands in front\n of him as if to ward it off. In a\n moment, Jakdane and the other\n crewman had reached Asrange\n and pulled him off.\nWhen they had Asrange in\n irons, Jakdane turned to Quest,\n who was now sitting unhappily\n at the table.\n\n\n “Take it easy,” he advised.\n “I'll wake the psychosurgeon\n and have him look you over. Just\n stay there.”\n\n\n Quest shook his head.\n\n\n “Don't bother him,” he said.\n “It's nothing but a few bruises.”", "“But my father was able to\n control it in the heavy atmosphere\n of Jupiter, and landed it\n successfully. I was born there,\n and he conditioned me to come\n to Earth and track down Blessing.\n I know now that it was\n part of the conditioning that I\n was unable to fight any other\n man until my task was finished:\n it might have gotten me in trouble\n and diverted me from that\n purpose.”\n\n\n More gently than Trella would\n have believed possible for his\n Jupiter-strong muscles, Quest\n took her in his arms.\n\n\n “Now I can say I love you,”\n he said. “That was part of the\n conditioning too: I couldn't love\n any woman until my job was\n done.”\n\n\n Trella disengaged herself.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” she said. “Don't\n you know this, too, now: that\n you're not a man, but an android?”", "“My parents landed on Jupiter,\n and I blasted off from it,”\n he said soberly. “I was born\n there. Have you ever heard of\n Dr. Eriklund Mansard?”\n\n\n “I certainly have,” she said,\n her interest taking a sudden\n upward turn. “He developed the\n surgiscope, didn't he? But his\n ship was drawn into Jupiter and\n lost.”\n\n\n “It was drawn into Jupiter,\n but he landed it successfully,”\n said Quest. “He and my mother\n lived on Jupiter until the oxygen\n equipment wore out at last. I\n was born and brought up there,\n and I was finally able to build\n a small rocket with a powerful\n enough drive to clear the\n planet.”\n\n\n She looked at him. He was\n short, half a head shorter than\n she, but broad and powerful as\n a man might be who had grown\n up in heavy gravity. He trod the\n street with a light, controlled\n step, seeming to deliberately\n hold himself down.", "“If Dr. Mansard succeeded in\n landing on Jupiter, why didn't\n anyone ever hear from him\n again?” she demanded.\n\n\n “Because,” said Quest, “his\n radio was sabotaged, just as his\n ship's drive was.”\n\n\n “Jupiter strength,” she murmured,\n looking him over coolly.\n 53\n “You wear Motwick on your\n shoulder like a scarf. But you\n couldn't bring yourself to help\n a woman against two thugs.”\n\n\n He flushed.\n\n\n “I'm sorry,” he said. “That's\n something I couldn't help.”\n\n\n “Why not?”\n\n\n “I don't know. It's not that\n I'm afraid, but there's something\n in me that makes me back\n away from the prospect of fighting\n anyone.”", "“He came back to Earth with\n you, eh?” asked Blessing intently.\n\n\n “Yes. I'm afraid it's your decision\n whether to let him go on\n living as a man or to tell him\n he's an android and claim ownership\n as Dr. Mansard's heir.”\n\n\n Trella planned to spend a few\n days resting in her employer's\n spacious home, and then to take\n a short vacation before resuming\n her duties as his confidential\n secretary. The next morning\n when she came down from her\n room, a change had been made.\n\n\n Two armed men were with\n Dom Blessing at breakfast and\n accompanied him wherever he\n went. She discovered that two\n more men with guns were stationed\n in the bare anteroom and\n a guard was stationed at every\n entrance to the house.\n\n\n “Why all the protection?” she\n asked Blessing.", "It was not inconceivable that\n she should have unknowingly\n fallen in love with an android.\n Humans could love androids,\n with real affection, even knowing\n that they were artificial.\n There were instances of android\n nursemaids who were virtually\n members of the families owning\n them.\n\n\n She was glad now that she\n had not told Quest of her mission\n to Ganymede. He thought\n he was Dr. Mansard's son, but\n an android had no legal right of\n inheritance from his owner. She\n would leave it to Dom Blessing\n to decide what to do about Quest.\n\n\n Thus she did not, as she had\n intended originally, speak to\n Quest about seeing him again\n after she had completed her assignment.\n Even if Jakdane was\n wrong and Quest was human—as\n now seemed unlikely—Quest\n had told her he could not love\n her. Her best course was to try\n to forget him.\n\n\n Nor did Quest try to arrange\n with her for a later meeting.", "question: Was he human?\nTrella\n feared she was in\n for trouble even before Motwick's\n head dropped forward on\n his arms in a drunken stupor.\n The two evil-looking men at the\n table nearby had been watching\n her surreptitiously, and now\n they shifted restlessly in their\n chairs.\n\n\n Trella had not wanted to come\n to the Golden Satellite. It was a\n squalid saloon in the rougher\n section of Jupiter's View, the\n terrestrial dome-colony on Ganymede.\n Motwick,\n already\n drunk,\n had insisted.\n\n\n A woman could not possibly\n make her way through these\n streets alone to the better section\n of town, especially one clad\n in a silvery evening dress. Her\n only hope was that this place\n had a telephone. Perhaps she\n could call one of Motwick's\n friends; she had no one on Ganymede\n she could call a real friend\n herself.", "“I'm sorry I couldn't fight\n those men for you, Miss, but I\n just couldn't,” he said miserably,\n as though reading her thoughts.\n “But no one will bother you on\n the street if I'm with you.”\n\n\n “A lot of protection you'd be\n if they did!” she snapped. “But\n I'm desperate. You can carry\n him to the Stellar Hotel for me.”\nThe gravity of Ganymede was\n hardly more than that of Earth's\n moon, but the way the man\n picked up the limp Motwick with\n one hand and tossed him over a\n shoulder was startling: as\n though he lifted a feather pillow.\n He followed Trella out the door\n of the Golden Satellite and fell\n in step beside her. Immediately\n she was grateful for his presence.\n The dimly lighted street\n was not crowded, but she didn't\n like the looks of the men she\n saw." ] ]
train	60995	[ "What is the significance of the story's title?", "Which is the best description of the relationship between Linton and Howell?", "What is the significance of Rogers Snead?", "What likely happens to Linton at the end of the story?", "Which is the best description of Linton?", "Which of these best describes the doctor that Linton meets at the end?", "Which best describes the role of the Mafia in this story?", "How does this society view resurrection?", "Which of these is not a likely consequence of the end of the story?" ]	[ [ "It hints at the extra costs for less natural things", "It marks the setting for the story", "It hints at Linton's constant desire for sweet things", "It shows Linton's goal for the story" ], [ "They are business partners trying to find a way to bring back someone they knew", "Howell is trying to be supportive but is exhausted by Linton's insistence", "They are new friends figuring out their rapport, so Howell wants to help however he can", "Howell is only meeting with Linton out of a feeling of obligation and doesn't care for him much" ], [ "His sighting gives LInton an idea of how to see his wife", "He serves as proof that Linton is seeing things, and needs professional help", "Snead is a reminder of a previous stage of Linton's life", "Linton knows that Snead could take him where he needs to go" ], [ "He and his wife live happily, both as cybernetic creatures", "He repeats a cycle of having his money taken from him from doctors", "He goes to rehab and then moves on with his life", "He will never leave the asylym because he needs too much help" ], [ "He is a heartbroken man wanting to find new goals for his life", "He is trying to recover from his past in the Mafia and wants to find legal ways to accomplish his goals", "He is a gullible person determined to follow his instinct", "He is a risk-taker who prefers to experience the more illegal things society has to offer" ], [ "Generous in that he is willing to help Linton with this problem that involves illegal work on his part", "Greedy in that he manipulates vulnerable people to take money from them", "Love-stricken, wanting to help people in similar situations", "Cunning in his cutting-edge technology he is developing" ], [ "Their involvement shows public perception on the procedure that Linton pays for", "They are the ones responsible for the technology that Linton pays for", "They were Linton's previous employers and the source of the money he uses to pay for the operation", "They show how violence-stricken the society is" ], [ "There are many people who pretend to do it but nobody who does", "There is a big push to make it legal", "It is looked down upon so nobody does it", "It only happens for those with questionable morals and a lot of money" ], [ "Howell will be hesitant to help Linton again", "The doctor continues taking advantage of people", "Linton goes through treatment, eventually repeating the same events", "Greta finds her own way to establish herself and find the money she wants" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around.", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES\nBy JIM HARMON\nHow much is the impossible worth?\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLinton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency\n of the restaurant water glass.\n\n\n \"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?\" he heard himself say stupidly.\n\n\n Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without\n looking. \"Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You\n know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting." ], [ "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES\nBy JIM HARMON\nHow much is the impossible worth?\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLinton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency\n of the restaurant water glass.\n\n\n \"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?\" he heard himself say stupidly.\n\n\n Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without\n looking. \"Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You\n know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around." ], [ "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES\nBy JIM HARMON\nHow much is the impossible worth?\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLinton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency\n of the restaurant water glass.\n\n\n \"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?\" he heard himself say stupidly.\n\n\n Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without\n looking. \"Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You\n know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?\"", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.\n Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take\n it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?\"\n\n\n \"But what do they do about it? Against it?\"\n\n\n \"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When\n the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment\n and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The\n charges, if any, come under general vice classification.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton complained. \"Why haven't I heard about it?\"" ], [ "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around." ], [ "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.", "FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES\nBy JIM HARMON\nHow much is the impossible worth?\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLinton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency\n of the restaurant water glass.\n\n\n \"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?\" he heard himself say stupidly.\n\n\n Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without\n looking. \"Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You\n know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?\"" ], [ "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "\"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.\n Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take\n it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?\"\n\n\n \"But what do they do about it? Against it?\"\n\n\n \"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When\n the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment\n and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The\n charges, if any, come under general vice classification.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton complained. \"Why haven't I heard about it?\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around." ], [ "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.\n Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take\n it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?\"\n\n\n \"But what do they do about it? Against it?\"\n\n\n \"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When\n the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment\n and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The\n charges, if any, come under general vice classification.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton complained. \"Why haven't I heard about it?\"", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around.", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"" ], [ "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "\"Think of all the problems it would cause. Insurance, for one thing.\n Overpopulation. Birth control is a touchy subject. They'd have to take\n it up if everybody got resurrected when they died, wouldn't they?\"\n\n\n \"But what do they do about it? Against it?\"\n\n\n \"There are a lot of fakes and quacks in the resurrection business. When\n the cops find out about a place, they break in, smash all the equipment\n and arrest everybody in sight. That's about all they can do. The\n charges, if any, come under general vice classification.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton complained. \"Why haven't I heard about it?\"", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "\"People who want to know the answers to questions have to ask them. You\n can find out anything by asking the right questions of the right person\n at the right time.\"\n\n\n Linton stared suspiciously. \"Do you know where I can find a\n resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n \"I am a resurrectionist.\"\n\n\n \"But the policeman brought me to you!\"\n\n\n \"Well, that's what you paid him to do, wasn't it? Did you think a\n policeman would just steal your money? Cynics—all you young people are\n cynics.\"\n\n\n Linton scooted forward on the insultingly cold metal chair and really\n looked at the doctor for the first time.\n\n\n \"Doctor, can you\nreally\nresurrect the dead?\"\n\n\n \"Will you stop being cynical? Of course I can!\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around.", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said." ], [ "\"What do you say it like that for?\" Linton demanded angrily. \"The\n man's dead. Plain dead. He's not Sherlock Holmes or the Frankenstein\n Monster—there's no doubt or semantic leeway to the thing.\"\n\n\n \"You know how it is,\" Howell said.\n\n\n Linton had thought he had known how death was. He had buried his wife,\n or rather he had watched the two workmen scoop and shove dirt in on\n the sawdust-fresh pine box that held the coffin. He had known what he\n sincerely felt to be a genuine affection for Greta. Even after they had\n let him out of the asylum as cured, he still secretly believed he had\n known a genuine affection for her. But it didn't seem he knew about\n death at all.\n\n\n Linton felt that his silence was asking Howell by this time.", "\"I've killed my wife!\" Linton called, rising from his knees, stretching\n his hands out to something.\n\n\n The pain stung him to sleep—a pain in his neck like a needle that left\n a hole big enough for a camel to pass through and big enough for him to\n follow the camel in his turn.\nHe opened his eyes to the doctor's spotless, well-ordered office. The\n doctor looked down at him consolingly. \"You'll have to go back, Mr.\n Linton. But they'll cure you. You'll be cured of ever thinking your\n wife was brought back to life and that you killed her all over again.\"\n\n\n \"Do you\nreally\nthink so, Doctor?\" Linton asked hopefully.", "The curves and angles of her flesh changed their positions against his\n Ivy dacron. Her attitude altered.\n\n\n \"I can't remember,\" she said. \"I can't really remember anything. Not\n really. My memories are ghosts....\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Linton said, \"we mustn't get excited. You've been through a\n trial.\"\n\n\n She accepted the verdict. She pulled away and touched at her hair. It\n was the same hair, black as evil, contrasting with her inner purity. Of\n course it would be; it hadn't changed even in the grave. He remembered\n the snaky tendrils of it growing out of the water-logged casket.\n\n\n \"I must see all our old friends,\" Greta persisted. \"Helen and\n Johnny....\"\n\n\n \"My darling,\" he said gently, \"about Johnny—\"", "Brain damage, he concluded nervously. Cell deterioration.\nGreta raised it again and he caught her wrists high over her head. She\n writhed against him provocatively. \"Frank, I'm sorry, dear, but I have\n to have that insurance money. It's hell!\"\n\n\n Linton understood immediately. He felt foolish, humiliated. All that\n money! He had resurrected a gold ring that had turned his knuckles\n green. No one must ever know.\n\n\n Linton twisted the stand away from his wife and watched her face\n in some appalled form of satisfaction as it registered horror and\n acceptance of the crumpled metal disk falling toward it.\n\n\n He split her head open and watched her float to the floor.\n\n\n Linton was surprised at the fine wire mesh just below the skin and\n those shiny little tabs that looked like pictures of transistors in\n institutional advertising.", "Greta turned her back to him. \"It's just as well. You shouldn't bring\n back Johnny to this dream of life, give him a ghost of mind and the\n photograph of a soul. It's monstrous. No one should do that. No one.\n But you're\nsure\nyou haven't the money to do it?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Linton said. \"I'm sold out. I've borrowed on my insurance to the\n hilt. It won't pay any more until I'm buried, and then, of course, you\n can resurrect me.\"\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Greta said. She sighed. \"Poor Johnny. He was such a good\n friend of yours. You must miss him. I'm so sorry for you.\"\n\n\n \"I have you,\" he said with great simplicity.", "A thick-bodied man at the next table leaned his groaning chair back\n intimately against Linton's own chair.\n\n\n \"That fellow who just left looked like a friend of yours, huh?\" the\n thick man said.\n\n\n \"Couldn't have been him, though,\" Linton answered automatically. \"My\n friend's dead.\"\n\n\n The thick man rocked forward and came down on all six feet. He threw\n paper money on the table as if he were disgusted with it. He plodded\n out of the place quickly.\n\n\n Howell breathed in deeply and sucked back Linton's attention. \"Now\n you've probably got old Snead into trouble.\"\n\n\n \"Snead's dead,\" Linton said.\n\n\n \"Oh, well, 'dead,'\" Howell replied.", "Linton remembered. Howell had to know that he would remember. What\n were they trying to pull on him? \"The man who isn't Snead is leaving,\"\n Linton said, describing the scene over Howell's shoulder. \"If that's\n Snead's brother, I might catch him to pay my respects.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Howell said, \"I wouldn't do that.\"\n\n\n \"Snead came to Greta's funeral. It's the least I could do.\"\n\n\n \"I wouldn't. Probably no relation to Snead at all. Somebody who looks\n like him.\"\n\n\n \"He's practically running,\" Linton said. \"He almost ran out of the\n restaurant.\"\n\n\n \"Who? Oh, the man who looked like Snead, you mean.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Linton said.", "\"Frank,\" she said, \"you should see that place in there. There are\n foaming acid baths, great whale-toothed disposals, barrels of chemicals\n to quench death and smother decay. It's\nperfect\n.\"\n\n\n \"It sounds carnal,\" he said uneasily.\n\n\n \"No, dear, it's perfect for some things that have to be done.\"\n\n\n Her eyes flashed around the doctor's office and settled somewhere, on\n something.\n\n\n Linton followed the direction of Greta's gaze and found only an ashtray\n stand, looking vaguely like a fanatic's idol to a heathen religion on a\n pedestal.\n\n\n Greta pounced on the stand, hefted it at the base and ran toward him\n with it over her head.\n\n\n Linton leaped aside and Greta hit the edge of the desk instead of him.", "Linton's fingers imprinted the linen. \"Damn you, Howell, you tell me!\"\n\n\n Howell climbed to his feet hurriedly. \"I take you out to dinner to\n console you over the loss of your wife a half a year ago, and to make\n you feel welcome back to the society of your fellows after being in the\n hospital for a nervous breakdown. I do all that, and for thanks, you\n yell at me and curse me. You kooks are all alike!\"\n\n\n Howell threw money on the table with the same kind of disinterest as\n the thick-set man and stalked out.\n\n\n I've got to hurry too, Linton thought. It's Resurrection Day!\nThe doctor fluttered his hands and chirped about the office. \"Well,\n well, Mr. Linton, we understand you've been causing disturbances.\"\n\n\n \"Not really,\" Linton said modestly.", "It wasn't fair at all, Linton thought. He should have had some time to\n prepare himself.\n\n\n Greta lifted her arms, stretching the white smock over the lines of her\n body. \"Darling!\" she said.\n\n\n \"Greta!\" he said, feeling a slight revulsion but repressing it. No\n doubt he would be able to adjust to her once having been dead the same\n way he had learned to accept the, to him, distasteful duty of kissing\n her ears the way she enjoyed.\n\n\n Greta swirled across the room and folded her arms across his shoulders.\n She kissed his cheek. \"It's so wonderful to be back. This calls for a\n celebration. We must see Nancy, Oscar, Johnny, all our old friends.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" he said, his heart lurching for her sad ignorance. \"But tell\n me—how was it being\naway\n?\"", "Linton grasped the situation immediately. \"You mean you want money. You\n realize I've just got out of an institution....\"\n\n\n \"I've often been in institutions myself, for alcoholism, narcotics\n addiction and more.\"\n\n\n \"What a wonderful professional career,\" Linton said, when he couldn't\n care less.\n\n\n \"Oh, yes—yes, indeed. But I didn't come out broke.\"\n\n\n \"Neither did I,\" Linton said hastily. \"I invested in shifty stocks,\n faltering bonds, and while I was away they sank to rock bottom.\"\n\n\n \"Then—\"\n\n\n \"When they hit rock bottom, they bounced up. If I hadn't found you, I\n would have been secure for the rest of my lonely, miserable life.\"", "\"Come, come,\" the doctor chided. \"You started riots in two places,\n attempted to bribe an officer. That's disturbing, Mr. Linton, very\n disturbing.\"\n\n\n \"I was only trying to find out something,\" Linton maintained. \"They\n could have told me. Everybody seems to know but me.\"\n\n\n The doctor clucked his tongue. \"Let's not think any such thing. People\n don't know more than you do.\"\n\n\n Linton rubbed his shoulder. \"That cop knew more about Judo holds than I\n did.\"\n\n\n \"A few specific people know a few specific things you don't. But let me\n ask you, Mr. Linton, could Einstein bake a pie?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know. Who the hell ever wasted Einstein's time asking him a\n thing like that?\"", "\"All that's ended now,\" the doctor assured him. \"Now we must go dig up\n the corpse. The female corpse, eh?\"\n\n\n Resurrection Day!\n\n\n \"Doctor,\" Linton whispered, \"my mind is singing with battalions of\n choirs. I hope that doesn't sound irreverent to you.\"\n\n\n The doctor stroked his oily palms together. \"Oh, but it does.\n Beautifully.\"\nThe certificate to allow reburial in Virginia hadn't been impossible\n to obtain. The doctor had taken the body and Linton's fortune and fed\n them both into the maw of his calculators, and by means of the secret,\n smuggled formulae, Greta would be cybernetically reborn.\n\n\n Linton shook his head. It seemed impossible. But Greta opened the\n olive-drab slab of metal of the door to the doctor's inner-inner\n sanctum and walked out into the medicinal cold fluorescent lighting.", "\"But it's wonderful,\" Linton said, thinking his immediate thoughts.\n \"Wonderful! Why should a thing like that be illegal? Why don't I know\n about it?\"\n\n\n \"Sh-h,\" Howell said uneasily. \"This is a public place.\"\n\n\n \"I don't understand,\" Linton said helplessly.\n\n\n \"Look, Frank, you can't legalize a thing like resurrection,\" Howell\n said with feigned patience. \"There are strong religious convictions to\n consider. The undertakers have a lobby. I've heard they got spies right\n in the White House, ready to assassinate if they have to. Death is\n their whole life. You got to realize that.\"\n\n\n \"That's not enough. Not nearly enough.\"", "He knelt beside the body and poked into the bleeding, smoldering\n wreckage.\n\n\n Yes, it seemed they had to automate and modify the bodies somewhat\n in resurrection. They couldn't chemically revive the old corpse like\n pouring water on a wilted geranium.\n\n\n Or—\n\n\n Did they use the old bodies at all? What were all those acid baths for\n if the bodies were used? Didn't the resurrectionists just destroy the\n old corpses and make androids, synthetic creatures, to take their place?\n\n\n But it didn't matter. Not a bit.\n\n\n She had thought she was his wife, sharing her viewpoint down to the\n finest detail, and he had thought she was his wife.\n\n\n It was what you thought was real that made it so, not the other way\n around.", "\"I don't know, mind you,\" Howell said, puffing out tobacco smoke, \"but\n I suppose he might have been resurrected.\"\n\n\n \"Who by?\" Linton asked, thinking:\nGod?\n\"The Mafia, I guess. Who knows who runs it?\"\n\n\n \"You mean, somebody has invented a way to bring dead people back to\n life?\" Linton said.\nHe knew, of course, that Howell did not mean that. Howell meant that\n some people had a system of making it appear that a person had died\n in order to gain some illegal advantage. But by saying something so\n patently ridiculous, Linton hoped to bring the contradicting truth to\n the surface immediately.\n\n\n \"An invention? I guess that's how it is,\" Howell agreed. \"I don't know\n much about people like that. I'm an honest businessman.\"", "Her fine black brows made Gothic arches. \"Yes? What about Johnny?\"\n\n\n \"It was a terrible accident right after—that is, about five months\n ago. He was killed.\"\n\n\n \"Killed?\" Greta repeated blankly. \"Johnny Gorman was killed?\"\n\n\n \"Traffic accident. Killed instantly.\"\n\n\n \"But Johnny was your friend, your best friend. Why didn't you have him\n resurrected the same way you did me?\"\n\n\n \"Darling, resurrection is a risky business and an expensive one. You\n have to pay premium prices for strawberries in February. I no longer\n have the money to pay for a resurrection of Johnny.\"", "\"Doctor, I'm beginning to believe in you,\" Linton said, \"but tell me,\n can you resurrect the\nlong\ndead?\"\n\n\n \"Size has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"No, my wife has been dead a long time. Months.\"\n\n\n \"Months?\" The doctor snapped those weeks away with his fingers. \"It\n could be years. Centuries. It's all mathematics, my boy. I need only\n one fragment of the body and my computers can compute what the rest\n of it was like and recreate it. It's infallible. Naturally there is a\n degree of risk involved.\"\n\n\n \"Infallible risk, yes,\" Linton murmured. \"Could you go to work right\n away?\"\n\n\n \"First, I must follow an ancient medical practice. I must bleed you.\"", "\"They didn't talk much about white slavery in Victorian England. I read\n an article in\nTime\nthe other day that said 'death' was our dirty\n word, not sex. You want to shock somebody, you tell him, 'You're going\n to be dead someday,' not anything sexual. You know how it is. The\n opposite of 'live' these days is 'video-taped.'\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" Linton said.\n\n\n He tried to assimilate it. Of course he had, he reminded himself, been\n out of touch for some time. It might be true. Then again, they might be\n trying to trick him. They used to do that to see if he was really well.\n But the temptation was too strong.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Howell, where could I find a resurrectionist?\"\n\n\n Howell looked away. \"Frank, I don't have anything to do with that kind\n of people and if you're smart, you'll not either.\"", "FEBRUARY STRAWBERRIES\nBy JIM HARMON\nHow much is the impossible worth?\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nLinton lay down his steel fork beside the massively solid transparency\n of the restaurant water glass.\n\n\n \"Isn't that Rogers Snead at that table?\" he heard himself say stupidly.\n\n\n Howell, the man across the table from him, looked embarrassed without\n looking. \"Not at all. Somebody who looks like him. Twin brother. You\n know how it is. Snead's dead, don't you remember?\"" ] ]
train	26569	[ "How many comanalysis sessions can someone undergo in one day?", "How does Bergstrom feel about Zarwell?", "How does the comanalysis process work?", "How does Zarwell feel about Bergstrom?", "Why doesn't Bergstrom alert the authorities that he has a wanted criminal, drugged and unconscious in his office?", "What is Bergstrom's relationship with Johnson?", "How did Zarwell lose his memories?", "Why doesn't Zarwell shoot Bergstrom?", "Why does Zarwell want to retire from overthrowing corrupt governments?" ]	[ [ "Four", "Two", "One", "Three" ], [ "Bergstrom thinks Zarwell is a dangerous man. He is thinking about turning Zarwell over to the authorities.", "Bergstrom thinks Zarwell is a very sick and confused individual. He is going to have Zarwell committed.", "Bergstrom hates Zarwell. He is planning to kill Zarwell during the next therapy session.", "Bergstrom admires Zarwell. He wants Zarwell to help him plan a government revolution." ], [ "The patient is drugged and put in a wave machine so that they can relax and get insomnia relief.", "The patient is drugged and experiences hallucinations to help cope with past trauma.", "The patient is drugged to put them in a relaxed state so that they can recover lost memories.", "The patient is drugged and put in a sponge-like material. This makes the patient relaxed enough to sleep and dream." ], [ "Zarwell is afraid of Bergstrom. The dreams induced by Bergstrom's drugs grow more and more disturbing.", "Zarwell is suspicious of Bergstrom. Bergstrom always seems to be uncomfortable in Zarwell's presence.", "Zarwell is suspicious of Bergstrom. He's sure Bergstrom has been tampering with his memories.", "Zarwell thinks Bergstrom is an alright guy. However, Zarwell isn't interested in making friends. He just wants to retire in anonymity." ], [ "Bergstrom is Zarwell's partner and is wants Zarwell to regain his memories.", "Bergstrom is a fan of Zarwell. He thinks Zarwell would overthrow the current dictatorship if Zarwell could regain his memories.", "Bergstrom is afraid Zarwell might wake early and kill him before the authorities arrive.", "Bergstrom wants Zarwell to meet with some people to overthrow the current dictatorship." ], [ "Johnson is the dictator of St. Martin's where Bergstrom lives.", "Johnson is the client paying Bergstrom to retrieve \nZarwell's memories.", "Johnson is the man Bergstrom wants Zarwell to help overthrow the dictator.", "Johnson is Bergstrom's boss." ], [ "A soldier hit Zarwell in the head with the butt of a gun, leaving him with amnesia.", "Zarwell was knocked unconscious when a building collapsed around him. He awoke with amnesia.", "Zarwell had his memories removed so he could get out of the revolution business.", "A bullet grazed Zarwell's head during the last revolution, leaving him with amnesia." ], [ "Zarwell may have been a killer in the old life, but not now.", "Zarwell is trying to start a new life. He doesn't want to kill anymore.", "Zarwell is a freedom fighter, not a cold-blooded killer.", "Zarwell likes Bergstrom. They are friends." ], [ "Zarwell met the love of his life and wants to spend his days in peace.", "Often the new government becomes just as oppressive as the old one.", "Zarwell is getting too old to fight.", "Zarwell has become ill and can no longer fight the good fight." ] ]	[ 2, 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "This morning, however, the sense\n of disorientation did not pass with\n full wakefulness. He achieved no\n understanding, but the strangeness\n did not leave as he sat up.\n\n\n He gazed about him. The room\n did not seem to be his own. The\n furnishings, and the clothing he observed\n in a closet, might have belonged\n to a stranger.\n\n\n He pulled himself from his blankets,\n his body moving with mechanical\n reaction. The slippers into\n which he put his feet were larger\n than he had expected them to be.\n He walked about the small apartment.\n The place was familiar, but\n only as it would have been if he\n had studied it from blueprints, not\n as though he lived there.\n\n\n The feeling was still with him\n when he returned to the psychoanalyst.\nTHE scene this time was more\n kaleidoscopic, less personal.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "He adjusted the ring setting on\n the pistol-shaped instrument that\n he took from his case, and carefully\n rayed several small areas of\n his face, loosening muscles that had\n been tight too long. He sighed\n gratefully when he finished, massaging\n his cheeks and forehead with\n considerable pleasure. Another\n glance in the mirror satisfied him\n with the changes that had been\n made. He turned to his briefcase\n again and exchanged the gun for\n a small syringe, which he pushed\n into a trouser pocket, and a single-edged\n razor blade.\n\n\n Removing his fiber-cloth jacket\n he slashed it into strips with the\n razor blade and flushed it down the\n disposal bowl. With the sleeves of\n his blouse rolled up he had the\n appearance of a typical workman\n as he strolled from the compartment.\n\n\n Back at the locker he replaced\n the briefcase and, with a wad of\n gum, glued the key to the bottom\n of the locker frame.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "The last question prompted a\n new thought. Just why had he\n chosen St. Martin’s? Was it only a\n coincidence? Or had he,\n subconsciously\n at least, picked this particular\n world? He had always\n considered himself the unwilling\n subject of glib persuaders … but\n mightn’t some inner compulsion of\n his own have put the monkey on his\n back?\n\n\n “… and we need your help.”\n Johnson had finished his speech.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed up at the bright\n sky. He pulled in a long breath,\n and let it out in a sigh.\n\n\n “What are your plans so far?”\n he asked wearily.\n—\nCHARLES V. DE VET", "Transcriber’s note:\nThis story was published in\n Galaxy\n magazine, June 1960.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\n[p\n 135\n ]\n\n By CHARLES V. DE VET\nmonkey on his back\nUnder the cloud of cast-off identities\n \n lay the shape of another man—\n \n was it himself?\nIllustrated by DILLON\nHE was walking endlessly\n down a long, glass-walled\n corridor. Bright sunlight\n slanted in through one wall, on the\n blue knapsack across his shoulders.\n Who he was, and what he was doing\n here, was clouded. The truth lurked\n in some corner of his consciousness,\n but it was not reached by surface\n awareness.\n\n\n The corridor opened at last into\n a large high-domed room, much\n like a railway station or an air terminal.\n He walked straight ahead." ], [ "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”" ], [ "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”", "“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”", "This morning, however, the sense\n of disorientation did not pass with\n full wakefulness. He achieved no\n understanding, but the strangeness\n did not leave as he sat up.\n\n\n He gazed about him. The room\n did not seem to be his own. The\n furnishings, and the clothing he observed\n in a closet, might have belonged\n to a stranger.\n\n\n He pulled himself from his blankets,\n his body moving with mechanical\n reaction. The slippers into\n which he put his feet were larger\n than he had expected them to be.\n He walked about the small apartment.\n The place was familiar, but\n only as it would have been if he\n had studied it from blueprints, not\n as though he lived there.\n\n\n The feeling was still with him\n when he returned to the psychoanalyst.\nTHE scene this time was more\n kaleidoscopic, less personal.", "At the rear of the space was a\n row of lockers for traveler use. He\n slipped a coin into a pay slot,\n opened the zipper on his bag and\n pulled out a flat briefcase. It took\n him only a few seconds to push the\n case into the compartment, lock it\n and slide the key along the floor\n beneath the locker.\n\n\n There was nothing to do after\n that—except wait.\n\n\n The men pursuing him came\n hurtling around the turn in the\n aisle. He kicked his knapsack to\n one side, spreading his feet wide\n with an instinctive motion.\n\n\n Until that instant he had intended\n to fight. Now he swiftly\n reassessed the odds. There were\n five of them, he saw. He should be\n able to incapacitate two or three\n and break out. But the fact that\n they had been expecting him meant\n that others would very probably\n be waiting outside. His best course\n now was to sham ignorance. He\n relaxed.", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "He adjusted the ring setting on\n the pistol-shaped instrument that\n he took from his case, and carefully\n rayed several small areas of\n his face, loosening muscles that had\n been tight too long. He sighed\n gratefully when he finished, massaging\n his cheeks and forehead with\n considerable pleasure. Another\n glance in the mirror satisfied him\n with the changes that had been\n made. He turned to his briefcase\n again and exchanged the gun for\n a small syringe, which he pushed\n into a trouser pocket, and a single-edged\n razor blade.\n\n\n Removing his fiber-cloth jacket\n he slashed it into strips with the\n razor blade and flushed it down the\n disposal bowl. With the sleeves of\n his blouse rolled up he had the\n appearance of a typical workman\n as he strolled from the compartment.\n\n\n Back at the locker he replaced\n the briefcase and, with a wad of\n gum, glued the key to the bottom\n of the locker frame.", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.", "He took his place behind the\n drive wheel and began working dirt\n down between windbreakers anchored\n in the rock. Along a makeshift\n road into the badlands trucks\n brought crushed lime and phosphorus\n to supplement the ocean\n sediment. The progress of life from\n the sea to the land was a mechanical\n [p\n 142\n ]\n process of this growing world.\n\n\n Nearly two hundred years ago,\n when Earth established a colony on\n St. Martin’s, the land surface of the\n planet had been barren. Only its\n seas thrived with animal and vegetable\n life. The necessary machinery\n and technicians had been supplied\n by Earth, and the long struggle began\n to fit the world for human\n needs. When Zarwell arrived, six\n months before, the vitalized area\n already extended three hundred\n miles along the coast, and sixty\n miles inland. And every day the\n progress continued. A large percentage\n of the energy and resources\n of the world were devoted to that\n essential expansion.", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him." ], [ "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”" ], [ "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”" ], [ "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”", "The last question prompted a\n new thought. Just why had he\n chosen St. Martin’s? Was it only a\n coincidence? Or had he,\n subconsciously\n at least, picked this particular\n world? He had always\n considered himself the unwilling\n subject of glib persuaders … but\n mightn’t some inner compulsion of\n his own have put the monkey on his\n back?\n\n\n “… and we need your help.”\n Johnson had finished his speech.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed up at the bright\n sky. He pulled in a long breath,\n and let it out in a sigh.\n\n\n “What are your plans so far?”\n he asked wearily.\n—\nCHARLES V. DE VET", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "“When this colony was first\n founded,” Johnson began without\n preamble, “the administrative body\n was a governor, and a council of\n twelve. Their successors were to\n be elected biennially. At first they\n were. Then things changed. We\n haven’t had an election now in the\n last twenty-three years. St. Martin’s\n is beginning to prosper. Yet\n the only ones receiving the benefits\n are the rulers. The citizens work\n twelve hours a day. They are poorly\n housed\n , poorly fed, poorly clothed.\n They …”\n\n\n Zarwell found himself not listening\n as Johnson’s voice went on. The\n story was always the same. But why\n did they always try to drag him into\n their troubles?\n\n\n Why hadn’t he chosen some\n other world on which to hide?" ], [ "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "“Haphazard? That’s true. The\n recall episodes are always purely\n random, with no chronological sequence.\n Our problem will be to reassemble\n them in proper order\n later. Or some particular scene may\n trigger a complete memory return.\n\n\n “It is my considered opinion,”\n Bergstrom went on, “that your lost\n memory will turn out to be no ordinary\n amnesia. I believe we will find\n that your mind has been tampered\n with.”\n\n\n “Nothing I’ve seen under the\n drug fits into the past I do remember.”\n\n\n “That’s what makes me so certain,”\n Bergstrom said confidently.\n “You don’t remember what we\n have shown to be true. Conversely\n then, what you think you remember\n must be false. It must have been\n implanted there. But we can go\n into that later. For today I think\n we have done enough. This episode\n was quite prolonged.”", "A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "The floor beneath Zarwell’s feet\n assumed abruptly the near transfluent\n consistency of a damp\n sponge. It rose in a foot-high wave\n and rolled gently toward the far\n wall.\n\n\n Bergstrom continued talking,\n with practiced urbanity. “When\n psychiatry was a less exact science,”\n his voice went on, seeming to come\n from a great distance, “a doctor\n had to spend weeks, sometimes\n months or years interviewing a\n patient. If he was skilled enough,\n he could sort the relevancies from\n the vast amount of chaff. We are\n able now, with the help of the\n serum, to confine our discourses to\n matters cogent to the patient’s\n trouble.”\n\n\n The floor continued its transmutation,\n and Zarwell sank deep into\n viscous depths. “Lie back and relax.\n Don’t …”", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone." ], [ "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "Bergstrom obviously realized\n how close he was to death. Yet\n surprisingly, after the first start,\n he showed little fear. Zarwell had\n thought the man a bit soft, too\n adjusted to a life of ease and some\n prestige to meet danger calmly.\n Curiosity restrained his trigger finger.\n\n\n “Why would I be foolish?” he\n asked. “Your Meninger oath of inviolable\n confidence?”\n\n\n Bergstrom shook his head. “I\n know it’s been broken before. But\n you need me. You’re not through,\n you know. If you killed me you’d\n still have to trust some other\n analyst.”\n\n\n “Is that the best you can do?”", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "With the action the perspective\n shifted again. He was watching the\n face of the man he shot jerk and\n twitch, expand and contract. The\n face was unharmed, yet it was no\n longer the same. No longer his own\n features.\n\n\n The stranger face smiled approvingly\n at him.\n“O\n DD,” Bergstrom said.\nHe brought his hands up and joined\n the tips of his fingers against his\n chest. “But it’s another piece in the\n [p\n 138\n ]\n jig-saw. In time it will fit into\n place.” He paused. “It means no\n more to you than the first, I suppose?”\n\n\n “No,” Zarwell answered.\n\n\n He was not a talking man, Bergstrom\n reflected. It was more than\n reticence, however. The man had\n a hard granite core, only partially\n concealed by his present perplexity.\n He was a man who could handle\n himself well in an emergency.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting.", "Bergstrom’s neat-boned, fair-skinned\n face betrayed no emotion\n other than an introspective stillness\n of his normally alert gaze. “I see\n no connection,” he decided, his\n words once again precise and meticulous.\n “We don’t have enough to\n go on. Do you feel able to try another\n comanalysis this afternoon\n yet?”\n\n\n “I don’t see why not.” Zarwell\n [p\n 137\n ]\n opened the collar of his shirt. The\n day was hot, and the room had no\n air conditioning, still a rare luxury\n on St. Martin’s. The office window\n was open, but it let in no freshness,\n only the mildly rank odor that pervaded\n all the planet’s habitable\n area.\n\n\n “Good.” Bergstrom rose. “The\n serum is quite harmless, John.” He\n maintained a professional diversionary\n chatter as he administered\n the drug. “A scopolamine derivative\n that’s been well tested.”", "The words tumbled down from\n above. They faded, were gone.\nZARWELL found himself\nstanding on a vast plain. There was\n no sky above, and no horizon in the\n distance. He was in a place without\n space or dimension. There was\n nothing here except himself—and\n the gun that he held in his hand.\n\n\n A weapon beautiful in its efficient\n simplicity.\n\n\n He should know all about the\n instrument, its purpose and workings,\n but he could not bring his\n thoughts into rational focus. His\n forehead creased with his mental\n effort.\n\n\n Abruptly the unreality about\n him shifted perspective. He was\n approaching—not walking, but\n merely shortening the space between\n them—the man who held\n the gun. The man who was himself.\n The other “himself” drifted\n nearer also, as though drawn by a\n mutual attraction.\n\n\n The man with the gun raised his\n weapon and pressed the trigger.", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "He offered no resistance as they\n reached him.\n\n\n They were not gentle men. A tall\n ruffian, copper-brown face damp\n with perspiration and body oil,\n grabbed him by the jacket and\n slammed him back against the\n lockers. As he shifted his weight\n to keep his footing someone drove\n a fist into his face. He started to\n raise his hands; and a hard flat\n object crashed against the side of\n his skull.\n\n\n The starch went out of his legs.\n“D\n O you make anything out of\n it?” the psychoanalyst Milton\n Bergstrom, asked.\n\n\n John Zarwell shook his head.\n “Did I talk while I was under?”\n\n\n “Oh, yes. You were supposed to.\n That way I follow pretty well what\n you’re reenacting.”\n\n\n “How does it tie in with what I\n told you before?”", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "[p\n 141\n ]\n\n Zarwell smiled with mild embarrassment.\n “At least in my dreams.”\n\n\n “Dreams?” Bergstrom’s eyes\n widened in surprise. “Oh, I beg your\n pardon. I must have forgotten to\n explain. This work is so routine to\n me that sometimes I forget it’s all\n new to a patient. Actually what you\n experienced under the drug were\n not dreams. They were recollections\n of real episodes from your\n past.”\n\n\n Zarwell’s expression became\n wary. He watched Bergstrom\n closely. After a minute, however,\n he seemed satisfied, and he let himself\n settle back against the cushion\n of his chair. “I remember nothing\n of what I saw,” he observed.\n\n\n “That’s why you’re here, you\n know,” Bergstrom answered. “To\n help you remember.”\n\n\n “But everything under the drug\n is so …”", "Bergstrom shrugged, dismissing\n his strayed thoughts. “I expected\n as much. A quite normal first phase\n of treatment.” He straightened a\n paper on his desk. “I think that will\n be enough for today. Twice in one\n sitting is about all we ever try.\n Otherwise some particular episode\n might cause undue mental stress,\n and set up a block.” He glanced\n down at his appointment pad. “Tomorrow\n at two, then?”\n\n\n Zarwell grunted acknowledgment\n and pushed himself to his\n feet, apparently unaware that his\n shirt clung damply to his body.\nTHE sun was still high when\n Zarwell left the analyst’s office.\n The white marble of the city’s\n buildings shimmered in the afternoon\n heat, squat and austere as\n giant tree trunks, pock-marked and\n gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell\n was careful not to rest his hand\n on the flesh searing surface of the\n stone.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”" ], [ "“I’m not a professional do-gooder.”\n Zarwell’s tone appealed\n to Bergstrom for understanding. “I\n have only a normal man’s indignation\n at injustice. And now I’ve done\n my share. Yet, wherever I go, the\n word eventually gets out, and I’m\n right back in a fight again. It’s like\n the proverbial monkey on my back.\n I can’t get rid of it.”\n\n\n He rose. “That disguise and\n memory planting were supposed to\n get me out of it. I should have\n known it wouldn’t work. But this\n time I’m not going to be drawn\n back in! You and your Vernon\n Johnson can do your own revolting.\n I’m through!”", "“It started on my home colony,”\n Zarwell explained listlessly. “A\n gang of hoods had taken over the\n government. I helped organize a\n movement to get them out. There\n was some bloodshed, but it went\n quite well. Several months later an\n unofficial envoy from another\n world asked several of us to give\n them a hand on the same kind of\n job. The political conditions there\n were rotten. We went with him.\n Again we were successful. It seems\n I have a kind of genius for that\n sort of thing.”\n\n\n He stretched out his legs and regarded\n them thoughtfully. “I\n learned then the truth of Russell’s\n saying: ‘When the oppressed win\n their freedom they are as oppressive\n as their former masters.’ When\n they went bad, I opposed them.\n This time I failed. But I escaped\n again. I have quite a talent for that\n also.", "“Your memory’s back then?”\n\n\n Zarwell nodded.\n\n\n “I’m glad to hear that,” Bergstrom\n assured him. “Now that\n you’re well again I’d like to introduce\n you to a man named Vernon\n Johnson. This world …”\n\n\n Zarwell stopped him with an upraised\n hand. “Good God, man, can’t\n you see the reason for all this? I’m\n tired. I’m trying to quit.”\n\n\n “Quit?” Bergstrom did not quite\n follow him.", "“When this colony was first\n founded,” Johnson began without\n preamble, “the administrative body\n was a governor, and a council of\n twelve. Their successors were to\n be elected biennially. At first they\n were. Then things changed. We\n haven’t had an election now in the\n last twenty-three years. St. Martin’s\n is beginning to prosper. Yet\n the only ones receiving the benefits\n are the rulers. The citizens work\n twelve hours a day. They are poorly\n housed\n , poorly fed, poorly clothed.\n They …”\n\n\n Zarwell found himself not listening\n as Johnson’s voice went on. The\n story was always the same. But why\n did they always try to drag him into\n their troubles?\n\n\n Why hadn’t he chosen some\n other world on which to hide?", "Zarwell tried to feel the anger he\n wanted to feel, but somehow it\n would not come. “We have nothing\n to talk about,” was the best he\n could manage.\n\n\n “Then will you just listen? After,\n I’ll leave—if you tell me to.”\n\n\n Against his will he found himself\n liking the man, and wanting at least\n to be courteous. He inclined his\n head toward a curb wastebox with\n a flat top. “Should we sit?”\n\n\n Johnson smiled agreeably and\n they walked over to the box and\n sat down.", "Zarwell made his decision quickly.\n “Go ahead,” he answered.\nALL Zarwell’s attention seemed\n on the cigar he lit as he rode\n down the escalator, but he surveyed\n the terminal carefully over the rim\n of his hand. He spied no suspicious\n loungers.\n\n\n Behind the escalator he groped\n along the floor beneath the lockers\n until he found his key. The briefcase\n was under his arm a minute\n later.\n\n\n In the basement lave he put a\n coin in the pay slot of a private\n compartment and went in.\n\n\n As he zipped open the briefcase\n he surveyed his features in the mirror.\n A small muscle at the corner of\n one eye twitched spasmodically.\n One cheek wore a frozen quarter\n smile. Thirty-six hours under the\n paralysis was longer than advisable.\n The muscles should be rested at\n least every twenty hours.\n\n\n Fortunately his natural features\n would serve as an adequate disguise\n now.", "“Who am I?” he asked, very interested\n now. Without attention he\n put his pistol away in a trouser\n pocket.\n\n\n Bergstrom brushed the question\n aside with one hand. “Your name\n makes little difference. You’ve used\n many. But you are an idealist. Your\n killings were necessary to bring\n justice to the places you visited. By\n now you’re almost a legend among\n the human worlds. I’d like to talk\n more with you on that later.”\n\n\n While Zarwell considered, Bergstrom\n pressed his advantage. “One\n more scene might do it,” he said.\n “Should we try again—if you trust\n me, that is?”\n\n\n [p\n 145\n ]", "Zarwell did not answer. His\n memory seemed on the point of\n complete return, and he sat quietly,\n hopefully. However, nothing more\n came and he returned his attention\n to his more immediate problem.\n\n\n Opening a button on his shirt, he\n pulled back a strip of plastic cloth\n just below his rib cage and took\n out a small flat pistol. He held it\n in the palm of his hand. He knew\n now why he always carried it.\n\n\n Bergstrom had his bad moment.\n “You’re not going to …” he began\n at the sight of the gun. He tried\n again. “You must be joking.”\n\n\n “I have very little sense of humor,”\n Zarwell corrected him.\n\n\n “You’d be foolish!”", "Zarwell was not the leader of the\n invaders, only a lesser figure in the\n rebellion. But he had played a leading\n part in the planning of the\n strategy that led to the city’s fall.\n The job had been well done.\n\n\n Time passed, without visible\n break in the panorama. Now Zarwell\n was fleeing, pursued by the\n same bearded men who had been\n his comrades before. Still he moved\n with the same firm purpose, vigilant,\n resourceful, and well prepared\n for the eventuality that had befallen.\n He made his escape without\n difficulty.\n\n\n He alighted from a space ship on\n still another world—another shift\n in time—and the atmosphere of\n conflict engulfed him.\n\n\n Weary but resigned he accepted\n it, and did what he had to do …\nBERGSTROM was regarding\nhim with speculative scrutiny.\n “You’ve had quite a past, apparently,”\n he observed.", "Zarwell passed a group of\n smaller children playing a desultory\n game of lic-lic for pieces of\n candy and cigarettes. Slowly he\n climbed the stairs of a stone flat.\n He prepared a supper for himself\n and ate it without either enjoyment\n or distaste. He lay down, fully\n clothed, on his bed. The visit to the\n analyst had done nothing to dispel\n his ennui.\n[p\n 139\n ]\n\n\n\n The next morning when Zarwell\n awoke he lay for a moment, unmoving.\n The feeling was there\n again, like a scene waiting only to\n be gazed at directly to be perceived.\n It was as though a great wisdom\n lay at the edge of understanding.\n If he rested quietly it would\n all come to him. Yet always, when\n his mind lost its sleep-induced\n [p\n 140\n ]\n lethargy, the moment of near understanding\n slipped away.", "A village was being ravaged.\n Men struggled and died in the\n streets. Zarwell moved among\n them, seldom taking part in the\n individual clashes, yet a moving\n force in the\n conflict\n .\n\n\n The background changed. He\n understood that he was on a different\n world.\n\n\n Here a city burned. Its resistance\n was nearing its end. Zarwell was\n riding a shaggy pony outside a high\n wall surrounding the stricken metropolis.\n He moved in and joined a\n party of short, bearded men, directing\n them as they battered at the\n wall with a huge log mounted on a\n many-wheeled truck.\n\n\n The log broke a breach in the\n concrete and the besiegers charged\n through, carrying back the defenders\n who sought vainly to plug the\n gap. Soon there would be rioting\n in the streets again, plundering and\n killing.", "One step more. Taking the syringe\n from his pocket, he plunged\n the needle into his forearm and\n tossed the instrument down a\n waste chute. He took three more\n steps and paused uncertainly.\n\n\n When he looked about him it\n was with the expression of a man\n waking from a vivid dream.\n“Q\n UITE ingenious,” Graves\n murmured admiringly. “You\n had your mind already preconditioned\n for the shot. But why would\n you deliberately give yourself amnesia?”\n\n\n “What better disguise than to\n believe the part you’re playing?”\n\n\n “A good man must have done\n that job on your mind,” Bergstrom\n commented. “I’d have hesitated to\n try it myself. It must have taken a\n lot of trust on your part.”\n\n\n [p\n 146\n ]\n\n “Trust and money,” Zarwell said\n drily.", "The big man turned. “You can\n tell the Chief he’s awake,” he said.\n Zarwell followed his gaze to where\n a younger man, with a blond lock of\n hair on his forehead, stood behind\n him. The youth nodded and went\n out, while the other pulled a chair\n up to the side of Zarwell’s cot.\n\n\n While their attention was away\n from him Zarwell had unobtrusively\n loosened his bonds as much as\n possible with arm leverage. As the\n big man drew his chair nearer, he\n made the hand farthest from him\n tight and compact and worked it\n free of the leather loop. He waited.\n\n\n The big man belched. “You’re\n supposed to be great stuff in a situation\n like this,” he said, his smoke-tan\n face splitting in a grin that revealed\n large square teeth. “How\n about giving me a sample?”\n\n\n “You’re a yellow-livered bastard,”\n Zarwell told him.", "Bergstrom was waiting in his office\n when Zarwell arrived that\n evening.\nHE was lying motionless on a\n hard cot, with his eyes closed,\n yet with his every sense sharply\n quickened. Tentatively he tightened\n small muscles in his arms and\n legs. Across his wrists and thighs\n he felt straps binding him to the\n cot.\n\n\n “So that’s our big, bad man,” a\n coarse voice above him observed\n [p\n 143\n ]\n caustically. “He doesn’t look so\n tough now, does he?”\n\n\n “It might have been better to\n kill him right away,” a second, less\n confident voice said. “It’s supposed\n to be impossible to hold him.”\n\n\n “Don’t be stupid. We just do\n what we’re told. We’ll hold him.”\n\n\n “What do you think they’ll do\n with him?”", "“No.” Bergstrom was angry now.\n “But use that logical mind you’re\n supposed to have! Scenes before\n this have shown what kind of man\n you are. Just because this last happened\n here on St. Martin’s makes\n little difference. If I was going to\n turn you in to the police, I’d have\n done it before this.”\n\n\n Zarwell debated with himself the\n truth of what the other had said.\n “Why didn’t you turn me in?” he\n asked.\n\n\n “Because you’re no mad-dog\n killer!” Now that the crisis seemed\n to be past, Bergstrom spoke more\n calmly, even allowed himself to\n relax. “You’re still pretty much in\n the fog about yourself. I read more\n in those comanalyses than you did.\n I even know who you are!”\n\n\n Zarwell’s eyebrows raised.", "“Execute him, I suppose,” the\n harsh voice said matter-of-factly.\n “They’re probably just curious to\n see what he looks like first. They’ll\n be disappointed.”\n\n\n Zarwell opened his eyes a slit to\n observe his surroundings.\n\n\n It was a mistake. “He’s out of\n it,” the first speaker said, and Zarwell\n allowed his eyes to open fully.\n\n\n The voice, he saw, belonged to\n the big man who had bruised him\n against the locker at the spaceport.\n Irrelevantly he wondered how he\n knew now that it had been a spaceport.\n\n\n His captor’s broad face jeered\n down at Zarwell. “Have a good\n sleep?” he asked with mock solicitude.\n Zarwell did not deign to acknowledge\n that he heard.", "The grin faded from the oily face\n as the man stood up. He leaned over\n the cot—and Zarwell’s left hand\n shot up and locked about his throat,\n joined almost immediately by the\n right.\n\n\n The man’s mouth opened and he\n tried to yell as he threw himself\n frantically backward. He clawed at\n the hands about his neck. When\n that failed to break the grip he suddenly\n reversed his weight and\n drove his fist at Zarwell’s head.\n\n\n Zarwell pulled the struggling\n body down against his chest and\n held it there until all agitated\n movement ceased. He sat up then,\n letting the body slide to the floor.\n\n\n The straps about his thighs came\n loose with little effort.\nTHE analyst dabbed at his upper\n lip with a handkerchief. “The\n episodes are beginning to tie together,”\n he said, with an attempt at\n [p\n 144\n ]\n nonchalance. “The next couple\n should do it.”", "Bergstrom did not argue as he\n left.\nRESTLESSNESS drove Zarwell\n from his flat the next day—a\n legal holiday on St. Martin’s. At\n a railed-off lot he stopped and loitered\n in the shadow of an adjacent\n building watching workmen drilling\n an excavation for a new structure.\n\n\n When a man strolled to his side\n and stood watching the workmen,\n he was not surprised. He waited for\n the other to speak.\n\n\n “I’d like to talk to you, if you\n can spare a few minutes,” the\n stranger said.\n\n\n Zarwell turned and studied the\n man without answering. He was\n medium tall, with the body of an\n athlete, though perhaps ten years\n [p\n 147\n ]\n beyond the age of sports. He had\n a manner of contained energy.\n “You’re Johnson?” he asked.\n\n\n The man nodded.", "The last question prompted a\n new thought. Just why had he\n chosen St. Martin’s? Was it only a\n coincidence? Or had he,\n subconsciously\n at least, picked this particular\n world? He had always\n considered himself the unwilling\n subject of glib persuaders … but\n mightn’t some inner compulsion of\n his own have put the monkey on his\n back?\n\n\n “… and we need your help.”\n Johnson had finished his speech.\n\n\n Zarwell gazed up at the bright\n sky. He pulled in a long breath,\n and let it out in a sigh.\n\n\n “What are your plans so far?”\n he asked wearily.\n—\nCHARLES V. DE VET", "“I won’t have any time off again\n until next week end,” Zarwell reminded\n him.\n\n\n “That’s right.” Bergstrom\n thought for a moment. “We\n shouldn’t let this hang too long.\n Could you come here after work\n tomorrow?”\n\n\n “I suppose I could.”\n\n\n “Fine,” Bergstrom said with satisfaction.\n “I’ll admit I’m considerably\n more than casually interested\n in your case by this time.”\nA WORK truck picked Zarwell\n up the next morning and he\n rode with a tech crew to the edge of\n the reclam area. Beside the belt\n bringing ocean muck from the converter\n plant at the seashore his\n bulldozer was waiting." ] ]
train	99902	[ "Which term best describes Sara's relationship with her parents?", "Why have Sara and her father not spoken in over a year?", "At what point did Sara's relationship with her father sharply transition?", "Describe Sara's attitude toward Fox:", "What is ironic about Sara's father's justification for the ads on his page?", "To what commonality are Sara and her father oblivious?", "In Sara's version of the Chevrolet ad, what is implied as the thing that makes America great?", "Which statement best represents the central theme of the text? " ]	[ [ "inflammatory", "tenuous", "strained", "obligatory" ], [ "Sara attended college in New York and stayed there after graduating.", "They have intense disagreements on most political issues.", "Sara and her father voted for different presidential candidates.", "Sara's father was an authoritative presence during her high school years." ], [ "When she remained in New York after graduating from NYU", "When she pierced her nose", "When she began high school", "When she moved to New York" ], [ "disgusted", "irked", "confused", "ambivalent" ], [ "He claims to value entities that create jobs, and ignores the potential for solar energy to do the same.", "He accuses Sara of hating advertising, when her job involves advertising.", "He accuses Sara of hating America, when most of his ads are from other countries.", "He dislikes modern ads for companies like Lyft, but supports them if they benefit him personally." ], [ "Their realities both stem from limited, biased media spheres.\n", "They both take Sara's mother for granted.", "They both claim to support job generation, but invest in companies and entities that eliminate jobs.", "The advertisements they watch are driving them apart, versus bringing them together." ], [ "freedom of speech", "freedom of religion", "diverse inhabitants", "affordable vehicles" ], [ "The media is ultimately responsible for the breakdown of the American family.", "People will be happy as long as the status quo is maintained.", "Humans have much more in common than they have in difference.", "While social media purports to bring us together, it more often drives us apart." ] ]	[ 3, 2, 3, 1, 1, 1, 3, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice.", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"", "Divided we stand\nSara lets the Lyft park itself in the drive, lets out a sigh, and tweets\nwish me luck\nplus some emojis before slipping her phone into a hoody pocket. Curtains twitch, and before she can get her bag out of the back Mom is there, right there next to her, their hands touching on the handle as they compete for control. \n\n \"It's OK Mom, I got it.\" \n\n \"You should have let us come pick you up.\" \n\n \"It's fine, there was no need. I didn't want to put any-\" \n\n \"But you shouldn't be wasting money, not with how much rent you pay and-\" \n\n Jesus. Not this already. \"Mom. I can afford a cab ride. I'm not\nthat\nmuch of a failure.\"", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"" ], [ "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice.", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "\"How's work, honey?\" Mom asks. \n\n \"Yeah, going OK.\" Sara works for a non-profit in Brooklyn that helps big organisations to transition to renewable energy. The pay is lousy but it feels important. \"We just got the last few schools in the city to agree to put solar panels on their roofs. Big deal for us. I've been working on them for the last two years.\" \n\n Mom says nothing, just looks down at her plate. \n\n Dad finishes chewing his mouthful, swallows, wipes his beard with a napkin. Sighs, barely controlled anger simmering behind his face. \"Solar panels cause cancer.\" \n\n Sara laughs, covering her mouth as she nearly chokes on chewed food. \"What? No they don't Dad.\"", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat." ], [ "And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice.", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.", "\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"" ], [ "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice." ], [ "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "He stabs at the screen, looks for a while, stabs again. Flips it over and hands it to her. \"Here. Read.\" \n\n Reluctantly, she takes it. His Facebook feed. Somewhere in the middle of it is the article, a very to the point CHINESE SOLAR PANELS CAUSE CANCER headline. But she can't even focus on it, because the rest of the screen is filled with distractions, looping videos and animated gifs, all adverts, and all for guns. Or security systems. Panic rooms. Back up power generators. Emergency rations. More guns. \n\n \"Jesus Christ Dad, these ads!\" \n\n \"No blasphemy at the dinner table, please honey\" says Mom. \n\n \"What about them?\"", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.", "\"Well, I don't read the news and I don't know any science,\" says Mom, \"But I do know this: after they opened that solar farm up near Mary, within just a few years her and two of her neighbours had cancer. I mean I don't know anything for sure honey, but given the risk are you sure it's safe to be putting these panels on top of schools?\" \n\n \"There's no risk, Mom. None at all. Dad, I wish you'd stop believing everything you see on Facebook.\" \n\n \"Well, maybe you should read things yourself before passing judgement on them.\" He pushes himself up from his seat, steps away from the table. Sara sighs, thinking she's upset him that much that he's actually abandoning his dinner, but he stops to grab something off a nearby shelf. His iPad. He heads back and takes his seat again.\nOh, here we fucking go\nshe thinks to herself.", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.", "\"How's work, honey?\" Mom asks. \n\n \"Yeah, going OK.\" Sara works for a non-profit in Brooklyn that helps big organisations to transition to renewable energy. The pay is lousy but it feels important. \"We just got the last few schools in the city to agree to put solar panels on their roofs. Big deal for us. I've been working on them for the last two years.\" \n\n Mom says nothing, just looks down at her plate. \n\n Dad finishes chewing his mouthful, swallows, wipes his beard with a napkin. Sighs, barely controlled anger simmering behind his face. \"Solar panels cause cancer.\" \n\n Sara laughs, covering her mouth as she nearly chokes on chewed food. \"What? No they don't Dad.\"" ], [ "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"Fine.\" \n\n \"Sorry Mom.\" \n\n Sara turns back to the TV, to watching the war, to trying to work out which one it is.\nIt had always been this way, ever since she was about thirteen. Up until then it just seemed like constant warmth, as though she didn't have any childhood concept of Dad apart from him getting home from work, then her sitting on his knee, eating cookies and watching football highlights until Mom came in and scolded them both for ruining their appetites before dinner.", "Sara slips her phone into her pocket, genuine guilt. Feels like a spoiled kid. \"I didn't realise. I'm sorry.\"", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.", "And then everything changed. Suddenly there was rap music and nose rings, sneaking out of the house to see her friends and not wanting to go to church. Suddenly he was no longer this lovable bear-man that ruffled her hair and gave her candy and explained defensive plays to her, but this huge obelisk of injustice that just wanted to crush her high school life into dust. It was constant warfare; every opinion she had became a battle, every decision she made a conflict. Getting away to college gave her escape, but bred resentment too; he hated that she went to New York, even though NYU was a good school, and her decision to stay there after she finished made things even worse. And then politics got all crazy, weirder then ever, and it became impossible for them to talk without it erupting into fights almost instantly. It was bad enough when the smart, young guy she liked was president and Dad constantly spewed his hate for him at her, but somehow it got even worse when the old, racist, women hating war-starter he liked won. Twice." ], [ "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "Cut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.\nVoiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and what keeps us strong.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nDad wipes another team from his eye. \"I think we're going to be OK,\" he says to himself. \"I think we're going to be just fine.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "\"Just… just look at them. They're terrifying. They're like… like adverts for the end of the world! You know they show you this stuff just to make you scared, right? Just to keep you paranoid.\" \n\n \"They show me this stuff because they've got products to sell. That's how the economy works. That's how we create jobs. Godammit Sara, are you telling me you hate\nadvertising\nnow? Do you just hate everything about America?\" \n\n Sara looks over to Mom, who looks like she's on the brink of tears. Suddenly she finds she's also lost the will to fight. Gently she closes the iPad and puts it down on the table, next to her plate. \n\n \"No, of course not Dad. Maybe I'll read this later, after the game.\"\nAfter dinner she helps Mom clean-up, the two of them loading the dishwasher in near silence. She's leaning against the counter, scrolling through Twitter on her phone, when Mom finally speaks.", "Everybody seems to be talking about the same thing.\nomg im crying\nholy shit that chevrolet ad /fire emoji\nthat was sooooo beautiful\nwho knew chevrolet were so woke\ni can't believe they did that, so amazing\nHang on, are they taking about the same ad?", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.", "\"Sara!\" says Mom. \n\n \"No I'm sorry, I can't. I can't sit here and watch this… this bullshit. This propaganda.\" She storms out of the room. \n\n \"Sara!\" Mom makes to get up.", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"", "So they didn't talk much now, barely online, never on the phone. Since her second year of school he'd never been to NYC to visit her. She came back when she could face it; sometimes for birthdays, sometimes for Thanksgiving. Maybe for Christmas. But somehow always, like now, for the Super Bowl. Like football was the one thing they still had, that one thing they could still sit in the same room together for. Shouting at players, screaming at the ref, laughing at the ads.\nDad is in the bathroom, and Sara has had enough of Fox and whichever war this is. She reaches over and grabs the remote from the arm of his chair, and tries to find something else to watch. The government had scrapped all the rules about how the internet worked, and for most people like her parents it had suddenly gotten a lot cheaper to get their TV through Facebook, so all she can find is\nFox, Breitbart News, Family Values TV, Info Wars, The Rebel, Glenn Beck, The Voice of America, America First, The Bible Today", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"Of course honey.\" \n\n Mom and Dad watch Sara leave the room, and then look at each other. \n\n \"Well.\" \n\n \"Well indeed.\" \n\n \"What did I tell you? You two just needed to spend some time together. Some quality time.\" \n\n \"I guess so. What did I ever do to deserve a woman as hot and as smart as you, huh Sheryl?\" \n\n Mom stands up and makes to leave the room, leaning down to kiss him as she passes. \"I ask myself that question every day.\"", "\"No, just leave her,\" says Dad, gently, his eyes still fixed on the screen. \"Just let her go.\"\nOut in the kitchen Sara sits at the table and wants to scream. She's angry, mainly with herself. She should never have fucking come here. She should have known better. There was never any fucking way anything good was going to come from this. As much as Mom wants to romanticise things, to make them sound cute and adorable, the truth is shit with Dad has never been right since she was a teenager. Too much resentment, too much bad blood, too much control and rebellion. They hadn't agreed on anything - they hadn't managed to have a simple conversation that didn't descend into fighting - in 15 goddamn years, and no amount of eating cookies and watching fucking Super Bowl ads on the TV was going to fix that. \n\n She sighs, wipes a tear from her cheek. On autopilot she takes her phone from her pocket, feels its reassuring warmth in her hand, and swipes open Twitter.", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat." ], [ "A little way away from the main group sits a small child, a girl. Maybe 8 years old. She is drawing shapes in the dust with a stick. She's drawn quite a bit it looks like, but from our angle we can't see what.\nCut to: drone footage. The pilot is watching the group. As he tracks away from the main party to where the girl is sat, the camera reveals what she has drawn.\nA large, child's rendition of the American flag.\nUnderneath it, it childlike handwriting, some words. 'I have a dream'\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. ALL PATROLS: STAND DOWN\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.\nCut to: exterior shot of the trailer. The still anonymous pilot exits, walks back towards his jeep.", "Voiceover: Keeping America safe means never sleeping, but keeping America great means never forgetting who we are, and how we got here.\nThe jeep starts up, pulls away from the camera in a cloud of dust.\nFade to black. Chevrolet logo. White text against black.\n'We know what really makes America great'\nSara finds herself in the front room, sobbing.", "Mom smiles, walks over and kisses her on the forehead. \"It's OK honey. Don't feel bad. Just go. Just go sit in there with him and watch some TV. Please.\"\nIt's the second down on the Falcon's 60 yard line with 30 yards to cover, and the Lions need one touchdown to equalise. Sara and her Dad are sat in the front room, working their way through a family sized pack of Oreos, when the ad break starts.\nDawn. Red skies over the desert. A Chevrolet truck pulls up next to a large, trailer. Low shot next to the front tire, as a cowboy booted foot drops down from the door, disturbing dust.", "Hastily she opens her FB TV app, pulls up the game. The ad is just finishing. She hits the 10-second rewind icon a couple of times, then leans the phone on its side against a ketchup bottle.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are revealed to be a Mexican family, maybe two. Men, women, children. They look tired, hungry. They stop to rest, sipping the little water they have left from tattered plastic bottles.", "Dinner is Mom's meatloaf, with gravy and mashed potatoes. Cornbread and broccoli. Every mouthful tastes like nostalgia, and Sara can feel herself being encompassed by a bubble, this barrier of warm air and long forgotten simplicity enveloping her body, protecting her from the confusion of the world outside.", "\"No, it is. It's my fault. I got myself into thinking we can never agree on anything, that we can never see eye to eye. That we've got nothing in common anymore.\" She lifts her head to look up at him. \"But I know that's wrong. That I shouldn't assume things about you. That there's still things that can bring us together.\" \n\n He grins back at her. \"Like Super Bowl ads?\" \n\n She laughs. \"I guess. But you know what I mean, really.\" \n\n \"I know honey. And I'm sorry too. I didn't mean what I said earlier. I know you don't really hate this country.\" He gestures to the couch next to him. \"Why don't you sit down, huh? We can watch the rest of the game together.\" \n\n She straightens herself up, wipes her eyes. Suddenly feels a little self conscious. \"Sure. Let me just go freshen up first.\"", "Alone, seen only by the TV, Dad smiles to himself. He picks up the remote, but instead of hitting play, he finds himself hitting rewind.\nCut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\nCut to: on the ground, in the desert. The group of figures are all men. Dirty, scruffy, furtive. Like they mean business.They carry guns, pistols, and assault riffles. Bad hombres. One of them pulls open a bag, looks inside.\nCut to: close up of the inside of the bag. Inside are packets of white powder.", "\"Honey?\" \n\n Dad pauses the TV, looks up at her. It looks like he's been crying too. \"Sara?\" \n\n \"Did you - did you watch it?\" \n\n \"The Chevrolet ad?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"Yeah, we did.\" Embarrassed, he wipes a tear from his cheek. \"It was… it was very moving.\" \n\n She falls on him, wrapping her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest. \"I'm sorry Dad. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to be so mean-\" \n\n \"It's OK, honey. It really is.\" \n\n \"No, no it's not. We always fight. And I know that's mainly my fault-\" \n\n 'Well, now, c'mon-\"", "\"Well I'm sure they'll be fine.\" She regrets the sarcasm as soon as she hears it in her own voice, but she still can't stop herself, like it's expected, like it's part of the routine. Part of their schtick. \"They just got to get themselves out there, huh Dad? Pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the American way, right?\" \n\n \"I'm glad you think this is funny, I really do. But what you New York types need to realise is-\" \n\n \"Ed!\" Mom had appeared in the doorway. \"Please! Both of you. No fighting today, please.\" \n\n \"Sheryl-\" \n\n \"No. I don't want to hear you two as much as disagreeing about anything today, unless it's about the game. And even then you'd better keep it civil. Otherwise you can both go hungry. Understand?\" \n\n Awkward pause.", "\"Yeah, well you know your father. Doesn't like to talk about it. Doesn't want to burden other people with his problems. Hates pity.\" She pauses, looks out the window into the yard. When she turns back to Sara her eyes are damp. \"This is why I was so excited about you coming back. Why he was so excited! I thought it'd take his mind of all this. He was so excited to see you. You know he loves watching the game with you, Sara.\" \n\n \"I know. I'm sorry I-\" \n\n \"And the ads! The Super Bowl ads! You know how much he loves watching the new ads with you. It's a stupid thing, sure, but he loves it. Talks about it all the time. It's like a tradition to him. That's why he got so upset over dinner when you got angry at his ads. It's something special he has with you, he doesn't want to lose it.\"", "Cut to: drone footage. Grainy, monochrome. A group of figures move slowly through the desert. The camera tracks them. Zooms in. The pilot punches buttons. The figures become highlighted by a computer overlay, text appears next to them. ILLEGAL ENTRY ATTEMPT SUSPECTED. GROUND PATROLS ALERTED.\n\"Fuck this,\" says Sara, getting up from her seat.", "Cut to: internal shot of the trailer, darkness split by morning light through the opening door. The figure enters, flicks on lights. The room is full of equipment, computers. The figure takes a seat, puts on a headset, thumbs on screens. Rests their hands on two large joysticks on the desk.\nCut to: airfield, the desert. The distinctive silhouette of a Predator drone taxis across the screen, rising heat shimmering the air around it.\nCut to: interior of the trailer. The faceless figure works controls, the joysticks, touch screens.\nVoiceover: They say you need to get up pretty early to get past America's finest. But the truth is we never sleep.\nCut to: a uniformed guard on top of the border wall. He looks up and gives a salute to the drone as it soars above him, out and across the desert.", "He smiles back at her, nods knowingly. \n\n Their first words in nearly a year. Fine. So far. She relaxes. Of course it is. How bad could it be? \n\n \"I thought I was gonna come pick you up from the airport?\" \n\n \"Ah, no. I got a cab. I didn't want to bother you.\" \n\n \"Bother me? You think I'm too old and infirm to pick my own daughter up from the airport?\" \n\n \"No Dad, of course not.\"\nThe war spills out of Fox News, casualty figures scrolling across monochrome drone footage, attack helicopters circling over Caracas apartment blocks, pundits with bronzed skin and immaculate blond hair smiling from four-way split screens.\n\"So you just got a cab?\" \n\n \"Yeah.\" \n\n \"How much did that cost?\"", "Suddenly, one of the party looks up, shouts something in Spanish. They all go to grab their guns.\nBut it's too late.\nFrom three different directions, three different Chevrolet jeeps appear, screeching to a halt, kicking up dust. From them jump Border Patrol agents and Minutemen militia, guns drawn and ready.\nThe gang of men don't even put up a fight. They know they're surrounded, they drop their weapons and pathetically raise their hands.\nAll except one. The guy with the bag full of drugs. He's got nothing to lose. He reaches for his rifle.\nCut to: Border Patrol agents, opening fire.\nText flashes across the screen. ALERT CANCELLED. THREAT NEUTRALISED.\nCut to: the drone, banking and turning, flying away.", "Mom sighs, shoulders falling, looks at Sara directly. \"I'm sorry honey.\" She looks old, Sara thinks, watching a resigned tiredness flicker across her face in a way she'd not noticed before. Like she's exhausted by conflict, surrendered to it. \"Now, don't I get a hug?\" \n\n Sara smiles. They hold each other for a few long seconds, rubbing and squeezing each other as the Lyft silently backs itself out of the driveway. When they part it's Mom's hand that's on the bag's handle. \n\n Inside she unwraps herself from scarves and layers, the heat in the house almost a shock after the cold air. Michigan in February. Mom is already halfway up the stairs, bag in tow, headed for her room. \n\n \"Mom, just leave that and I'll…\" \n\n \"Your father's in the front room,\" she says, just before she disappears from view. \"Go say hi.\"", "\"You should go easy on your father, you know. He's worried about a lot of things.\" \n\n \"What things? Solar panel cancer?\" \n\n \"Don't joke Sara, I'm serious. There's a lot that bothers him. The state of the world. The future. All these damn wars.\" \n\n \"We're all worried about all that, Mom.\" \n\n \"He's worried about his health.\nI'm\nworried about his health. Probably more than he is.\" \n\n Sara looks up from her phone, genuine concern. \"Is he OK?\" \n\n \"I don't know. He won't go to the doctor. Hasn't been in months. He's worried about his insurance.\" \n\n \"I had no idea-\"", "\"How's work, honey?\" Mom asks. \n\n \"Yeah, going OK.\" Sara works for a non-profit in Brooklyn that helps big organisations to transition to renewable energy. The pay is lousy but it feels important. \"We just got the last few schools in the city to agree to put solar panels on their roofs. Big deal for us. I've been working on them for the last two years.\" \n\n Mom says nothing, just looks down at her plate. \n\n Dad finishes chewing his mouthful, swallows, wipes his beard with a napkin. Sighs, barely controlled anger simmering behind his face. \"Solar panels cause cancer.\" \n\n Sara laughs, covering her mouth as she nearly chokes on chewed food. \"What? No they don't Dad.\"", "There's a brief second, a fleeting moment, where Sara can bite her lip, let it go. She misses it. \"But I thought it was immigrants that are stealing people's jobs?\" \n\n \"You might think it's funny little lady, but let me tell you - you remember Kyle and Max, Bill Cooper's boys? Live up off Lafayette, past the Checkers?\" \n\n \"Nope.\" \n\n \"Well let me tell you,\" He shifts in the recliner, with some obvious pain and effort, to face her. \"Both of 'em lost their jobs just this last year. Both of 'em were truckers. Both of 'em been driving trucks since high school. Now the damn trucks are driving themselves and they're both out of work. And they got families to support. Kids.\"", "and lots of hunting and sports channels she doesn't even recognise. It's signed in to her Dad's FB account, and the last thing she wants is to try and log in on hers before he gets back from the john. Yeah. There was no way that would end up with them keeping it civil.\nIn her pocket her phone vibrates, purrs against her skin, reminding her it's there, making sure she's not forgotten where her real friends are, that there's a world outside, beyond Dad and his TV. She takes it out and cradles it in her hands, the dark screen fleetingly reflecting back her face before it jumps awake at her very touch, opening up to bathe her in blue light, in comfort and warmth and the familiar. For the first time since she got home she feels herself relax.", "For a few seconds Sara is alone in the hallway, the smell of cooking meat coming from one doorway, the sound of rolling news from another. She shakes her head, kicks off shoes, tucks hair behind her ears. Braces herself.\nHe's sat in the living room, reclining in the Lazy Boy. He doesn't hear her enter - her socked feet silent on the pile carpet floor, his attention lost in the screen that fills most of the wall. Fox News. She braces herself again. \n\n \"Hey Dad.\" \n\n His head jerks to look at her. \"Hey! When did you get here?\" He starts to push himself up. \n\n \"Don't get up Dad, it's fine. Really.\" She takes a seat on the couch. \"I just got here, like two minutes ago.\" \n\n \"Good flight?\" \n\n \"Yeah. Fine. Y'know. Same as always.\"" ] ]
valid	30035	[ "What did the author intend the lesson of the passage to be?", "What happened to Dameri while he was in custody of the government?", "What was Dameri’s purpose in landing on earth?", "What did the people of Earth generally believe Dameri Tass would do on their planet?", "How did Dameri Tass communicate in English?", "What would have happened if Dameri had delivered his speech sooner?", "What would the citizens of Carthis learn about Earth after Dameri returned?", "What was the relationship like between Dermott and Casey?" ]	[ [ "We should be trying to form a planetary government to become a civilized planet", "It is not possible for the planet to unite under a common cause", "We need not speak the same language to understand each other", "Solutions for human kind aren’t going to suddenly appear from outer space" ], [ "He picked up an accent from the guards", "He slept almost the entire time", "He learned horses were creatures that could be ridden", "He was too shy to speak" ], [ "He wanted to witness an uncivilized planet and share knowledge", "His spaceship needed to land for repairs", "He heard reports that Earth had interesting animal specimens for his collection", "He arrived on accident while exploring planets in the Galactic League" ], [ "Collect humans to be displayed in a zoo in Carthis", "Assess it for civility and suitability to join the Galactic League", "Solve their societal challenges with his knowledge", "Initiate colonization of Earth, for Carthis had dwindling resources" ], [ "He could communicate telepathically", "He never was able to communicate in English", "He used a handheld translation device", "He acquired the knowledge from a human" ], [ "Conflict between the government and UN", "There would have been many lives saved", "No change in the course of events", "Earth could have been part of the Galactic League" ], [ "They would learn about the animals of Earth", "They would learn they needed to revise the log of Galactic League planets", "They would learn it is an uncivilized place", "They likely would never learn that it existed" ], [ "A superior and subordinate", "Two patrol officers brought very close together by their experience discovering an alien", "Dermott was like a father to Casey", "Colleagues from the same graduating class at the academy" ] ]	[ 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 3, 4, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"", "Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.", "The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"" ], [ "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly.", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"" ], [ "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly." ], [ "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly.", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"", "Excitement, anticipation, blanketed\n the world. Shepherds in Sinkiang,\n multi-millionaires in Switzerland,\n fakirs in Pakistan, gauchos in\n the Argentine were raised to a\n zenith of expectation. Panhandlers\n debated the message to come with\n pedestrians; jinrikisha men argued\n it with their passengers; miners discussed\n it deep beneath the surface;\n pilots argued with their co-pilots\n thousands of feet above.\n\n\n It was the most universally\n awaited event of the ages.", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel." ], [ "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"" ], [ "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly.", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"" ], [ "Dameri Tass shook his head.\n \"Sure, an' 'twould've been my\n makin' if I could've taken one back\n to Carthis.\" He entered his vessel.\n\n\n The others drew back, out of\n range of the expected blast, and\n watched, each with his own\n thoughts, as the first visitor from\n space hurriedly left Earth.\n... THE END\nTranscriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from\nIf Worlds of Science Fiction\nJanuary 1954.\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and\n typographical errors have been corrected without note.", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "Never in the history of the planet\n had such a furor arisen. Thus far,\n no newspapermen had been allowed\n within speaking distance. Administration\n higher-ups were being subjected\n to a volcano of editorial heat\n but the longer the space alien was\n discussed the more they viewed with\n alarm the situation his arrival had\n precipitated. There were angles that\n hadn't at first been evident.\n\n\n Obviously he was from some civilization\n far beyond that of Earth's.\n That was the rub. No matter what\n he said, it would shake governments,\n possibly overthrow social systems,\n perhaps even destroy established religious\n concepts.\n\n\n But they couldn't keep him under\n wraps indefinitely.\n\n\n It was the United Nations that\n cracked the iron curtain. Their demands\n that the alien be heard before\n their body were too strong and\n had too much public opinion behind\n them to be ignored. The White\n House yielded and the date was set\n for the visitor to speak before the\n Assembly.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "The alien frowned worriedly.\n \"Sure,\" he said, \"and what kin all\n this be? Is it some ordinance I've\n been after breakin'?\"\n\n\n McCord, Sir Alfred and Andersen\n hastened to reassure him and\n made him comfortable in a chair.\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen faced the\n thousands in the audience and held\n up his hands, but it was ten minutes\n before he was able to quiet the\n cheering, stamping delegates from\n all Earth.\n\n\n Finally: \"Fellow Terrans, I shall\n not take your time for a lengthy\n introduction of the envoy from the\n stars. I will only say that, without\n doubt, this is the most important\n moment in the history of the human\n race. We will now hear from the\n first being to come to Earth from\n another world.\"", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop." ], [ "Trained to grasp a situation and\n immediately respond in manner best\n suited to protect the welfare of the\n people of New York State, Dermott\n cleared his throat and said, \"Tim,\n take over while I report.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" Casey protested, but his\n fellow minion had left.\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass told\n Casey, holding out the metal cap.\n\n\n \"Faith, an' do I look balmy?\"\n Casey told him. \"I wouldn't be\n puttin' that dingus on my head for\n all the colleens in Ireland.\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" the stranger said\n impatiently.\n\n\n \"Bejasus,\" Casey snorted, \"ye\n can't—\"\n\n\n Dermott called from the car,\n \"Tim, the captain says to humor\n this guy. We're to keep him here\n until the officials arrive.\"", "Tim Casey loosened his .38 in its\n holster and said, \"Sure, and I'm\n beginning to wonder if it's one of\n ours. No insignia and—\"\n\n\n A circular door slid open at that\n point and Dameri Tass stepped out,\n yawning. He spotted them, smiled\n and said, \"Glork.\"\n\n\n They gaped at him.\n\n\n \"Glork is right,\" Dermott swallowed.\n\n\n Tim Casey closed his mouth with\n an effort. \"Do you mind the color\n of his face?\" he blurted.\n\n\n \"How could I help it?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass rubbed a blue-nailed\n pink hand down his purplish countenance\n and yawned again. \"Gorra\n manigan horp soratium,\" he said.", "Tim Casey closed his eyes and\n groaned. \"Humor him, he's after\n sayin'. Orders it is.\" He shouted\n back, \"Sure, an' did ye tell 'em he's\n in technicolor? Begorra, he looks\n like a man from Mars.\"\n\n\n \"That's what they think,\" Larry\n yelled, \"and the governor is on his\n way. We're to do everything possible\n short of violence to keep this\n character here. Humor him, Tim!\"\n\n\n \"Mandaia,\" Dameri Tass\n snapped, pushing the cap into\n Casey's reluctant hands.\n\n\n Muttering his protests, Casey\n lifted it gingerly and placed it on\n his head. Not feeling any immediate\n effect, he said, \"There, 'tis satisfied\n ye are now, I'm supposin'.\"", "Patrolman Dermott and Patrolman\n Casey shot stares at each other.\n \"'Tis double talk he's after givin'\n us,\" Casey said.\n\n\n Dameri Tass frowned. \"Harama?\"\n he asked.\n\n\n Larry Dermott pushed his cap to\n the back of his head. \"That doesn't\n sound like any language I've even\nheard\nabout.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass grimaced, turned\n and reentered his spacecraft to\n emerge in half a minute with his\n hands full of contraption. He held\n a box-like arrangement under his\n left arm; in his right hand were two\n metal caps connected to the box\n by wires.\n\n\n While the patrolmen watched\n him, he set the box on the ground,\n twirled two dials and put one of the\n caps on his head. He offered the\n other to Larry Dermott; his desire\n was obvious.", "Dameri Tass shrugged. \"Faith, an'\n why not? As I was after sayin', I\n shared the kerit helmet with Tim\n Casey.\"\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott glared at him\n unbelievingly. \"You learned the\n language just by sticking that Rube\n Goldberg deal on Tim's head?\"\n\n\n \"Sure, an' why not?\"\n\n\n Dermott muttered, \"And with it\n he has to pick up the corniest\n brogue west of Dublin.\"\n\n\n Tim Casey got to his feet indignantly.\n \"I'm after resentin' that,\n Larry Dermott. Sure, an' the way\n we talk in Ireland is—\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass interrupted, pointing\n to a bedraggled horse that had\n made its way to within fifty feet of\n the vessel. \"Now what could that\n be after bein'?\"", "\"Hey, hold it,\" Dermott said anxiously.\n He was beginning to feel\n like a character in a shaggy dog\n story.\n\n\n Interest in the horse was ended\n with the sudden arrival of a helicopter.\n It swooped down on the\n field and settled within twenty feet\n of the alien craft. Almost before it\n had touched, the door was flung\n open and the flying windmill disgorged\n two bestarred and efficient-looking\n Army officers.\n\n\n Casey and Dermott snapped them\n a salute.\n\n\n The senior general didn't take\n his eyes from the alien and the\n spacecraft as he spoke, and they\n bugged quite as effectively as had\n those of the patrolmen when they'd\n first arrived on the scene.", "The alien stooped down and\n flicked a switch on the little box.\n It hummed gently. Tim Casey suddenly\n shrieked and sat down on the\n stubble and grass of the field. \"Begorra,\"\n he yelped, \"I've been murthered!\"\n He tore the cap from\n his head.\n\n\n His companion came running,\n \"What's the matter, Tim?\" he\n shouted.\n\n\n Dameri Tass removed the metal\n cap from his own head. \"Sure, an'\n nothin' is after bein' the matter\n with him,\" he said. \"Evidently the\n bhoy has niver been a-wearin' of\n a kerit helmet afore. 'Twill hurt\n him not at all.\"\n\"You can\n talk!\" Dermott\n blurted, skidding to a stop.", "\"Nonsense!\" the general snapped.\n\n\n Further discussion was interrupted\n by the screaming arrival of\n several motorcycle patrolmen followed\n by three heavily laden patrol\n cars. Overhead, pursuit planes\n zoomed in and began darting about\n nervously above the field.\n\n\n \"Sure, and it's quite a reception\n I'm after gettin',\" Dameri Tass said.\n He yawned. \"But what I'm wantin'\n is a chance to get some sleep. Faith,\n an' I've been awake for almost a\ndecal\n.\"\nDameri Tass\n was hurried, via\n helicopter, to Washington. There\n he disappeared for several days,\n being held incommunicado while\n White House, Pentagon, State Department\n and Congress tried to\n figure out just what to do with him.", "The patrolmen followed his stare.\n \"It's a horse. What else?\"\n\n\n \"A horse?\"\n\n\n Larry Dermott looked again, just\n to make sure. \"Yeah—not much of\n a horse, but a horse.\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass sighed ecstatically.\n \"And jist what is a horse, if I may\n be so bold as to be askin'?\"\n\n\n \"It's an animal you ride on.\"\n\n\n The alien tore his gaze from the\n animal to look his disbelief at the\n other. \"Are you after meanin' that\n you climb upon the crature's back\n and ride him? Faith now, quit your\n blarney.\"\n\n\n He looked at the horse again,\n then down at his equipment. \"Begorra,\"\n he muttered, \"I'll share the\n kerit helmet with the crature.\"", "\"I'm Major General Browning,\"\n he rapped. \"I want a police cordon\n thrown up around this, er, vessel.\n No newsmen, no sightseers, nobody\n without my permission. As soon as\n Army personnel arrives, we'll take\n over completely.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Larry Dermott said. \"I\n just got a report on the radio that\n the governor is on his way, sir. How\n about him?\"\n\n\n The general muttered something\n under his breath. Then, \"When the\n governor arrives, let me know;\n otherwise, nobody gets through!\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass said, \"Faith, and\n what goes on?\"\n\n\n The general's eyes bugged still\n further. \"\nHe talks!\n\" he accused.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Dermott said. \"He\n had some kind of a machine. He\n put it over Tim's head and seconds\n later he could talk.\"", "Shure and begorra, it was a great day for the Earth! The\n first envoy from another world was about to speak—that\n is, if he could forget that horse for a minute....\noff course\nBy Mack Reynolds\nIllustrated by Kelly Freas\nFirst on\n the scene were Larry\n Dermott and Tim Casey of the\n State Highway Patrol. They assumed\n they were witnessing the\n crash of a new type of Air Force\n plane and slipped and skidded desperately\n across the field to within\n thirty feet of the strange craft, only\n to discover that the landing had\n been made without accident.\n\n\n Patrolman Dermott shook his\n head. \"They're gettin' queerer looking\n every year. Get a load of it—no\n wheels, no propeller, no cockpit.\"\n\n\n They left the car and made their\n way toward the strange egg-shaped\n vessel.", "The Secretary General sighed\n deeply. \"Just what\ndid\nhe do?\"\n\n\n \"The Secret Service reports he\n spent the day whistling Mother Machree\n and playing with his dog, cat\n and mouse.\"\n\n\n \"Dog, cat and mouse? I say!\"\n blurted Sir Alfred.\n\n\n The President was defensive. \"He\n had to have some occupation, and\n he seems to be particularly interested\n in our animal life. He wanted\n a horse but compromised for the\n others. I understand he insists all\n three of them come with him wherever\n he goes.\"\n\n\n \"I wish we knew what he was\n going to say,\" Andersen worried.\n\n\n \"Here he comes,\" said Sir Alfred.\n\n\n Surrounded by F.B.I. men,\n Dameri Tass was ushered to the\n speaker's stand. He had a kitten in\n his arms; a Scotty followed him.", "\"Cushlamachree,\" Dameri Tass\n moaned. \"I've gone and put me\n foot in it again. I'll be after getting\nkert\nfor this.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred was on his feet. \"I\n don't understand! Do you mean you\n aren't an envoy from another\n planet?\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass held his head in his\n hands and groaned. \"An envoy, he's\n sayin', and meself only a second-rate\n collector of specimens for the Carthis\n zoo.\"\n\n\n He straightened and started off\n the speaker's stand. \"Sure, an' I\n must blast off immediately.\"\n\n\n Things were moving fast for\n President McCord but already an\n edge of relief was manifesting itself.\n Taking the initiative, he said, \"Of\n course, of course, if that is your\n desire.\" He signaled to the bodyguard\n who had accompanied the\n alien to the assemblage.", "He turned and gestured to Dameri\n Tass who hadn't been paying\n overmuch attention to the chairman\n in view of some dog and cat\n hostilities that had been developing\n about his feet.\n\n\n But now the alien's purplish face\n faded to a light blue. He stood and\n said hoarsely. \"Faith, an' what was\n that last you said?\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen repeated,\n \"We will now hear from the first\n being ever to come to Earth from\n another world.\"\n\n\n The face of the alien went a\n lighter blue. \"Sure, an' ye wouldn't\n jist be frightenin' a body, would\n ye? You don't mean to tell me this\n planet isn't after bein' a member of\n the Galactic League?\"\n\n\n Andersen's face was blank. \"Galactic\n League?\"", "The President snapped back,\n \"You probably won't believe this,\n but he's been asleep until yesterday.\n When he first arrived he told us he\n hadn't slept for a\ndecal\n, whatever\n that is; so we held off our discussion\n with him until morning. Well—he\n didn't awaken in the morning,\n nor the next. Six days later, fearing\n something was wrong we woke\n him.\"\n\n\n \"What happened?\" Sir Alfred\n asked.\n\n\n The President showed embarrassment.\n \"He used some rather ripe\n Irish profanity on us, rolled over,\n and went back to sleep.\"\n\n\n Viljalmar Andersen asked, \"Well,\n what happened yesterday?\"\n\n\n \"We actually haven't had time to\n question him. Among other things,\n there's been some controversy about\n whose jurisdiction he comes under.\n The State Department claims the\n Army shouldn't—\"", "The alien's face faded a light\n blue again. \"Faith, an' I'd almost\n forgotten,\" he said. \"If I'd taken\n a crature from this quarantined\n planet, my name'd be\nnork\n. Keep\n your dog and your kitty.\" He shook\n his head sadly and extracted a\n mouse from a pocket. \"An' this\n amazin' little crature as well.\"\n\n\n They followed him to the spacecraft.\n Just before entering, he spotted\n the bedraggled horse that had\n been present on his landing.\n\n\n A longing expression came over\n his highly colored face. \"Jist one\n thing,\" he said. \"Faith now, were\n they pullin' my leg when they said\n you were after ridin' on the back of\n those things?\"\n\n\n The President looked at the woebegone\n nag. \"It's a horse,\" he said,\n surprised. \"Man has been riding\n them for centuries.\"", "And nine-tenths of the population\n of Earth stood ready and willing\n to be guided. The other tenth\n liked things as they were and were\n quite convinced that the space\n envoy would upset their applecarts.\nViljalmar Andersen\n , Secretary-General\n of the U.N., was to\n introduce the space emissary. \"Can\n you give me an idea at all of what\n he is like?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\n President McCord was as upset\n as the Dane. He shrugged in agitation.\n \"I know almost as little as\n you do.\"\n\n\n Sir Alfred Oxford protested, \"But\n my dear chap, you've had him for\n almost two weeks. Certainly in that\n time—\"", "He hustled from the rostrum and\n made his way, still surrounded by\n guards, to the door by which he had\n entered. The dog and the cat trotted\n after, undismayed by the furor\n about them.\n\n\n They arrived about four hours\n later at the field on which he'd\n landed, and the alien from space\n hurried toward his craft, still muttering.\n He'd been accompanied by a\n general and by the President, but\n all the way he had refrained from\n speaking.\n\n\n He scurried from the car and\n toward the spacecraft.\n\n\n President McCord said, \"You've\n forgotten your pets. We would be\n glad if you would accept them as—\"", "By the time the delegates from\n every nation, tribe, religion, class,\n color, and race had gathered in\n New York to receive the message\n from the stars, the majority of\n Earth had decided that Dameri\n Tass was the plenipotentiary of a\n super-civilization which had been\n viewing developments on this planet\n with misgivings. It was thought\n this other civilization had advanced\n greatly beyond Earth's and that the\n problems besetting us—social, economic,\n scientific—had been solved\n by the super-civilization. Obviously,\n then, Dameri Tass had come, an\n advisor from a benevolent and\n friendly people, to guide the world\n aright.", "A dull roar was beginning to\n emanate from the thousands gathered\n in the tremendous hall, murmuring,\n questioning, disbelieving.\nViljalmar Andersen\n felt that\n he must say something. He extended\n a detaining hand. \"Now you\n are here,\" he said urgently, \"even\n though by mistake, before you go\n can't you give us some brief word?\n Our world is in chaos. Many of us\n have lost faith. Perhaps ...\"\n\n\n Dameri Tass shook off the restraining\n hand. \"Do I look daft?\n Begorry, I should have been\n a-knowin' something was queer. All\n your weapons and your strange\n ideas. Faith, I wouldn't be surprised\n if ye hadn't yet established\n a planet-wide government. Sure,\n an' I'll go still further. Ye probably\n still have wars on this benighted\n world. No wonder it is ye\n haven't been invited to join the\n Galactic League an' take your place\n among the civilized planets.\"" ] ]
valid	63855	[ "Who is called an aphrodisiac?", "What is the main reason the Cleopatra was chosen to report to Tethys?", "Why did the workers weld appendages to the Cleopatra?", "How did Gorman feel about Strike?", "How long did it take the Cleopatra to travel from Tethys to Eridanus?", "What best describes the battle?", "Why did the Eridans not care if they died?", "Why did the ship go to hyperspace?", "How was the ship able to navigate through the alien cosmos?" ]	[ [ "Celia Graham", "the Cleopatra", "Commander Strike", "Ivy Hendricks" ], [ "The Eridans launched a major invasion", "She is led by Commander Strike", "She was close by", "She has enough power to complete the mission" ], [ "To prepare for battle against the Eridans", "To enable travel to hyperspace", "Maintenance during a twenty-day leave", "To make it through the asteroid belt" ], [ "He wanted him to conduct the hyperspace experiment", "He did not like him", "He liked him for pulling his flagship out of a tight spot", "He had him mixed up with some other guy named Strykalski" ], [ "Eight and a half light years", "Three hours and five minutes", "An unknown amount of time", "Three weeks" ], [ "Chlorine gas and heat rays verus rifle fire and torpedoes", "radiation net and rays of heat versus rifle fire and torpedoes", "Chlorine gas and radiation net versus heat rays and torpedoes", "radiation net and torpedoes versus rifle fire and heat rays" ], [ "They were breathing chlorine gas", "They had no mind inside their bodies", "They had 150 spaceships", "They were warlike" ], [ "Because Cob gave the order", "Because Gorman appointed them to the experiment", "Because they needed time to fix the drive", "Because Ivy requested the ship for the experiment" ], [ "They were able to calculate the route", "They were already in route to Eridanus", "They were able to sight alien stars", "They discovered two planetary systems by telescope" ] ]	[ 2, 4, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Cob made a sour face. \"Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!\"\n He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally.\n The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting\n nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small,\n \"Warp!\"\n\n\n An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered\n another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and\n turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the\n subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see\n her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when\n they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship\nAtropos\nout of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ...\n good to be around.", "Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a\n million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless\n field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on\n Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was\n begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her\n over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all\n armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on\n her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and\n re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were\n welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her\n companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in\n mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it...\nIvy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering\n Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"It's good to see you again, Strike.\"\n\n\n Strykalski studied her. Yes, she hadn't changed. She was still the Ivy\n Hendricks he remembered. She was still calm, still lovely, and still\n very, very competent.\n\n\n \"I've missed you, Ivy.\" Strike wasn't just being polite, either. Then\n he grinned. \"Lover-Girl's missed you, too. There never has been an\n Engineering Officer that could get the performance out of her cranky\n hulk the way you used to!\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing,\" returned Ivy, still smiling, \"that I'll be back at\n my old job for a while, then.\"", "\"Gun deck!\"\n\n\n A feminine voice replied.\n\n\n \"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers\n get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" the woman rapped out.\n\n\n \"Radar!\"\n\n\n \"Right here, Skipper!\"\n\n\n \"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.\n It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!\"", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop.\" Commander Strykalski smoothed out the\n wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar.\n\n\n Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S.\nCleopatra's\nExecutive, set down his Martini\n and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination\n in the mellow light.\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" he began hopefully, \"It could be a forgery?\"\n\n\n Strike shook his head.\n\n\n Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. \"Then perhaps old Brass-bottom\n Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?\" To Cob, eight Martinis\n made anything possible.\n\n\n \"Could there be two Strykalskis?\" demanded the owner of the name under\n discussion.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"I am at that,\" mused Whitley with a foolish grin. \"And I'd better\n enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This\n cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth\n century potables...\"\n\n\n Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. \"Well, I suppose we'd better\n call the crew in.\" He turned to Cob. \"Who is Officer of the Deck\n tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Bayne.\"\n\n\n \"Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to\n get us an orbit plotted.\"\n\n\n \"Will do, Skipper,\" Celia Graham left.\n\n\n \"Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up\n the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the\n bridge.\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"" ], [ "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO\n TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP\n ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE\n FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL\n HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP\n ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "\"I am at that,\" mused Whitley with a foolish grin. \"And I'd better\n enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This\n cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth\n century potables...\"\n\n\n Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. \"Well, I suppose we'd better\n call the crew in.\" He turned to Cob. \"Who is Officer of the Deck\n tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Bayne.\"\n\n\n \"Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to\n get us an orbit plotted.\"\n\n\n \"Will do, Skipper,\" Celia Graham left.\n\n\n \"Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up\n the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the\n bridge.\"", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a\n million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless\n field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on\n Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was\n begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her\n over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all\n armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on\n her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and\n re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were\n welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her\n companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in\n mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it...\nIvy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering\n Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"" ], [ "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a\n million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless\n field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on\n Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was\n begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her\n over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all\n armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on\n her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and\n re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were\n welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her\n companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in\n mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it...\nIvy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering\n Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand.", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall." ], [ "\"It's good to see you again, Strike.\"\n\n\n Strykalski studied her. Yes, she hadn't changed. She was still the Ivy\n Hendricks he remembered. She was still calm, still lovely, and still\n very, very competent.\n\n\n \"I've missed you, Ivy.\" Strike wasn't just being polite, either. Then\n he grinned. \"Lover-Girl's missed you, too. There never has been an\n Engineering Officer that could get the performance out of her cranky\n hulk the way you used to!\"\n\n\n \"It's a good thing,\" returned Ivy, still smiling, \"that I'll be back at\n my old job for a while, then.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "\"I am at that,\" mused Whitley with a foolish grin. \"And I'd better\n enjoy it. There'll be no Martinis on Tethys, that's for sure! This\n cruise is going to interfere with my research on ancient twentieth\n century potables...\"\n\n\n Strike heaved his lanky frame upright. \"Well, I suppose we'd better\n call the crew in.\" He turned to Cob. \"Who is Officer of the Deck\n tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Bayne.\"\n\n\n \"Celia, you'd better go relieve him. He'll have to work all night to\n get us an orbit plotted.\"\n\n\n \"Will do, Skipper,\" Celia Graham left.\n\n\n \"Cob, you'd better turn in. Get some sleep. But have the NPs round up\n the crew. If any of them are in the brig, let me know. I'll be on the\n bridge.\"", "Cob made a sour face. \"Project Warp, yet! Sounds like a dog barking!\"\n He growled deep in his throat and barked once or twice experimentally.\n The officer's club was silent, and a silver-braided Commodore sitting\n nearby scowled at Whitley. The Lieutenant subsided with a final small,\n \"Warp!\"\n\n\n An imported Venusian quartet began to play softly. Strike ordered\n another round of drinks from the red-skinned Martian tending bar and\n turned on his stool to survey the small dance floor. The music and the\n subdued lights made him think of Ivy Hendricks. He really wanted to see\n her again. It had been a long time since that memorable flight when\n they had worked together to pull Admiral Gorman's flagship\nAtropos\nout of a tight spot on a perihelion run. Ivy was good to work with ...\n good to be around.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces\n of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they\n were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and\n understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge.\n\n\n \"Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may\n encounter here.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain,\" replied Celia gratefully.\n\n\n Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne.\n\n\n \"Astrogation here,\" came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the\n agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have\n been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar\n stars that were his stock-in-trade.", "Lover-Girl wormed her way through the asteroid belt, passed within a\n million miles of Jupiter and settled comfortably down on the airless\n field next to the glass-steel dome of the Experimental Substation on\n Tethys. But her satisfied repose was interrupted almost before it was\n begun. Swarms of techmen seemed to burst from the dome and take her\n over. Welders and physicists, naval architects and shipfitters, all\n armed with voluminous blueprints and atomic torches set to work on\n her even before her tubes had cooled. Power lines were crossed and\n re-crossed, shunted and spliced. Weird screen-like appendages were\n welded to her bow and stern. Workmen and engineers stomped through her\n companionways, bawling incomprehensible orders. And her crew watched in\n mute dismay. They had nothing to say about it...\nIvy Hendricks rose from her desk as Strike came into her Engineering\n Office. There was a smile on her face as she extended her hand.", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "\"Amen! Amen! Amen! Stop.\" Commander Strykalski smoothed out the\n wrinkled flimsy by spreading it carefully on the wet bar.\n\n\n Coburn Whitley, the T.R.S.\nCleopatra's\nExecutive, set down his Martini\n and leaned over very slowly to give the paper a microscopic examination\n in the mellow light.\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" he began hopefully, \"It could be a forgery?\"\n\n\n Strike shook his head.\n\n\n Lieutenant Whitley looked crestfallen. \"Then perhaps old Brass-bottom\n Gorman means some other guy named Strykalski?\" To Cob, eight Martinis\n made anything possible.\n\n\n \"Could there be two Strykalskis?\" demanded the owner of the name under\n discussion.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now." ], [ "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHQ TELWING CSN 30 JAN 27 TO CMDR DAVID FARRAGUT STRYKALSKI VII CO\n TRS CLEOPATRA FLEET BASE CANALOPOLIS MARS STOP SUBJECT ORDERS STOP\n ROUTE LUNA PHOBOS SYRTIS MAJOR TRANSSENDERS PRIORITY AAA STOP MESSAGE\n FOLLOWS STOP TRS CLEOPATRA AND ALL ATTACHED AND OR ASSIGNED PERSONNEL\n HEREBY RELIEVED ASSIGNMENT AND DUTY INNER PLANET PATROL GROUP STOP\n ASSIGNED TEMP DUTY BUREAU RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT STOP SUBJECT VESSEL", "So, reflected Strike, the transfer of the\nCleopatra\nto Tethys for\n work under the Bureau of Research and Development meant innovations\n and tests. And Commander Strykalski was concerned. The beloved Old\n Aphrodisiac didn't take kindly to innovations. At least she never had\n before, and Strike could see no reason to suppose the cantankerous\n monitor would have changed her disposition.\n\n\n \"There's Celia!\" Cob Whitley was waving toward the dance floor.", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "Ivy Hendricks nodded. \"We've stumbled on a laboratory effect that\n warps space. We plan to reproduce it in portable form on the\nCleopatra\n... king size. She'll be able to take us through the\n hyper-spatial barrier.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" Celia Graham was wide-eyed. \"I always thought of hyperspace as\n a ... well, sort of an abstraction.\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed." ], [ "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "\"Gun deck!\"\n\n\n A feminine voice replied.\n\n\n \"Check your accumulators. We may have to fight. Have the gun-pointers\n get the plots from Radar. And load fish into all tubes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\" the woman rapped out.\n\n\n \"Radar!\"\n\n\n \"Right here, Skipper!\"\n\n\n \"We're going into second-order, Celia. Use UV Radar and keep tabs on\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Let's get back to the bridge, Ivy.\n It's going to be a hell of a rough half hour!\"", "Torpedoes from the tubes that circled her beam found marks out in\n space and leathery aliens died, their black ships burst asunder by the\n violence of new atoms being created from old.\n\n\n But there were too many. They hemmed her in, heat rays ever slashing,\n wounding her. Strykalski fought her controls, cursing her, coaxing\n her. Damage reports were flowing into the flying bridge from every\n point in the monitor's body. Lover-Girl was being hurt ... hurt badly.\n The second-order drive was damaged, not beyond repair, but out of\n commission for at least six hours. And they couldn't last six hours.\n They couldn't last another ten minutes. It was only the practiced hands\n of her Captain and crew that kept the\nCleopatra\nalive....\n\n\n \"We're caught, Ivy!\" Strike shouted to the girl over the noises of\n battle. \"She can't stand much more of this!\"", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "Cob and Strykalski rushed back to the port, straining to see the\n back-curving plates of the hull. Ivy was right. The metal, and to a\n lesser extent, even the leaded glassteel of the port was covered with a\n dim, dancing witchfire. It was as though the ship were being bombarded\n by a continuous shower of microscopic fire bombs.\n\n\n Whitley found refuge in his favorite expression. \"Ye gods and little\n catfish!\"\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy. \"What do you think it is?\"\n\n\n \"I ... I don't know. Matter itself might be different ... here.\"", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "\"I'm temporarily under Research and Development command, Ivy, but\n Regulations say that fighting ships cannot be held inactive during\n wartime! The\nCleopatra's\na warship and there's a war on now. If you\n can have your gear jerry-rigged in three hours, you can come along\n and test it when we have the chance. Otherwise the hell with it!\"\n Strykalski's face was dead set. \"I mean it, Ivy.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces\n of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they\n were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and\n understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge.\n\n\n \"Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may\n encounter here.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain,\" replied Celia gratefully.\n\n\n Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne.\n\n\n \"Astrogation here,\" came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the\n agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have\n been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar\n stars that were his stock-in-trade.", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet." ], [ "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "Old Lover-Girl tried gallantly to pierce the strange trap. She failed.\n The alien weapons were too strange, too different from anything her\n builders could have imagined or prepared her to face. The net sucked\n the life from her second-order generators, and she slowed, like the\n victim of a nightmare. Now rays of heat reached out for her, grazing\n her flanks as she turned and twisted. One touched her atmospheric fins\n and melted them into slowly congealing globes of steel glowing with a\n white heat. She fought back with whorls of atomic fire that sped from\n her rifles to wreak havoc among her attackers.\n\n\n Being non-entities in themselves, and only limbs of the single\n mentality that rested secure on its home world, the Eridans lacked the\n vicious will to live that drove the Tellurian warship and her crew. But\n their numbers wore her down, cutting her strength with each blow that\n chanced to connect.", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "Strykalski was on his feet. \"Attack!\"\n\n\n \"The nonhumans from Eridanus have launched a major invasion of the\n solar Combine! All the colonies in Centaurus are being invaded!\"\n\n\n Strike felt the bottom dropping out of his stomach, and he knew that\n all the others felt the same. If this was a war, they were the ones\n who would have to fight it. And the Eridans! Awful leathery creatures\n with tentacles ... chlorine breathers! They would make a formidable\n enemy, welded as they were into one fighting unit by the functioning of\n the group-mind....\n\n\n He heard himself saying sharply into Ivy's communicator: \"See to it\n that my ship is fueled and armed for space within three hours!\"\n\n\n \"Hold on, Strike!\" Ivy Hendricks intervened, \"What about the tests?\"", "Old Aphrodisiac readied herself for war.\nLike a maddened bull terrier, the old monitor charged at the Eridan\n horde. Within the black hulls strange, tentacled creatures watched\n her in scanners that were activated by infrared light. The chlorine\n atmosphere grew tense as the Tellurian warship drove full at the\n pulsating net of interlocked force lines. Parsecs away, on a frozen\n world were a dull red shrunken sun shone dimly through fetid air,\n the thing that was the group-mind of the Eridans guided the thousand\n leathery tentacles that controlled the hundred and fifty black\n spaceships. The soft quivering bulk of it throbbed with excitement as\n it prepared to kill the tiny Tellurian thing that dared to threaten its\n right to conquest.", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia.", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "But there was apparently more to this transfer than just Ivy pulling\n wires to see him again. Things were tense in the System since Probe\n Fleet skeeterboats had discovered a race of group-minded, non-human\n intelligences on the planets of 40 Eridani C. They lived in frozen\n worlds that were untenable for humans. And they were apparently all\n parts of a single entity that never left the home globe ... a thing no\n human had seen. The group-mind. They were rabidly isolationist and they\n had refused any commerce with the Solar Combine.\n\n\n Only CSN Intelligence knew that the Eridans were warlike ... and that\n they were strongly suspected of having interstellar flight....", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "Celia Graham, trim in her Ensign's greys, was making her way through\n the crowd of dancers. Celia was the\nCleopatra's\nRadar Officer, and\n like all the rest, bound with chains of affection to the cranky old\n warship. The\nCleopatra's\ncrew was a unit ... a team in the true sense\n of the word. They served in her because they wanted to ... would serve\n in no other. That's the way Strike ran his crew, and that's the way the\n crew ran Lover-Girl. Old Aphrodisiac's family was a select community.\n\n\n There was a handsome Martian Naval Lieutenant with Celia, but when she\n saw the thoughtful expression on her Captain's face, she dismissed him\n peremptorily. Here was something, apparently, of a family matter.", "Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces\n of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they\n were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and\n understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge.\n\n\n \"Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may\n encounter here.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain,\" replied Celia gratefully.\n\n\n Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne.\n\n\n \"Astrogation here,\" came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the\n agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have\n been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar\n stars that were his stock-in-trade.", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"" ], [ "Cob was screaming at the gun-pointers through the open communicator\n circuit, his blood heated by the turbulent cacophony of crackling rays\n and exploding torpedoes. \"Hit 'em! Damn it! Damn it, hit 'em now! Dead\n ahead! Hit 'em again!...\"\n\n\n Ivy stumbled across the throbbing deck to stand at Strykalski's side.\n \"The hyper drive!\" she yelled, \"The hyper drive!\"\n\n\n It was a chance. It was the\nonly\nchance ... for Lover-Girl and Ivy\n and Cob and Celia ... for all of them. He had to chance it. \"Ivy!\" he\n called over his shoulder, \"Check with Engineering! See if the thing's\n hooked into the surge circuit!\"\n\n\n She struggled out of the flying bridge and down the ramp toward the\n engine deck. Strike and Cob stayed and sweated and cursed and fought.\n It seemed that she would never report.", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet.", "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "Strykalski raised his eyebrows inquisitively. Before Ivy could explain,\n Cob and Celia Graham burst noisily into the room and the greetings\n began again. Ivy, as a former member of the\nCleopatra's\ncrew, was one\n of the family.\n\n\n \"Now, what I would like to know,\" Cob demanded when the small talk had\n been disposed of, \"is what's with this 'Project Warp'? What are you\n planning for Lover-Girl? Your techmen are tearing into her like she was\n a twenty-day leave!\"\n\n\n \"And why was the\nCleopatra\nchosen?\" added Celia curiously.\n\n\n \"Well, I'll make it short,\" Ivy said. \"We're going to make a hyper-ship\n out of her.\"\n\n\n \"Hyper-ship?\" Cob was perplexed.", "\"What time do you want to lift ship?\"\n\n\n \"0900 hours.\"\n\n\n \"Right.\" Cob took a last loving look around the comfortable officer's\n club and heaved a heavy sigh. \"Tethys, here comes Lover-Girl. It's\n going to be a long, long cruise, Captain.\"\n\n\n How long, he couldn't have known ... then.\nThe flight out was uneventful. Uneventful, that is for the T.R.S.\nCleopatra\n. Only one tube-liner burned through, and only six hours\n wasted in nauseous free-fall.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "\"No.\" Whitley sighed unhappily. \"And there's only one Tellurian Rocket\n Ship\nCleopatra\nin the Combined Solarian Navies, bless her little iron\n rump! Gorman means us. And I think we've been had, that's what I think!\"\n\n\n \"Tethys isn't so bad,\" protested Strike.\n\n\n Cob raised a hand to his eyes as though to blot out the sight of that\n distant moonlet. \"Not so bad, he says! All you care about is seeing Ivy\n Hendricks again, I know you! Tethys!\"\n\n\n Strike made a passing effort to look stern and failed. \"You mean\nCaptain\nHendricks, don't you, Mister Whitley? Captain Hendricks of\n Project Warp?\"", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "\"Well, I can't see anything to worry about, Skipper,\" she said when he\n had explained. \"I should think you'd be glad of a chance to see Ivy\n again.\"\n\n\n Cob Whitley leaned precariously forward on his bar-stool to wag a\n finger under Celia's pretty nose. \"But he doesn't know what Captain\n Hendricks has cooked up for Lover-Girl, and you know the old carp likes\n to be treated with respect.\" He affected a very knowing expression.\n \"Besides, we shouldn't be gallivanting around testing Ivy's electronic\n eyelash-curlers when the Eridans are likely to be swooshing around old\n Sol any day!\"\n\n\n \"Cob, you're drunk!\" snapped Celia." ], [ "\"Plot us a course to 40 Eridani C, Bayne,\" Strykalski directed. \"On\n gyro-headings.\"\n\n\n \"What?\" The astrogator sounded as though he thought Strike had lost his\n mind. \"Through\nthis\nspace?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly,\" Strykalski insisted quietly. \"You're so proud of your\n dead-reckoning. Here's a chance for you to do a real job. Get me an\n orbit.\"\n\n\n \"I ... all right, Captain,\" grumbled Bayne.\n\n\n Strike turned to Ivy Hendricks. \"Well, Captain Hendricks, this is some\n gadget you have dreamed up out of your Project Warp,\" he breathed\n shakily. \"At least the fat's out of the fire for the time being....\"\n\n\n Ivy looked out of the port and back with a shudder. \"I hope so, Strike.\n I hope so.\"", "There were no familiar constellations. The stars were spread evenly\n across the ebony bowl of the sky, and they looked back at him with an\n alien, icy disdain.\n\n\n The realization that he stood with a tiny shell, an infinitesimal human\n island lost in the vastness of a completely foreign cosmos broke with\n an almost mind-shattering intensity over his brain!\n\n\n He was conscious of Cob standing beside him, looking out into this\n unknown universe and whispering in awe: \"\nWe're\nthe aliens here....\"\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks came into the bridge then, a haggard look around her\n eyes. \"I came up through the ventral blister,\" she said, \"Bayne is down\n there and he's having fits. There isn't a star in sight he recognizes\n and the whole hull of the ship is\nglowing\n!\"", "Ivy suggested that since the\nCleopatra\nand her crew were no part of\n this alien cosmos, no prime-space instruments could detect the errant\n mass. Like a microscopic bull in a gargantuan china shop, the Tellurian\n warship existed under a completely different set of physical laws than\n did the heavenly bodies of this strange space.", "Cob pulled himself together, smiling as all the accustomed pieces\n of his life began to fit together again. It didn't matter that they\n were in an unknown cosmos. Damage Control was something he knew and\n understood. He smiled thankfully and left the bridge.\n\n\n \"Maintain a continuous radar-watch, Celia. We can't tell what we may\n encounter here.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Captain,\" replied Celia gratefully.\n\n\n Strykalski reached for the squawk-box and called Bayne.\n\n\n \"Astrogation here,\" came the shaky reply. In the exposed blisters the\n agoraphobia must be more acute, reasoned Strike, and Bayne must have\n been subconsciously stirred up by the disappearance of the familiar\n stars that were his stock-in-trade.", "As they turned to go, all the pin-points of light that were the stars\n vanished, only to reappear in distorted groups ahead and behind the\n ship. They were in second-order flight again, and traveling above light\n speed. Within seconds, contact would be made with the advance units of\n the alien fleet.", "\"That's been the view up to now. We all shared it here, too, until\n we set up this screen system and things began to disappear when they\n got into the warped field. Then we rigged a remote control and set up\n telecameras in the warp....\" Ivy's face sobered. \"We got plates of\n star-fields ... star-fields that were utterly different and ... and\nalien\n. It seems that there's at least one other space interlocked and\n co-existent with ours. When we realized that we decided to send a ship\n through. I sent a UV teletype to Admiral Gorman at Luna Base ... and\n here you are.\"\n\n\n \"Why us?\" Cob asked thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"I'll answer that,\" offered Strike, \"Lover-Girl's a surge circuit\n monitor, and it's a safe bet this operation takes plenty of power.\" He\n looked over to Ivy. \"Am I right?\"", "All that waited for the\nCleopatra\nin her own cosmos was a hot\n reception at the hands of the defenders of 40 Eridani C II, while here\n was mystery at close range. Mystery that was not cosmic in scope ...\n just a swarm of innocuous seeming planetoids ... the first explorable\n worlds that they had neared in this universe. Strike decided to heave\n to and examine their find. Ivy wanted samples and though no one said\n it in so many words ... no one was anxious for another encounter\n with the rapacious Eridans. With typically human adaptiveness they\n had sublimated their fear of the unknown space in which they found\n themselves. Curiosity took the place of fear and here was something\n close at hand to probe. Anthropoid inquisitiveness prevailed.", "\"Right on the nose, Strike,\" she returned. Then she broke into a wide\n smile. \"Besides, I wouldn't want to enter an alien cosmos with anyone\n but Lover-Girl's family. It wouldn't be right.\"\n\n\n \"Golly!\" said Celia Graham again. \"Alien cosmos ... it sounds so creepy\n when you say it that way.\"\n\n\n \"You could call it other things, if you should happen to prefer them,\"\n Ivy Hendricks said, \"Subspace ... another plane of existence. I....\"\n\n\n She never finished her sentence. The door burst open and a\n Communications yeoman came breathlessly into the office. From the\n ante-room came the sound of an Ultra Wave teletype clattering\n imperiously ... almost frantically.\n\n\n \"Captain Hendricks!\" cried the man excitedly, \"A message is coming\n through from the Proxima transsender ... they're under attack!\"", "The man looked up from his auto-pilot check. \"Sir.\"\n\n\n \"Steady as she goes.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"And that,\" shrugged Ivy Hendricks, \"Is that.\"\nThree weeks passed in the timeless limbo of second-order flight. Blast\n tubes silent, the\nCleopatra\nrode the curvature of space toward\n Eridanus. At eight and a half light years from Sol, the second-order\n was cut so that Bayne could get a star sight. As the lights of the\n celestial globe slowly retreated from their unnatural grouping ahead\n and astern, brilliant Sirius and its dwarf companion showed definite\n disks in the starboard ports. At a distance of 90,000,000 miles from\n the Dog Star, its fourteen heavy-gravity planets were plainly visible\n through the electron telescope.", "At last the communicator began to flash red. Strike opened the circuit\n with his free hand. \"All right?\" he demanded with his heart in his\n throat.\n\n\n \"\nTry it!\n\" Ivy shouted back.\n\n\n Strykalski lurched from his chair as another ray caught the ship for an\n instant and heated a spot on the wall to a cherry red. Gods! he prayed\n fervently. Let it work!\n\n\n A movement of the ship threw him to the deck. He struggled to his\n feet and across to the jerry-rigged switchboard that controlled the\n hyper drive's warp field. With a prayer on his lips, he slapped at the\n switches with wild abandon....\nThe sudden silence was like a physical blow. Strike staggered to the\n port and looked out. No alien ships filled the void with crisscrossing\n rays. No torpedoes flashed. The\nCleopatra\nwas alone, floating in\n star-flecked emptiness.", "It was only the fact that they could return at will to their own\n space ... and the danger of the questing Eridans ... that kept one or\n all from crying out in utter childish fear. Celia Graham whimpered\n softly and slipped her hand into Cob's. He squeezed it to give her a\n reassurance he did not feel.\n\n\n Then Strike broke the spell. The effort was great, but it brushed away\n the shadows that had risen to plague them from the tortured abyss of\n racial memory. It brought them back to what they were: highly civilized\n people, parts of an intricately technological culture. Their ship\n was a part of that culture. The only part they could cling to. The\nCleopatra\ndemanded attention and service, and her demanding saved\n them.\n\n\n \"Cob,\" Strike directed with forced briskness, \"Take over Damage\n Control. See what can be done about the second-order drive.\"", "It was pure conjecture, but it seemed well supported by the observable\n facts. The hull continued to glow with its unnatural witchfire, and\n soon disturbing reports were coming in from the Damage Control section\n that the thickness of the outer hull was actually being reduced.\n The rate was slow, and there was no immediate danger, but it was\n nevertheless unnerving to realize that Lover-Girl was being dissolved\n by\nsomething\n. Also, the outside Geigs recorded a phenomenal amount\n of short radiation emanating\nfrom the ship herself\n. The insulation\n kept most of it from penetrating, but tests showed that the strange\n radiation's source was the glow that clung stubbornly to the spacer's\n skin.\n\n\n A tense week passed and then the ship neared the spot where a\n change over to prime-space could be effected. According to Bayne's\n calculations, 40 Eridani C would be within 40,000,000 miles of them\n when the ship emerged from hyper space.", "They fell silent, seeking comfort in each other's presence.\nThe second-order drive repaired, Old Aphrodisiac moved out through the\n alien space toward the spot where 40 Eridani C existed on the other\n side of the barrier.\n\n\n The ship's tactical astrophysicist brought in some disturbing reports\n on the stars that shone brightly all around her. They fitted the\n accepted classifications in all particulars ... except one. And that\n one had the scientist tearing his hair. The mass of every observable\n body except the ship herself was practically non-existent. Even the two\n planetary systems discovered by the electron telescope flouted their\n impossible lack of mass.", "\"All right, Strike. I'll be ready,\" Ivy Hendricks said coolly.\nExactly three hours and five minutes later, the newly created\n hyper-ship that was still Old Aphrodisiac lifted from the ramp outside\n the Substation dome. She rose slowly at first, the radioactive flame\n from her tubes splashing with sun-bright coruscations over the loading\n pits and revetments. For a fleeting instant she was outlined against\n the swollen orb of Saturn that filled a quarter of Tethys' sky, and\n then she was gone into the galactic night.\n\n\n Aboard, all hands stood at GQ. On the flying bridge Strykalski and\n Coburn Whitley worked steadily to set the ship into the proper position\n in response to the steady flood of equations that streamed into their\n station from Bayne in the dorsal astrogation blister.", "Strykalski found himself at the port again, looking out into the vast\n stretch of alien void. Terror was seeping like dampness through him,\n stretching cold fingers into his heart and mind. He realized that\n everyone on board must feel the same way. It was the old human devil\n rising from the pit of the primeval past. Fear of the unknown, of the\n strange. And there was loneliness. From the dark corners of his mind,\n the terrible loneliness came stealing forth. Never had a group of human\n beings been so frighteningly\napart\nfrom their kind. He felt rejected,\n scorned and lost.\n\n\n The others felt it, too. Ivy and Cob drew closer, until all three stood\n touching each other; as though they could dispel the loneliness of the\n unnatural environment by the warmth of human, animal contact. Celia\n came into the bridge softly ... just to be near her friends.", "\"Right here, Captain,\" came Cob Whitley's voice from the bridge.\n\n\n \"Shift into second-order! We'll have to try and run their net!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Whitley snapped.\n\n\n \"Communications!\" called Strike.\n\n\n \"Communications here.\"\n\n\n \"Notify Luna Base we have made contact. Give their numbers, course, and\n speed!\"\n\n\n Ivy could feel her heart pounding under her blouse. Her face was\n deadly pale, mouth pinched and drawn. This was the first time in battle\n for any of them ... and she dug her fingernails into her palms trying\n not to be afraid.\n\n\n Strykalski was rapping out his orders with machine-gun rapidity, making\n ready to fight his ship if need be ... and against lop-sided odds. But\n years of training were guiding him now.", "Strykalski and Ivy Hendricks stood beside Bayne in the dorsal blister\n while the astrogator sighted Altair through his polytant. His long,\n horse face bore a look of complete self-approbation when he had\n completed his last shot.\n\n\n \"A perfect check with the plotted course! How's that for fancy dead\n reckoning?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\n He was destined never to know the accolade, for at that moment the\n communicator began to flash angrily over the chart table. Bayne cut it\n in with an expression of disgust.\n\n\n \"Is the Captain there?\" demanded Celia Graham's voice excitedly.\n\n\n Strike took over the squawk-box. \"Right here, Celia. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Radar contact, sir! The screen is crazy with blips!\"\n\n\n \"Could it be window?\"", "\"Bridge.\"\n\n\n \"Communications here. Message from Luna Base, Captain.\"\n\n\n \"Here it is,\" Strykalski told Cob. \"Right on time.\"\n\n\n \"Speak of the devil,\" muttered the Executive.\n\n\n \"From the Admiral, sir,\" the voice in the interphone said, \"Shall I\n read it?\"\n\n\n \"Just give me the dope,\" ordered Strike.\n\n\n \"The Admiral orders us to quote make a diversionary attack on the\n planet of 40 Eridani C II unquote,\" said the squawk-box flatly.\n\n\n \"Acknowledge,\" ordered Strykalski.\n\n\n \"Wilco. Communications out.\"\n\n\n Strike made an I-told-you-so gesture to his Executive. Then he turned\n toward the enlisted man at the helm. \"Quarter-master?\"", "\"No, sir. The density index indicates spacecraft. High value in the\n chlorine lines....\"\n\n\n \"Eridans!\" cried Ivy.\n\n\n \"What's the range, Celia?\" demanded Strike. \"And how many of them are\n there?\"\n\n\n The sound of the calculator came through the grill. Then Celia replied:\n \"Range 170,000 miles, and there are more than fifty and less than two\n hundred. That's the best I can do from this far away. They seem to\n have some sort of radiation net out and they are moving into spread\n formation.\"\n\n\n Strike cursed. \"They've spotted us and they want to scoop us in with\n that force net! Damn that group-mind of theirs ... it makes for uncanny\n co-ordination!\" He turned back to the communicator. \"Cob! Are you on?\"", "An hour after blasting free of Tethys was pointed at the snaking river\n of stars below Orion that formed the constellation of Eridanus.\n\n\n When Cob asked why, Strike replied that knowing Gorman, they could\n expect orders from Luna Base ordering them either to attack or\n reconnoiter the 40 Eridani C system of five planets. Strykalski added\n rather dryly that it was likely to be the former, since Space Admiral\n Gorman had no great affection for either the\nCleopatra\nor her crew.\n\n\n Ivy Hendricks joined them after stowing her gear, and when Whitley\n asked her opinion, she agreed with Strike. Her experiences with Gorman\n had been as unfortunate as any of the others.\n\n\n \"I was afraid you'd say that,\" grumbled Cob, \"I was just hoping you\n wouldn't.\"\n\n\n The interphone flashed. Strike flipped the switch." ] ]
valid	62382	[ "What is not clearly an element of injustice in this story?", "Why might one not want to live in the universe in which this story takes place?", "Why is Kirk's friend considered dangerous to the community?", "Is Kirk's friend actually dangerous to the community?", "Is Kirk a model citizen?", "What happened to Kirk's father?", "What are the gender roles like in this community?", "Of the following options, what best summarizes this story?", "Who is Kirk most mad at in this story?" ]	[ [ "Heat stones were unfairly distributed", "There was classism", "Kirk's father was harmed", "There was rampant sexism" ], [ "Kids at Kirk's age are routinely hazed and attacked", "Mothers have to support the family through drastic measures", "Survival itself is difficult", "The individuals in the community are not accepting of others" ], [ "He ran his mouth too much", "He disobeyed orders regularly", "He threatened violence against his peers", "He tried to kill a fellow citizen" ], [ "Yes, he hated most people in the community", "No, he just opposed the current leader", "No, he just wanted to point out injustice", "Yes, he was planning on inciting violence" ], [ "No, he hated the systems enforced by his community.", "Yes, he followed all the rules set out by the Officers.", "No, he wanted to kill the leader's son.", "Yes, he was kind to his family and friends." ], [ "His father was killed by a fellow citizen", "His father was trapped in a barrier until he died", "His father was killed by the enemy", "His father accidentally fell to his death" ], [ "The women hunt and the men watch the children", "Men and women do an equal amount of raising the kids", "Women do a lot of the business on behalf of each family", "Men have to protect the group regularly" ], [ "A boy has to prevent his friend from getting himself in danger.", "A boy realizes the full extent to which his community supports him.", "A boy has to protect his whole family indefinitely.", "A boy realizes the full extent to which his community oppresses him." ], [ "His younger sister", "His peers who spoke to him post-battle", "His friend on the battlefield", "The officer who spoke to him post-battle" ] ]	[ 4, 3, 1, 3, 1, 1, 4, 4, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled\n them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long,\n one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled\n him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against\n the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe\n it.\n\n\n You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the\n heart....\n\n\n You saw it....\n\n\n \"That's one of our spears!\" He screamed it, like a woman. \"One of our\n own—from the front!\"\n\n\n \"I let them get as close as I dared,\" said the Officer tonelessly. \"I\n tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that\n was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come.\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at\n them as if they were strange things and no part of him.\n\n\n \"Kirk,\" he said, \"this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done\n anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible,\n but they didn't actually kill them.\"\n\n\n Wes raised his head slowly. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\n \"We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them,\n but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father,\n called to us to put the ladder down. We waited....\"\n\n\n A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something\n that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear\n behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely:\n\n\n \"I don't understand.\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat\n it slowly on the wall, up and down.\n\n\n \"I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there\n was nothing else to do.\"\n\n\n A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over\n his shoulder, and breathing hard.\n\n\n \"Here's Kirk,\" he said. \"Where'll I put him?\"\n\n\n There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. \"Over\n there, Charley. I'll help.\"\n\n\n It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never\n been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of.\n Something in the Officer's voice.", "It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.\n\n\n He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts.\n Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there\n on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had\n to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You\n had to keep them from getting onto the plain.\n\n\n He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work\n any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....\n\n\n No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer,\n was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching\n furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "\"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they\n let their young ones cry with the cold?\"\nThere was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.\n His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never\n talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set\n him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a\n mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....\n\n\n \"Listen!\" said Ma Kirk.\n\n\n Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need\n to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by\n the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into\n a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was\n no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its\n source.", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through.", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "He coughed. The Officers' voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact\n groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound\n had grown louder in Kirk's ears. He could hear men yelling and the\n ringing of metal on stone.\n\n\n He started to run, holding Randl's elbow. Grey dust blew under their\n feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at\n them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely:\n\n\n \"What did you see?\"\n\n\n They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. \"Up there,\n Wes.\"\n\n\n Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain's\n hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to\n foot.\n\n\n \"I saw her,\" said Randl hoarsely. \"She was carrying heat-stones into\n the Ship.\"", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers." ], [ "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "\"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they\n let their young ones cry with the cold?\"\nThere was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.\n His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never\n talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set\n him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a\n mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....\n\n\n \"Listen!\" said Ma Kirk.\n\n\n Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need\n to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by\n the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into\n a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was\n no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its\n source.", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "\"There must be something in the Ship that they don't want us to have.\n Something valuable, something they want to keep for themselves. What\n else could it be but heat-stones and maybe dried meat?\"\n\n\n \"We don't know, Wes! The Ship is—well, we shouldn't talk about it.\n And the Officers wouldn't do that. If they wanted us killed off they'd\n let the Piruts in on us, or the shags, and let 'em finish us quick.\n Freezing and starving would take too long. There'd be too many of us if\n we found out, or got mad.\"", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat\n it slowly on the wall, up and down.\n\n\n \"I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there\n was nothing else to do.\"\n\n\n A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over\n his shoulder, and breathing hard.\n\n\n \"Here's Kirk,\" he said. \"Where'll I put him?\"\n\n\n There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. \"Over\n there, Charley. I'll help.\"\n\n\n It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never\n been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of.\n Something in the Officer's voice.", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "Kirk snorted. \"You women know so much. If they let the shags or the\n Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody,\n including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb.\n They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the\nCrash\n, and nobody\n knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They\n think we'd never suspect.\"\n\n\n \"Yah!\" said Lil sharply. \"You just like to talk. Why should the\n Officers want us killed off anyhow?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.", "It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.\n\n\n He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts.\n Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there\n on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had\n to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You\n had to keep them from getting onto the plain.\n\n\n He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work\n any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....\n\n\n No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer,\n was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching\n furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled\n them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long,\n one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled\n him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against\n the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe\n it.\n\n\n You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the\n heart....\n\n\n You saw it....\n\n\n \"That's one of our spears!\" He screamed it, like a woman. \"One of our\n own—from the front!\"\n\n\n \"I let them get as close as I dared,\" said the Officer tonelessly. \"I\n tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that\n was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come.\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "\"Yes.\" The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner,\n with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under\n his horny overlids. He said quietly:\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to have to tell you this....\"\n\n\n Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a\n spear-stab where there was no spear.\n\n\n He said, \"Pa.\"\n\n\n The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk.\n He hadn't, after the first glance.\n\n\n \"Your father, and his two friends.\"\n\n\n Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. \"I wish I'd\n known,\" he whispered. \"I'd have killed more of them.\"" ], [ "\"Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?\"\n\n\n \"He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad.\" The man shook his head, and then shrugged. \"Maybe it's\n better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you\n that way, too, I heard. Always talking.\"\n\n\n He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and\n grunted over his shoulders, \"The O.D.'s looking for you.\"", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.\nThe Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.\n There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and\n down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down\n below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies\n for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning\n cannibal.\n\n\n That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get\n into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook\n some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and\n said:\n\n\n \"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?\"", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's\n head and said grimly:\n\n\n \"Yeah. About what\nwe're\ngoing to do.\"\n\n\n Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned.\n \"Take it easy,\" he said softly. \"I'll cover you.\"\n\n\n Randl whispered, \"Wes. Wes!\" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own\n drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow.\n\n\n He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see.\n Randl shook him off.\n\n\n \"Don't move me, you fool! Just listen.\" His voice was harsh and rapid.\n He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it\n joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through\n his fingers.", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "Kirk grunted. A Pirut with red hair standing straight in the wind came\n over the wall. Kirk speared him left-handed in the belly, dodged the\n downstroke of his loaded sap, and kicked the body out of the way.\n\n\n He said, \"Wonder how they got so close, so fast?\"\n\n\n \"Some trick.\" Randl laughed suddenly. \"Funny their wanting the Ship as\n much as you and I do.\"\n\n\n \"Think they could know what's in it?\"", "There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word \"Ship\" hung\n there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over\n the door and back to her son.\n\n\n \"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know.\"\n\n\n \"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way\n they do? We can't even get near the outside of it.\"\n\n\n Lil tossed her head. \"Well neither do they.\"\n\n\n \"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they\n haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the\n plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about.\"\n\n\n He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his\n knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.\n\n\n The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.\nIt was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last\n gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the\n tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox\n head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,\n piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.\n\n\n They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into\n the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low\n behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took\n courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who\n drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was\n too bad for the man who climbed on them.", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through." ], [ "\"Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?\"\n\n\n \"He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad.\" The man shook his head, and then shrugged. \"Maybe it's\n better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you\n that way, too, I heard. Always talking.\"\n\n\n He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and\n grunted over his shoulders, \"The O.D.'s looking for you.\"", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's\n head and said grimly:\n\n\n \"Yeah. About what\nwe're\ngoing to do.\"\n\n\n Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned.\n \"Take it easy,\" he said softly. \"I'll cover you.\"\n\n\n Randl whispered, \"Wes. Wes!\" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own\n drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow.\n\n\n He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see.\n Randl shook him off.\n\n\n \"Don't move me, you fool! Just listen.\" His voice was harsh and rapid.\n He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it\n joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through\n his fingers.", "Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.\nThe Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.\n There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and\n down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down\n below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies\n for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning\n cannibal.\n\n\n That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get\n into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook\n some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and\n said:\n\n\n \"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?\"", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "Kirk grunted. A Pirut with red hair standing straight in the wind came\n over the wall. Kirk speared him left-handed in the belly, dodged the\n downstroke of his loaded sap, and kicked the body out of the way.\n\n\n He said, \"Wonder how they got so close, so fast?\"\n\n\n \"Some trick.\" Randl laughed suddenly. \"Funny their wanting the Ship as\n much as you and I do.\"\n\n\n \"Think they could know what's in it?\"", "Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his\n knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.\n\n\n The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.\nIt was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last\n gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the\n tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox\n head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,\n piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.\n\n\n They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into\n the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low\n behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took\n courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who\n drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was\n too bad for the man who climbed on them.", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.", "Kirk snorted. \"You women know so much. If they let the shags or the\n Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody,\n including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb.\n They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the\nCrash\n, and nobody\n knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They\n think we'd never suspect.\"\n\n\n \"Yah!\" said Lil sharply. \"You just like to talk. Why should the\n Officers want us killed off anyhow?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through." ], [ "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.\nThe Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.\n There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and\n down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down\n below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies\n for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning\n cannibal.\n\n\n That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get\n into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook\n some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and\n said:\n\n\n \"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?\"", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through.", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his\n knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.\n\n\n The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.\nIt was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last\n gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the\n tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox\n head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,\n piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.\n\n\n They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into\n the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low\n behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took\n courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who\n drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was\n too bad for the man who climbed on them.", "The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut.\n\n\n Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong\n stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting\n aside the door curtain.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said stiffly, \"Which way are they coming?\"\n\n\n Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and\n found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.\n\n\n Kirk pointed. \"From the west. Piruts, I think.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. \"Your Pa\n went hunting that way.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Kirk. \"I'll watch out for him.\"", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "\"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they\n let their young ones cry with the cold?\"\nThere was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.\n His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never\n talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set\n him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a\n mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....\n\n\n \"Listen!\" said Ma Kirk.\n\n\n Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need\n to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by\n the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into\n a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was\n no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its\n source.", "There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word \"Ship\" hung\n there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over\n the door and back to her son.\n\n\n \"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know.\"\n\n\n \"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way\n they do? We can't even get near the outside of it.\"\n\n\n Lil tossed her head. \"Well neither do they.\"\n\n\n \"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they\n haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the\n plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about.\"\n\n\n He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands." ], [ "\"Yes.\" The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner,\n with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under\n his horny overlids. He said quietly:\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to have to tell you this....\"\n\n\n Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a\n spear-stab where there was no spear.\n\n\n He said, \"Pa.\"\n\n\n The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk.\n He hadn't, after the first glance.\n\n\n \"Your father, and his two friends.\"\n\n\n Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. \"I wish I'd\n known,\" he whispered. \"I'd have killed more of them.\"", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through.", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his\n knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.\n\n\n The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.\nIt was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last\n gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the\n tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox\n head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,\n piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.\n\n\n They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into\n the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low\n behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took\n courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who\n drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was\n too bad for the man who climbed on them.", "Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.\nThe Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.\n There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and\n down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down\n below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies\n for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning\n cannibal.\n\n\n That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get\n into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook\n some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and\n said:\n\n\n \"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at\n them as if they were strange things and no part of him.\n\n\n \"Kirk,\" he said, \"this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done\n anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible,\n but they didn't actually kill them.\"\n\n\n Wes raised his head slowly. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\n \"We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them,\n but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father,\n called to us to put the ladder down. We waited....\"\n\n\n A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something\n that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear\n behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely:\n\n\n \"I don't understand.\"", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut.\n\n\n Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong\n stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting\n aside the door curtain.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said stiffly, \"Which way are they coming?\"\n\n\n Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and\n found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.\n\n\n Kirk pointed. \"From the west. Piruts, I think.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. \"Your Pa\n went hunting that way.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Kirk. \"I'll watch out for him.\"", "There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word \"Ship\" hung\n there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over\n the door and back to her son.\n\n\n \"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know.\"\n\n\n \"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way\n they do? We can't even get near the outside of it.\"\n\n\n Lil tossed her head. \"Well neither do they.\"\n\n\n \"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they\n haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the\n plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about.\"\n\n\n He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "\"Kind of a pal of yours, wasn't he?\"\n\n\n \"He wasn't very strong. He needed someone to cover him.\"\n\n\n \"Too bad.\" The man shook his head, and then shrugged. \"Maybe it's\n better, at that. He was headed for trouble, that one. Kinda leading you\n that way, too, I heard. Always talking.\"\n\n\n He looked at Kirk's face and shut up suddenly. He turned away and\n grunted over his shoulders, \"The O.D.'s looking for you.\"" ], [ "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut.\n\n\n Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong\n stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting\n aside the door curtain.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said stiffly, \"Which way are they coming?\"\n\n\n Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and\n found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.\n\n\n Kirk pointed. \"From the west. Piruts, I think.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. \"Your Pa\n went hunting that way.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Kirk. \"I'll watch out for him.\"", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.\n\n\n He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts.\n Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there\n on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had\n to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You\n had to keep them from getting onto the plain.\n\n\n He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work\n any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....\n\n\n No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer,\n was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching\n furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "Men and youths like himself, old enough to fight, were spilling out of\n low doorways and forming companies on the flat ground. Kirk spotted\n Jakk Randl and fell in beside him. They stood with their backs to the\n wind, stamping and shivering, their head-hair and scant fur clouts\n blown straight out.\n\n\n Randl nudged Kirk's elbow. \"Look at 'em,\" he said, and coughed. He was\n always coughing, jerking his thin sharp face back and forth. Kirk could\n have broken his brittle light-furred body in two. All Randl's strength\n was in his eyes. The pupils were always spread, always hot with some\n bitter force, always probing. He wasn't much older than Kirk.", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "Kirk followed. The wind was cold, howling up from the outer gullies.\nThe Officer of the Day was waiting at the north end of the wall.\n There was a ladder dropped over it now, and men were climbing up and\n down with bodies and sheaves of recovered spears. More were busy down\n below, rolling the dead Piruts and the shags down into the deep gullies\n for the scavenger rats and the living shags who didn't mind turning\n cannibal.\n\n\n That ladder made Kirk think of Pa. It was the only way for a man to get\n into the outer gullies from the west escarpment of the colony. He shook\n some of the queer heaviness out of his head, touched his forelock and\n said:\n\n\n \"I'm Wes Kirk, sir. You wanted me?\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "He coughed. The Officers' voices rang sharp through the wind. Compact\n groups of men began to run, off toward the west. The whisper of sound\n had grown louder in Kirk's ears. He could hear men yelling and the\n ringing of metal on stone.\n\n\n He started to run, holding Randl's elbow. Grey dust blew under their\n feet. The drifts of crystal stones sent their sound shivering back at\n them in splinters. Kirk said fiercely:\n\n\n \"What did you see?\"\n\n\n They were passing under the hill now. Randl jerked his head. \"Up there,\n Wes.\"\n\n\n Kirk looked up. Someone was standing at the doorway of the Captain's\n hut. Someone tall and slender and the color of the Sunstar from head to\n foot.\n\n\n \"I saw her,\" said Randl hoarsely. \"She was carrying heat-stones into\n the Ship.\"", "He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled\n them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long,\n one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled\n him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against\n the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe\n it.\n\n\n You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the\n heart....\n\n\n You saw it....\n\n\n \"That's one of our spears!\" He screamed it, like a woman. \"One of our\n own—from the front!\"\n\n\n \"I let them get as close as I dared,\" said the Officer tonelessly. \"I\n tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that\n was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come.\"", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again.", "\"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they\n let their young ones cry with the cold?\"\nThere was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.\n His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never\n talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set\n him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a\n mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....\n\n\n \"Listen!\" said Ma Kirk.\n\n\n Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need\n to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by\n the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into\n a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was\n no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its\n source.", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "Kirk snorted. \"You women know so much. If they let the shags or the\n Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody,\n including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb.\n They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the\nCrash\n, and nobody\n knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They\n think we'd never suspect.\"\n\n\n \"Yah!\" said Lil sharply. \"You just like to talk. Why should the\n Officers want us killed off anyhow?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.", "There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word \"Ship\" hung\n there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over\n the door and back to her son.\n\n\n \"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know.\"\n\n\n \"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way\n they do? We can't even get near the outside of it.\"\n\n\n Lil tossed her head. \"Well neither do they.\"\n\n\n \"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they\n haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the\n plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about.\"\n\n\n He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands." ], [ "He helped to lay his father down. He'd seen bodies before. He'd handled\n them, fighting on the pillbox walls. But never one he'd known so long,\n one he'd eaten and slept and wrestled with. The thick arm that hauled\n him out of bed this morning, the big hands that warmed the baby against\n the barrel chest. You saw it lying lax and cold, but you didn't believe\n it.\n\n\n You saw it. You saw the spear shaft sticking out clean from the\n heart....\n\n\n You saw it....\n\n\n \"That's one of our spears!\" He screamed it, like a woman. \"One of our\n own—from the front!\"\n\n\n \"I let them get as close as I dared,\" said the Officer tonelessly. \"I\n tried to find a way. But there wasn't any way but the ladder, and that\n was what the Piruts wanted. That's why they made them come.\"", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "The Officer put his hands flat on the top of the wall and looked at\n them as if they were strange things and no part of him.\n\n\n \"Kirk,\" he said, \"this is going to be hard to explain. I've never done\n anything as hard. The Piruts didn't kill them. They were responsible,\n but they didn't actually kill them.\"\n\n\n Wes raised his head slowly. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\n \"We saw them coming up the tongue of rock. The Piruts were behind them,\n but not far. Not far enough. One of the three, it wasn't your father,\n called to us to put the ladder down. We waited....\"\n\n\n A muscle began to twitch under Kirk's eye. That, too, was something\n that had never happened before, like the stab of pain with no spear\n behind it. He licked his lips and repeated hoarsely:\n\n\n \"I don't understand.\"", "It looked to Kirk as though the pillbox was pretty far gone.\n\n\n He ran down the slope with the others, slipping in the crystal drifts.\n Randl was spent. Kirk kept him going, thinking of the huts back there\n on the plain, and Ma and Lil and the little ones, and the baby. You had\n to fight the Piruts, no matter what you thought about the Officers. You\n had to keep them from getting onto the plain.\n\n\n He wondered about Pa. Hunting shags in the outer gullies was mean work\n any time, but when the Piruts were raiding....\n\n\n No time to think about that. Wite, the second son of the First Officer,\n was signalling for double time. Kirk ran faster, his ears twitching\n furiously as they sifted the flying echoes into some kind of order.", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "\"There aren't enough heat-stones to go around any more. Why should they\n let their young ones cry with the cold?\"\nThere was silence in the room again. Kirk felt it, thick and choky.\n His heart kicked against his ribs. He was scared, suddenly. He'd never\n talked that much before. It was the baby, crying in the cold, that set\n him off. Suppose someone had heard him. Suppose he was reported for a\n mutineer. That meant the sucking-plant....\n\n\n \"Listen!\" said Ma Kirk.\n\n\n Nerves crackled icily all over Kirk's skin. But there wasn't any need\n to listen. The noise rolled in over them. It hit rock faces polished by\n the wind, and the drifts of crystalline pebbles, and it splintered into\n a tangle of echoes that came from everywhere at once, but there was\n no mistaking it. No need even to use sensitive earcups to locate its\n source.", "The Officer tightened suddenly and made one hand into a fist and beat\n it slowly on the wall, up and down.\n\n\n \"I didn't want to give the order. God knows I didn't want to! But there\n was nothing else to do.\"\n\n\n A man came up over the top of the ladder. He was carrying a body over\n his shoulder, and breathing hard.\n\n\n \"Here's Kirk,\" he said. \"Where'll I put him?\"\n\n\n There was a clear space off to the right. Kirk pointed to it. \"Over\n there, Charley. I'll help.\"\n\n\n It was hard to move. He'd never been tired like this before. He'd never\n been afraid like this, either. He didn't know what he was afraid of.\n Something in the Officer's voice.", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "The great alarm gong by the Captain's hut.\n\n\n Kirk began to move, very swiftly and quietly. Before the third gong\n stroke hit them he had his spear and his sling and was already lifting\n aside the door curtain.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said stiffly, \"Which way are they coming?\"\n\n\n Kirk's ears twitched. He sorted the gong sounds, and the wind, and\n found a whisper underneath them, rushing up out of the gullied plain.\n\n\n Kirk pointed. \"From the west. Piruts, I think.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sucked in her breath. Her voice had no tone in it. \"Your Pa\n went hunting that way.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Kirk. \"I'll watch out for him.\"", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "\"Who's to hear it?\" Kirk raised his heavy overlids and let his pupils\n widen, huge liquid drops spreading black across his eyeballs, sucking\n the dim grey light into themselves, forcing line and shape out of\n blurred nothingness. He made no move to drop the curtain.\n\n\n The same landscape he had stared at since he was able to crawl by\n himself away from the box of heat-stones. Flat grey plain running\n right and left to the little curve of the horizon. Rocks on it, and\n edible moss. Wind-made gullies with grey shrubs thick in their bottoms,\n guarding their sour white berries with thorns and sacs of poisoned dust\n that burst when touched.\n\n\n Between the fields and the gullies there were huts like his own, sunk\n into the earth and sodded tight. A lot of huts, but not as many as\n there had been, the old ones said. The Hans died, and the huts were\n empty, and the wind and the earth took them back again." ], [ "Kirk didn't say anything. He started to walk around the heat box. Lil\n yelled, \"Ma!\"\n\n\n The young ones stopped fighting, scuttling out of reach and watching\n with bright moist eyes, grinning. The baby had reached the hiccoughing\n stage.\n\n\n Ma Kirk said, \"Sit down, or go pick on somebody your own size.\"\n\n\n Kirk stopped. \"Aw, I wasn't going to hurt her. She has to be so smart!\"\n He leaned forward to glare at Lil. \"And I would so kill the Captain's\n daughter!\"\n\n\n The baby was quiet. Ma Kirk laid it down in a nest of skins put close\n to the heat and said wearily:\n\n\n \"You men, always talking about killing! Haven't we enough trouble\n without that?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the little box of heat-stones, his pupils shrinking.", "He shoved the curtain of little skins aside and crouched there with his\n thick shoulders fitted into the angle of the jamb, staring out, cold\n wind threading in across his splayed and naked feet.\n\n\n The hackles rose golden and stiff across Kirk's back. He said carefully,\n\n\n \"I would like to kill the Captain and the First Officer and the Second\n Officer and all the little Officers, and the Engineers, and all their\n families.\"\n\n\n His voice carried inside on the wind eddies. Ma Kirk yelled,\n\n\n \"Wes! You come here and let that curtain down! You want us all to\n freeze?\" Her dark-furred shoulders moved rhythmically over the rocking\n child. She added sharply, \"Besides, that's fool's talk, Jakk Randl's\n talk, and only gets the sucking-plant.\"", "Kirk tried to turn. The six men swung with him. Kirk said, \"You better\n discipline me. You better kill me, because, if you don't, I'll kill\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I don't blame you, boy. Go and rest. You'll understand.\"\n\n\n \"I'll understand, all right.\" Kirk's voice was a hoarse, harsh whisper\n that came out by itself and wouldn't be stopped. \"I'll understand about\n Pa, and the Ship with the heat-stones in it, and the Captain's yellow\n daughter getting fat and warm while my sisters freeze and go hungry.\n I'll understand, and I'll make everybody else understand, too!\"\n\n\n The Officer's eyes held a quick fire. \"Boy! Do you know what you're\n saying?\"\n\n\n \"You bet I know!\"\n\n\n \"That's mutiny. For God's sake, don't make things worse!\"", "The baby cried. Ma Kirk shrilled at her son, and two of the younger\n ones fought over a bone with no meat on it, rolling and snapping on the\n dirt floor. Kirk shifted his head forward to shut out the sound of them\n and followed the line of the plain upward with sullen, glowing eyes.\n\n\n The huts of the Engineers were larger than those in the Hansquarter.\n The huts of the Officers were not much larger than the Engineers', but\n there were more of them and they climbed higher up the grey slope.\n Five, nearly six hands of them, with the Captain's metal-roofed place\n highest of all.\n\n\n Highest and nearest, right under the titanic shape lifting jagged\n against the icy stars from the crest of the ridge.\n\n\n The Ship.\n\n\n Kirk's voice was soft in his thick throat. \"I would like to kill them,\"\n he said. \"I would like to kill them all.\"", "Kirk nodded. He couldn't say anything. The heat was dying in Randl's\n eyes.\n\n\n \"Listen, Wes. I saw the secret way into Ship. Bend closer, and\n listen....\"\n\n\n Kirk bent. He didn't move for a long time. After a while Randl's voice\n stopped, and then the blood wasn't pumping any more, just oozing.\n Randl's hands slid away, so that Kirk could see the hole the stone had\n made. Everything seemed to be very quiet.\n\n\n Kirk sat there, holding Randl in his arms.\n\n\n Presently someone came up and shook Kirk's shoulder and said, \"Hey,\n kid, are you deaf? We been yelling for you.\" He stopped, and then said\n more gently, \"Oh. Jakk got it, did he?\"\n\n\n Kirk laid the body carefully on the stones and got up. \"Yeah.\"", "He glanced back just before he let the curtain drop. The pale glow of\n the heat-stones picked dots of luminous blackness out of the gloom,\n where the still breathless faces were, watching him. He saw the blurred\n shapes of clay cooking pots, of low bed frames, of huddled bodies. The\n baby began to whimper again.\n\n\n Kirk shivered in the cold wind. \"Lil,\" he said. \"I would, too, kill the\n Captain's yellow daughter.\"\n\n\n \"Yah,\" said Lil. \"Go chase the beetles away.\"\n\n\n There was no conviction in her voice. The wind was freezing on Kirk's\n bare feet. He dropped the curtain and went across the plain.", "\"Worse for us, or for you?\" Kirk was shouting, holding his head up in\n the wind. \"Listen, you men! Do you know what the Officers are doing up\n there in the Ship they won't let us touch?\"\n\n\n There was an uneasy stirring among the Hans, a slipping aside of\n luminous black eyes. The Officer shut his jaw tight. He stepped in\n close to Kirk.\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" he said urgently. \"Don't make me punish you, not now. You're\n talking rot, but it's dangerous.\"\n\n\n Kirk's eyes were hot and not quite sane. He couldn't have stopped if\n he'd wanted to.\n\n\n \"Rot, is it? Jakk Randl knew. He saw with his own eyes and he told me\n while he was dying. The Captain's yellow daughter, sneaking heat-stones\n into....\"", "The Officer hit him on the jaw, carefully and without heat. Kirk sagged\n down. The Officer stepped back, looking as though he had a pain in him\n that he didn't want to show.\n\n\n He said quietly, but so that everyone could hear him, \"Discipline, for\n not longer than it takes to clear the rock below.\"\n\n\n Two of the men nodded and took Kirk away down a flight of stone steps.\n One of the four who were left looked over the wall and spat.\n\n\n \"Rock's pretty near clean,\" he said, \"but even so....\" He shook himself\n like a dog. \"That Jakk Randl, he was always talking.\"\n\n\n One of the others flicked a quick look around and whispered, \"Yeah. And\n maybe he knew what he was talking about!\"", "Kirk's voice wasn't a voice at all. \"You killed them. You killed my\n father.\"\n\n\n \"Three lives, against all those back on the plain. We held our fire\n too long as it was, hoping. The Piruts nearly broke through. Try to\n understand! I had to do it.\"\n\n\n Kirk's spear made a flat clatter on the stone. He started forward. Men\n moved in and held him, without rancor, looking at their own feet.\n\n\n \"Please try to understand,\" whispered the Officer. \"I had to do it.\"\n\n\n The Officer, the bloody wall, the stars and the cold grey gullies all\n went away. There was nothing but darkness, and wind, a long way off.\n Kirk thought of Pa coming up under the wall, close to safety, close\n enough to touch it, and no way through. Pa and Frank and Russ, standing\n under the wall, looking up, and no way through.", "Ma Kirk looked at him. \"Your Pa's still big enough to whale you, young\n man! Now you stop it, both of you.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" said Kirk sullenly. He squatted down, holding his hands\n over the heat. His back twitched with the cold, but it was nice to have\n his belly warm, even if it was empty. \"Wish Pa'd hurry up. I'm hungry.\n Hope they killed meat.\"\n\n\n Ma Kirk sighed. \"Seems like meat gets scarcer all the time, like the\n heat-stones.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe,\" said Kirk heavily, \"it all goes to the same place.\"\n\n\n Lil snorted. \"And where's that, Smarty?\"\n\n\n His anger forced out the forbidden words.\n\n\n \"Where everybody says, stupid! Into the Ship.\"", "\"Yah!\" cried a shrill voice over his shoulder. \"All but the Captain's\n yellow daughter!\"\nKirk spun angrily around. Lil, next below himself, danced back out of\n reach, her kilt of little skins flying around her thin hips.\n\n\n \"Yah!\" she said again, and wrinkled her flat nose. \"I've seen you\n looking at her. All yellow from head to foot and beautiful pink lids to\n her eyes. You wouldn't kill\nher\n, I bet!\"\n\n\n \"I bet I'll half kill you if you don't shut up!\"\n\n\n Lil stuck out her tongue. Kirk aimed a cuff at her. She danced behind\n his arm and jerked the curtain down and shot away again, making two\n jumps over the brawling young ones and the box of heat-stones.\n\n\n She squatted demurely beside Ma Kirk and said, as though nothing had\n happened, \"Ma says will you please not let so much heat out.\"", "He said, \"Jakk, I'll get the sawbones....\"\n\n\n Hot black eyes turned to his. Burnt-out fires in a face with the young\n beard hardly full on its sharp jaw.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Wes, quick, and listen. Sawbones is no good—and why would\n I want to go on living anyway?\"\n\n\n He smiled. Kirk had never seen him smile like that, without bitterness\n or pain. He sat down, crouched on the body of a man who lived only two\n huts away from him. The blood made little red fountains between Randl's\n fingers.\n\n\n \"It's up to you, Wes. You're the only one that really knows about the\n Ship. You'll do better than I would, anyhow. You're a fighter. You\n carry it on, so the Hans can live. Promise.\"", "\"Yes.\" The O.D. was also the Third Officer. Taller than Kirk, thinner,\n with the hair going grey on his body and exhausted eyes sunk deep under\n his horny overlids. He said quietly:\n\n\n \"I'm sorry to have to tell you this....\"\n\n\n Kirk knew. The knowledge leaped through him. It was strange, to feel a\n spear-stab where there was no spear.\n\n\n He said, \"Pa.\"\n\n\n The Officer nodded. He seemed very tired, and he didn't look at Kirk.\n He hadn't, after the first glance.\n\n\n \"Your father, and his two friends.\"\n\n\n Kirk shivered. The horny lids dropped over his eyes. \"I wish I'd\n known,\" he whispered. \"I'd have killed more of them.\"", "\"Maybe there'd be less trouble for us.\"\n\n\n Lil poked her shock of black hair around Ma Kirk's knee. Her big eyes\n glowed in the feeble light.\n\n\n She said, \"You men! He's no man, Ma. He's just a little boy who has to\n stay behind and shoo the beetles out of the fields.\"\n\n\n The young ones giggled, well out of reach. Lil's thin body was strung\n tight, quivering to move. \"Besides,\" she demanded, \"what have the\n Officers and the Engineers ever done to you that you should want to\n kill them—all but the Captain's yellow daughter?\"\n\n\n Kirk's big heavy chest swelled. \"Ma,\" he said, \"you make that brat shut\n up or I'll whale her, anyhow.\"", "There was suddenly a lot of silence in the room. The word \"Ship\" hung\n there, awesome and accusing. Ma Kirk's eyes flicked to the curtain over\n the door and back to her son.\n\n\n \"Don't you say things like that, Wes! You don't know.\"\n\n\n \"It's what everybody says. Why else would they guard the Ship the way\n they do? We can't even get near the outside of it.\"\n\n\n Lil tossed her head. \"Well neither do they.\"\n\n\n \"Not when we can see 'em, no. Of course not. But how do we know they\n haven't got ways of getting into the Ship that don't show from the\n plain? Jakk says a lot goes on that we don't know about.\"\n\n\n He got up, forcing his belief at them with his big square hands.", "He stopped. Kirk put a stone accurately through the back of a Pirut's\n head and said grimly:\n\n\n \"Yeah. About what\nwe're\ngoing to do.\"\n\n\n Randl didn't answer. He sat down suddenly, doubled over. Kirk grinned.\n \"Take it easy,\" he said softly. \"I'll cover you.\"\n\n\n Randl whispered, \"Wes. Wes!\" He held up one thin hand. Kirk let his own\n drop, looking at it. There was blood on it, running clear to the elbow.\n\n\n He went down beside Randl, putting his arms around him, trying to see.\n Randl shook him off.\n\n\n \"Don't move me, you fool! Just listen.\" His voice was harsh and rapid.\n He was holding both hands over the left side of his neck, where it\n joined the shoulder. Kirk could see the bright blood beating up through\n his fingers.", "Kirk raised his shaggy head. The light of the yellow star they called\n Sun caught in the huge luminous blackness of his eyes.\n\n\n Beyond the Hansquarter, just where the flat plain began to rise, were\n the Engineers. Not many of them any more. You could see the dusty lumps\n where the huts had been, the tumbled heaps of metal that might have\n meant something once, a longer time ago than anyone could remember. But\n there were still plenty of huts standing. Two hands and one hand and\n a thumb of them, full of Engineers who said how the furrows should be\n laid for the planting but did nothing about the tilling of them.\n\n\n And beyond the Engineers—the Officers.", "Kirk snorted. \"You women know so much. If they let the shags or the\n Piruts in on us, how could they stop 'em before they killed everybody,\n including the Officers? As for slow death—well, they think we're dumb.\n They've kept us away from the Ship ever since the\nCrash\n, and nobody\n knows how long ago that was. They think they can go on doing it. They\n think we'd never suspect.\"\n\n\n \"Yah!\" said Lil sharply. \"You just like to talk. Why should the\n Officers want us killed off anyhow?\"\n\n\n Kirk looked at the thin fuzzy baby curled tight in the skins.", "Looking up, calling to the men they knew, asking for help and getting a\n spear through the heart.\n\n\n After that, even the wind was gone, and the darkness had turned red.\nThere was a voice, a long way off. It said, \"God, he's strong!\" Over\n and over. It got louder. There were weights on his arms and legs, and\n he couldn't throw them off. He was pressed against something.\n\n\n It was the wall. He saw that after a while. The wall where the Officer\n had been standing. There were six men holding him, three on each side.\n The Officer was gone.\n\n\n Kirk relaxed. He was shivering and covered with rime from body sweat.\n Somebody whistled.\n\n\n \"Six men! Didn't know the kid had it in him.\"\n\n\n The Officer's voice said dully, \"No discipline. Better take him home.\"", "Kirk's pupils shrank to points no warmer nor softer than the tip of his\n knife. He smiled, almost gently, looking up the hill.\n\n\n The captain's yellow daughter, taking life into the Ship.\nIt was a big raid. Kirk saw that when he scrambled up out of the last\n gully, half-carrying the wheezing Randl. The Piruts had come up the\n tongue of rock between two deep cuts and tackled the guards' pillbox\n head on. They hadn't taken it, not yet. But they were still trying,\n piling up their dead on the swept grey stone.\n\n\n They were using shags again. They drove the lumbering beasts on into\n the hail of stones and thrown spears from the pillbox, keeping low\n behind them, and then climbing on the round hairy bodies. It took\n courage, because sometimes the shags turned and clawed the men who\n drove them, and sometimes the dead ones weren't quite dead and it was\n too bad for the man who climbed on them." ] ]
valid	50818	[ "What is NOT one of the reasons Manet wanted to be alone?", "What did Manet do at his job?", "What did Manet find in the desert?", "What did Manet ask for from the trader?", "Why does the trader not get any requests for returns?", "How did Manet feel about his last creation?", "Who did Manet like the best?", "Why did Manet lock the two people in the small room?" ]	[ [ "To be able to practice poor hygiene", "To see how long it would take to go mad", "To compare peace and war", "To feel bored" ], [ "Take measurements of the stars, moons, and Earth", "Control the atmosphere seeder station", "Control the gimcrack", "Nothing" ], [ "Nothing, he was hallucinating", "A businessman in a spaceship", "A cabin with a fireplace", "A spaceship sent by the government" ], [ "A companion", "Whiskey", "Nothing", "A credit card" ], [ "He charges a lot for his wares", "His merchandise is so pleasing", "People don't know how much the items cost", "He only visits each place one time" ], [ "He was upset the man was a friend", "He was happy the man was an antagonist", "He was upset the man was an antagonist", "He was happy the man was a friend" ], [ "Trader Tom", "Veronica", "Victor", "Ronald" ], [ "They were unintelligent.", "He had gone crazy.", "They would not do as he said.", "They tried to kill him." ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.", "He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.", "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.", "\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"" ], [ "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"", "No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.", "HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.", "On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.", "\"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n \"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n\n\n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You\nnever\npay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your\nestate\n.\"\n\n\n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n\n\n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on\n a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\nManet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed\n to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever you want?\"\n\n\n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n\n\n \"You know.\"\n\n\n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"", "He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.", "Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since." ], [ "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.", "\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"", "On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.", "He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"" ], [ "\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"", "\"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n \"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n\n\n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You\nnever\npay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your\nestate\n.\"\n\n\n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n\n\n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on\n a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\nManet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed\n to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever you want?\"\n\n\n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n\n\n \"You know.\"\n\n\n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.", "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "\"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown\n blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn\n from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the\n planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't\n already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for\n it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this\n glass of whiskey.\"\n\n\n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n\n\n \"Very good.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent?\"\n\n\n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n\n\n \"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for\n paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a\n Trader Tom Credit Card.\"", "\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "\"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the\n Trader Tom plan.\"\n\n\n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n\n\n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any\n complaints yet.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n\n\n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\nManet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but\n still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n\n\n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper\n taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to\n himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers....", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across\n the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of\n a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange\n cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n\n\n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone\n fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache\n painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the\n horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n\n\n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n\n\n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber\n whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the\n comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm\nfine\n.\" He let the word\n hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what\n place this is?\"" ], [ "\"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n \"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n\n\n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You\nnever\npay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your\nestate\n.\"\n\n\n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n\n\n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on\n a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\nManet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed\n to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n\n\n \"Whatever you want?\"\n\n\n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n\n\n \"You know.\"\n\n\n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"", "\"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the\n Trader Tom plan.\"\n\n\n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n\n\n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any\n complaints yet.\"\n\n\n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n\n\n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\nManet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but\n still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n\n\n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper\n taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to\n himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.", "\"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only\nsell\n. I\n am a trader—Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for\n example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n\n\n \"Folk legend!\"\n\n\n \"On the contrary,\nmon cher\n, the only reality it lacks is political\n reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of\n the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without\n representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n\n\n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual,\n you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so\n much.\"", "The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you\n choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's\n my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n\n\n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n\n\n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's\nme\nexactly. Trader Tom Service—Serving\n the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is\n poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the\n planets.\"\n\n\n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey,\n immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving\n the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.", "\"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown\n blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn\n from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the\n planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't\n already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for\n it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this\n glass of whiskey.\"\n\n\n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n\n\n \"Very good.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent?\"\n\n\n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n\n\n \"I only meant—but never mind. We give you what you want. As for\n paying for it—why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a\n Trader Tom Credit Card.\"", "He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers....", "\"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed\n his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a\ngovernment\nservice. I\n represent free enterprise.\"\n\"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a\n spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n\n\n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known.\n Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the\n capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper.\n They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things\n they can forego the papers. Comprehend,\nmon ami\n? My businessmen\n have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw\n materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they\n make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"", "And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.", "Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "\"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never\n change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your\n interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll\n never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've\n made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man.\nI've\n seen that you will always keep your friends.\n\"\nThe prospect\nwas\nfrightful.\n\n\n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you\n are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see\n me suffer?\"\n\n\n \"\nYes.\n\"", "He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n\n\n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out.\n There was a lot left inside.\n\n\n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one\n of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n\n\n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n\n\n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the\n Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He\n hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room\n for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away\n hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head.\n Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to\n nothing whatsoever.", "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.", "He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There\n was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and\n looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its\n outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits.\n Maybe even the\nModifier\nitself.\n\n\n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He\n studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n\n\n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\nThe Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n\n\n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n\n\n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n\n\n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n\n\n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n\n\n The Black King shuffled sideways.", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.", "On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand." ], [ "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether\n it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as\n dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and\n think more like a god than any man for generations.\n\n\n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing\n bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n\n\n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already\n talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had\n cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and\n winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n\n\n Lately she was winking back at him.\n\n\n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from\n his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.", "Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"", "No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet\n could only be this lonely on Mars.\n\n\n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n\n\n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle\n of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat,\n flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the\n black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons\n and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole\n gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was\n needed here—no human being, at least.", "\"I am not your friend.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n\n\n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure\n at the symmetry of the situation.\n\n\n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I\n am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have\nall\nyour knowledge.\nYou\ndo not have all your knowledge. If you let\n yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is\n my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n\n\n \"When do you start?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n\n\n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.", "HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.", "He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from\n him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n\n\n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n\n\n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n\n\n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did\n so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n\n\n He glanced forward and found the headings:\nThe Final Model\n.\n\n\n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid\n a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to\n that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he\n could.\n\n\n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of\n ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and\n under his fingers...." ], [ "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "The Red King followed....\n\n\n Uselessly.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n\n\n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n\n\n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him.\n Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in\n order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n\n\n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said\n pontifically.\n\n\n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.", "\"I am not your friend.\"\n\n\n \"No?\"\n\n\n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n\n\n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure\n at the symmetry of the situation.\n\n\n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I\n am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have\nall\nyour knowledge.\nYou\ndo not have all your knowledge. If you let\n yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is\n my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n\n\n \"When do you start?\"\n\n\n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n\n\n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.", "\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.", "Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress.\n Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know\n any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to\n that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n\n\n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the\n last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The\n aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not\n seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for\n single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts,\n that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the\n leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"", "HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\nBy JIM HARMON\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery lonely man tries to make friends.\n\n Manet just didn't know when to stop!\nWilliam Manet was alone.\n\n\n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would\n give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate\n loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him\n to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin\n teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable\n lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.", "On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the\nReader's\n Digest\n, covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in\n black on the spine and cover:\nThe Making of Friends\n.\n\n\n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title\n in larger print and slightly amplified:\nThe Making of Friends and\n Others\n. There was no author listed. A further line of information\n stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of\n the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD.,\n SYRACUSE.\n\n\n The unnumbered first chapter was headed\nYour First Friend\n.\n\n\n Before you go further, first find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This\n is\nvital\n.", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship." ], [ "\"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going\n to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year,\n forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n\n\n \"If you think it's the\nright\nthing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n\n\n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n\n\n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n\n\n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of\n his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk\n carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he\n walked too carefully for this to happen.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion,\n William, you should let us out.\"", "She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over\n his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n\n\n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n\n\n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather\n bristly, masculine countenance.\n\n\n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n\n\n She made her return.\n\n\n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n\n\n \"Whenever you say.\"\n\n\n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment.\n There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n\n\n \"Now?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"I'll tell you.\"", "\"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill,\n dearest.\"\n\n\n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you\n back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n\n\n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n\n\n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\nPouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual\n diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the\n box to go around.\n\n\n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The\n Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n\n\n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make\n any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.", "Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk,\n suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the\n conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n\n\n So he went to open the box.\n\n\n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It\n crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the\n boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n\n\n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old\n chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and\n unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to\n have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.", "He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n\n\n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized\n regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n\n\n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\nRonald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the\n corridor.\n\n\n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n\n\n \"No, darling.\"\n\n\n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore\n the noise. She was still following orders.\n\n\n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried\n through sepulchrally.\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n\n\n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.", "Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the\n hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n\n\n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't\n have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types.\n Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an\n insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain\n compensations.\n\n\n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed:\nThe Making of a Girl\n.\nVeronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and\n over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into\n his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n\n\n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his\n life.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"", "A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n\n\n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took\n comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the\n station.\n\n\n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n\n\n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His\n hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips\n seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the\n shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n\n\n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n\n\n But he looked offended.\n\n\n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n \"inside, inside.\"\n\n\n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.", "\"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said\n meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make\n any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your\n uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that\n for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social\n manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your\n purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every\n foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a\n friend!\"", "Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n\n\n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n\n\n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the\n diesel works, closed again.\n\n\n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n\n\n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of\n Ronald's jaw.\n\n\n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n\n\n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n \"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n\n\n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n\n\n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"", "Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n\n\n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n\n\n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n\n\n \"Move!\"\n\n\n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the\n flesh-sprayers.\n\n\n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized\n that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n\n\n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n\n\n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n\n\n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should\n understand. I am different from the others.\"\n\n\n \"They all say that.\"", "Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n\n\n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in\n a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet\n wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n\n\n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n\n\n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that\n their checker games always ended in a tie?\nThe calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated\n for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n\n\n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n\n\n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent\n wall.\n\n\n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of\n eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.", "He quickly riffled through the pages.\nOther Friends, Authority, A\n Companion\n.... Then\nThe Final Model\n. Manet tried to flip past this\n section, but the pages after the sheet labeled\nThe Final Model\nwere\n stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in\n the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to\n this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n\n\n Manet flipped back to page one.\n\n\n First find the\nModifier\nin your kit. This is\nvital\nto your entire\n experiment in socialization. The\nModifier is Part #A-1\non the Master\n Chart.", "\"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be\n warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\nManet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n\n\n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel\n Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines,\n the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing,\nad nauseum\n. What a\n narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought\n and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal\n human being?\n\n\n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.", "And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n\n\n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles\n and patchy sunburn.\n\n\n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward\n Communication.\n\n\n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small\n pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on\n the walls of the tubeway.\n\n\n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding\n vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n\n\n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n\n\n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald\n in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated\n quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.", "She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright,\n less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald.\n Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what\n constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n\n\n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back\n to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n\n\n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean\n thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n\n\n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head\n until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so\n cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight\n in you at all?\"", "But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered\n wonderful opportunities.\n\n\n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making\n a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as\n bright as envy.\nManet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid\n dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia.\n Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the\n arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating\n human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure\n as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest,\n making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a\n kind of climaxing release of terror.\n\n\n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would\n never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.", "Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\nWhen he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was\n pushing it across the floor towards him.\n\n\n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't\n wood—only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color\n picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a\n busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\nLIFO\nThe Socialization Kit\n\"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n \"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic,\n aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer—but that is\n reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it\n approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n\n\n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the\n charges.\"", "He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n\n\n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out.\n There was a lot left inside.\n\n\n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one\n of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n\n\n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n\n\n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the\n Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He\n hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room\n for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away\n hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head.\n Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to\n nothing whatsoever.", "Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties—Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson,\n Sam Merwin tennis stories,\nSaturday Evening Post\ncovers—when he had\n first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm\n opinions on all these.\n\n\n He yearned for someone to challenge him—to say that\nDime Sports\nhad\n been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why,\nSewanee Review\n, there\n had been a magazine for you.\n\n\n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his\n own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior\n to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a\n better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n\n\n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n\n\n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.", "\"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never\n change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your\n interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll\n never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've\n made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man.\nI've\n seen that you will always keep your friends.\n\"\nThe prospect\nwas\nfrightful.\n\n\n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you\n are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n\n\n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see\n me suffer?\"\n\n\n \"\nYes.\n\"" ] ]
valid	20029	[ "Where did Edward grow up?", "Why did Edward decide to tell the truth about his childhood?", "What is true about Edward's writings?", "How does Edward feel about the Arab-Israeli conflict?", "What is a role that Edward does not play?", "What is a theme of Edward's best-known book?", "What is a criticism that has not been said about Edward's best-known book?", "How does the author feel about Edward's books?", "Who disliked Edward's work?", "Why do people like to find out new data about famous people?" ]	[ [ "First Jerusalem, then Lebanon, then Cairo", "First Jerusalem, then Cairo, then the US", "First Cairo, then the US", "First Jerusalem, then the US" ], [ "To create the impression he was Palestinian", "To gain sympathy for living in exile", "To get it out there in his own words before someone else could", "To make a lot of money" ], [ "He often writes about the arts", "He writes solely about the Palestinian cause", "His writing is concise", "He researched his book for 3 years" ], [ "He never criticizes the Palestinians", "He is pro-Arab but still criticizes their shortcomings", "He supports Israel wholeheartedly", "He supports all the Arabs wholeheartedly" ], [ "Activist", "Critic", "Academic", "Politician" ], [ "China will rule the world", "The East looks down on the West", "Our view of the East is skewed", "Palestine should have its own state" ], [ "It was too exhaustively researched", "It was written with political intentions", "It was written from a liberal anti-West perspective", "It was written for egotistical reasons" ], [ "They are not worth reading", "They are enlightening", "They are of too conservative a mind", "They are not well-researched" ], [ "Only liberal scholars", "Some historians", "Only conservative scholars", "Almost everyone liked it" ], [ "It requires a lot of thought", "It makes them feel better about themselves", "It makes them like the people even more", "They are obsessed fans" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 1, 2, 4, 3, 1, 2, 2, 2 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right", "to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called" ], [ "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize", "to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, Said, who had" ], [ "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called" ], [ "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Arab cultural and intellectual life. He has also, within the Palestinian camp, been a consistent advocate of reconciliation with Israel and an opponent of terrorism. The Question of Palestine called for a \"two-state solution\" at a time when the official PLO", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "Arab governments--or the Palestinian leadership--off the hook. He has assailed the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that rule most of the Arab world, punctured the ideological phantasms of Pan-Arabist nationalism and reactionary Islam alike, and bemoaned the impoverished state of", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "In 1978, in the wake of the Camp David accords, Said delivered a message from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to one of Arafat's top aides indicating that the United States would recognize", "Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let", "the PLO as a legitimate party to peace talks in exchange for recognition of Israel. Arafat ignored the message. Fifteen years later, when Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, Said, who had", "residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of", "ambition was total control over British Mandatory Palestine. The book, published in Israel in 1981, had, as of the mid-'90s, never been translated into Arabic or published in any Arab country.", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with" ], [ "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "Until very recently, Said has been an insistent voice for Palestinian statehood: He helped to draft the PLO's \"Algiers Declaration\" of 1988, which linked this aspiration to the recognition of Israel's right", "Arab governments--or the Palestinian leadership--off the hook. He has assailed the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that rule most of the Arab world, punctured the ideological phantasms of Pan-Arabist nationalism and reactionary Islam alike, and bemoaned the impoverished state of" ], [ "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his" ], [ "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.", "to exist. Over the years, he has often said that his own place in such a state would be as its toughest critic. Even as he has been unsparing in his indictments of Israeli and American policy, he has not let" ], [ "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over" ], [ "altogether too enamored of the canons of European literature and avers that Said possesses \"a very conservative mind, essentially Tory in its structure.\"", "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "Not so fast, says Weiner: Said's childhood was not \"the parable of Palestinian identity\" marked by dispossession from a beloved homeland and the subsequent pain of exile. Instead, Said \"grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward's birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members.\"", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure." ], [ "Edward W. Said \n\n The game of biographical \"gotcha\" is a perennially popular form of ideological blood sport. The goal is to find an incriminating datum that will leave a permanent stain on the target's reputation, make his defenders look like craven apologists, and give the general public a ready-made judgment that can be wielded without too much reading or thought. If the anti-communism of George Orwell or Arthur Koestler bugs you, you can point to recent allegations that the former was a snitch and the latter a rapist. If you resent the fact that your college professors forced you to read I, Rigoberta MenchÃº , you can rejoice in the discovery that she embellished some important details of her life story. Didn't Karl Marx beat his wife? And what about Freud's thing for his sister-in-law and his taste for cocaine?", "A similar account of Edward Said's youth can be found in a new book called Out of Place , the author of which is Edward Said. The book, Said's 17 th , is a wrenching, intimate account of growing up in Cairo's wealthy Levantine expatriate community, of summering in the dreary Lebanese resort town of Dhour el Shweir, and of visiting the family home in Jerusalem, sometimes for as long as several months. Weiner claims that the memoir is an elaborate sleight of hand and speculates that Said decided to \"spin\" the story of his past--by telling the truth about it--when he heard about Weiner's inquiries. In the weeks since his essay appeared, Weiner's motives, methods, and assertions have been roundly attacked by Said and his friends, and Weiner has made some attempt at clarification. (Click for a recap of the controversy and links to relevant articles, or click here for my review of Out of Place .)", "To this list now add Columbia literature professor Edward W. Said, the subject of a fiercely debated article in the September issue of Commentary . The article, by American-born Israeli legal scholar Justus Reid Weiner, contends that Said, who was born in Jerusalem to a Christian Arab family in 1935, has over the years deliberately obscured some facts about his early life, and amplified others, in order to create the impression that he was, of all things, Palestinian.", "But to treat Said solely, or even primarily, as a political figure is necessarily to produce a distorted view of his life. He is, first and foremost, a literary critic, who wrote his Ph.D. at Harvard--on Joseph Conrad, a lifelong obsession--under Harry Levin, one of the champions of a comparative approach to literary study. Said's subsequent work has retained much of the expansive spirit and rigorous methodology of Levin's teachings. Beginnings: Intention and Method , the book which made Said's academic reputation, is a bulky study of how novels begin, carried out through painstakingly close formal analysis and displaying crushing erudition.", "The Nation know him as a formidable reviewer of opera and classical music. Several generations of graduate students in a number of disciplines know him as the author of Orientalism . The 30,000 literary scholars who make up the membership of", "But Said's fame outside the American academy rests on Orientalism , his sweeping account of how Western art, literature, and scholarship have produced a deformed, biased picture of Arab and Muslim culture in the service of colonial domination. The impact of Orientalism far exceeded its subject, vast though that was. In addition to laying the groundwork for \"post-colonial\" studies as an area of inquiry, the book inspired a flurry of scholarship devoted to \"the other\"--to groups of people who, by virtue of race, gender, sexuality, or geographical location, are unable to represent themselves and so (to echo the line from Karl Marx that serves as the book's epigraph) \"must be represented\" by those more powerful. And Orientalism , with its harsh critiques of European philology and American social science, contributed to an epistemological shift in the American academy: Traditional disciplines were no longer to be taken for granted as the vehicles of objective knowledge but themselves became the objects of ideological analysis.", "O rientalism and Culture and Imperialism are unquestionably incendiary, but they are also permanent and exemplary works of late-20 th -century criticism, in no small part because they invite so much argument, because for all the intellectual authority they project they remain open, vulnerable, provisional. And they also fulfill the basic mandate of literary analysis, which is to illuminate the works they discuss: To return to Verdi's Aida , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , or Kipling's Kim after reading Said on them is to find them richer, stranger, and more complicated than you had ever imagined. \n\n More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing \"criticism over solidarity,\" speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail. There was a time when this idea flourished more widely--even in the pages of Commentary .", "enormous passion and expressed with great vehemence--make Said an uncommonly interesting, and endlessly controversial, intellectual figure.", "Just who is Edward Said that his family's real estate holdings and his grammar school records rate 7,000 words in Commentary , not to mention three years of research by a scholar in", "Most controversial--and most misunderstood--has been Said's involvement in Palestinian affairs. He has published half a dozen books on the plight of the Palestinians, including The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky (1986), and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), a scathing critique of the Oslo peace accords, which Said calls \"the Palestinian Versailles.\" These writings, his relationship with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, and his many years of service in the Palestine National Council (the now-defunct Palestinian parliament in exile, from which he resigned in 1991 after being diagnosed with leukemia) have invited smears and misrepresentations: A decade ago Commentary branded him \"The Professor of Terror.\" New York magazine once called him \"Arafat's man in New York.\" And he showed up last spring, unnamed, in The New Yorker 's special \"Money\" issue as a well-dressed Columbia don rumored to be \"on the payroll of the PLO.\"", "a lot of the criticism came from traditional scholars. In the New York Review of Books , for example, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, one of the chief modern villains of Orientalism , decried Said's inflammatory tone and questioned his", "Lewis and Ahmad are both right. Orientalism and its even more ambitious sequel Culture and Imperialism are works of passionate, almost agonized ambivalence. To read them is to encounter a mind at war with itself and the world (and ready to go to war with his critics, as any number of exchanges over the past quarter-century will show). Said's evident love of the literature and music of the West continually collides with his righteous anger at what the West has done to the rest. His desire to use literary criticism as a weapon on the side of the oppressed sits athwart the pleasure he takes in letting his mind play over the meaning in a novel or a poem. The results are books at once exhausting in their detail and maddening in their omissions, uneven in tone, overreaching and underargued. \"He is easily distracted\" the critic John Leonard remarked in an appreciative review of Culture and Imperialism , \"answering too many fire alarms, sometimes to pour on more petrol.\"", "Whereas Lewis attacks Said for trashing the norms and values of traditional scholarship, Ahmad rebukes him for hewing too closely to them. And while Lewis believes Said to be motivated by a crude anti-Western leftist animus, Ahmad finds him", "knowledge of history, philology, and Arabic. (To read Lewis' piece, click here. For Said's angry response, click here.) But the most sustained assault on Orientalism 's premises, and on its prestige, came from the left. In a book called", "Both Said's methods and his substantive claims have come under attack. Because his theoretical debt to Michel Foucault and his unabashedly political intentions marked him as an avatar of the emerging academic left,", "the Modern Language Association--minus one who resigned in protest earlier this year over Said's election--know him as Mr. President. Readers of Al-Hayat , a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, and Al-Ahram , a Cairo weekly, know him as a regular", "In Theory --a wholesale slaughter of the sacred cows of the postmodern Western intelligentsia--the Indian Marxist literary critic Aijaz Ahmad raised further questions about Said's mastery of his sources and accused him of self-aggrandizement and insufficient political discipline.", "commentator on politics and culture. Each of these identities--political activist, literary scholar, university professor, public intellectual--are, in Said's case, inordinately complex in and of themselves. The tensions between them--between intellectual, aesthetic, and political impulses that are felt with", "residence at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs? Followers of Middle East politics, as well as viewers of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer , where Said often appears, know him as an eloquent spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Readers of", "been invited to the event by its patron, Bill Clinton, stayed home. Since then, as bien-pensant American opinion has embraced the \"peace process,\" Said has bemoaned Arafat's \"capitulation\" and grown increasingly disgusted with the chairman's dictatorial rule over" ] ]
valid	20048	[ "Are there clear solutions for the problems that the author discusses?", "What does the author think about the system of government in Belgium?", "What time period is this article likely written in based on its content?", "What is the significance of architecture to the arguments?", "What are some of the positive aspects the author highlights?", "What are the sources the author uses for the article?", "Where does the author write their experience from?", "What level of depth does the author provide on the subjects they use to make their case?", "What are the general topics the author uses to make their case?", "How does the author’s tone shift over the course of the story?" ]	[ [ "There is a clear solution for the management of waste that was proposed", "There could be free solutions to most of the problems", "They are very multi-faceted problems that couldn’t easily be solved", "The author writes about several types of solution to each criticism they raise" ], [ "They support the decisions the government has had to make to preserve the environment at the expense of new roads", "They wonder when there will be a turning point to corrupt the government that they can’t think of a prior time having suffered corruption", "They don’t think they function well, and that they have overregulated business", "They think it is the best way to move into the future" ], [ "1990s", "1980s", "2000s", "2010s" ], [ "The author believes the EU is taking over Belgium’s historical buildings with new architectural projects", "The author compares the EU to architects as an analogy", "The author thinks that how money is being spent on government buildings is a waste", "The author is an architect themselves and notice many examples to make their case through the story" ], [ "There are no blatant positives discussed", "The streamlining of nations under the European Union", "The move to have one currency across Europe", "The apparent good will of the people staffing the headquarter building" ], [ "Likely some news reporting, plus personal experience in the culture and economy", "Only personal experience and interviews", "Economists that have studied the EU as their life’s work", "They cite several government publications" ], [ "They are located in Italy", "They explain their upbringing in Canada", "They mention being in Belgium themselves", "They mention being from the USA" ], [ "Language is really the only thing covered in any depth", "A broad, but not very deep assessment", "They provide the reader with deeper arguments about the monetary system and striking tendencies than anything else", "They provide deep, explanatory statistics to most arguments" ], [ "Corruption, fraud, mistrust, espionage", "Culture, consumer spending, politics, language, corruption, telecommunications", "Political platforms, language, telecommunications, Trains", "Consumer spending, language, public strikes, acts of war" ], [ "They remain steadfastly supportive to the EU", "They remain steadfastly in opposition to their subject", "They start out hopeful and are slowly dismayed with further findings", "Desolate to begin with, shifting to the glimmers of promising results to come" ] ]	[ 3, 3, 1, 3, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization." ], [ "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization." ], [ "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood." ], [ "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood." ], [ "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood." ], [ "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy." ], [ "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions." ], [ "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood." ], [ "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy." ], [ "Fortunately, Berlaymont isn't in my neighborhood, but a patisserie is. Bakeries are easier to find than gas stations in Brussels, and the neon bakery sign I can see from my office window often calls out to me the way signs for cocktail lounges once called out to earlier generations of writers. Think I'll answer now.", "is entirely bilingual, down to abbreviations: Buses and trams are brightly labeled MIVB/STIB, the transit-agency acronyms in French and Flemish. But bilingualism doesn't seem to do much to bring people together. In the Flemish parts of town,", "Belgian politics enjoy none of the rowdy intellectual contention of the United Kingdom, none of the nuance-loving literary polemics of France, not even a strong national identity. The primary issue in public debate is who gets what benefits, and while commerce and money are gods, neither is served particularly well. The national infrastructure is fraying, with little renewal: Belgians have a high per-capita income and spend it generously on cars and dining, but what Rousseau called the esprit social seems lacking. Crumbling, generic, enervated, debt-ridden, materialistic ... is this Europe's future? \n\n Brussels is a place where you can take your dog into a restaurant, but not your kids. Where a best-selling product, in an ostensibly Catholic country, is Judas beer. (My proposed slogan: \"Taste you can trust.\") Where there's no such thing as takeout coffee with lids. Anyone who wants coffee must sit languidly in a cafe, gradually feeling overcome with lethargy and despair.", "Other European atmospherics: lobster bisque for sale from sidewalk vendors; excellent public transportation; monumental traffic jams of expensive cars crowding small streets; bare breasts common in advertisements and at beaches, miniskirts being considered acceptable attire for professional women (when, oh when will these enlightened attitudes reach the United States?); notably more pollution than in the United States; notably more government, running higher deficits; lots of well-cared-for historic buildings, such as the built-in-the-14 th -century church I attend with my family; prices far too high, except for wine and flowers, which are cheap (European staples, you know); large cemeteries, where thousands of U.S. soldiers rest beneath uniform stone markers; and ubiquitous fresh bread and great chocolates.", "I Have Seen the Future of Europe \n\n The Eurocrats were thinking ahead when they made Brussels the \"Capital of Europe,\" headquarters of the emerging European Union. Though practically unknown in the United States, the union is one of Europe's biggest stories, an important organization trying to establish itself as a sort of metagovernment for European states. Entertainingly, the European Union is perhaps the sole bureaucracy left in the world that admits that its goal is to expand. And what better place to locate this new enterprise than Brussels, which may be a living preview of the Europe to come: swathed in red tape and pomp, paralyzed by constituency politics, declining at great cost. The European Union couldn't have picked a better home.", "most people would rather hear English than French, and in the French sections, Flemish is rarely welcome. Until recently, Belgian politics were dominated by an aging Francophone aristocracy, whose wealth was secured by Wallonian mines. But mining is a dying", "Yet, sympathy is usually with strikers, and cowed politicians give in to almost all demands from almost all quarters. Polls repeatedly show that majorities think government should give the workers more, a legacy of the European class system. Europe is plagued by families that have been filthy rich for generations--based on no useful contribution to society. And a residue of estates reminds voters of the landed gentry's historic role as parasites. But the link between government giving the workers more, and taxes and public debt rising, does not seem to have sunk in on this side of the Atlantic, except perhaps in the United Kingdom, where, perhaps not coincidentally, unemployment is relatively low. \n\n As in most of Europe, state-sanctioned monopolies drag down Belgian economic activity, and government barriers to entrepreneurs are much worse than anywhere in America. Sabena loses money even though it has government-protected air routes, a high percentage of business flyers, and the highest seat-mile prices in Europe.", "The union's command center is a cathedral to bureaucratic power, the only diplomatic structure I've ever been in that actually looks the way Hollywood depicts diplomatic life. At State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom, paint is peeling in the halls and people with titles like \"deputy director\" work in chintzy little Dilbert cubicles. At the marble-clad European Union headquarters, even midlevel Eurocrats have large, plush suites with leather chairs and original artwork on the walls. Ranks of big black-glass BMWs and Mercedes limos are parked at the structure's circular drive, motors wastefully idling. Landing a job in the Brussels Eurocracy has become the career goal of many of Europe's best graduates.", "But will the spooky level of Belgian corruption rub off on the euro? Observers consider Belgium the second-most corrupt European state, trailing only Italy. Last year, the Belgian secretary-general of NATO had to quit over charges that his Flemish Socialist Party accepted $50 million in bribes from a defense contractor. Police recently arrested two other top politicians and raided the headquarters of the French Socialist Party in connection with bribes from another defense firm. \n\n The European Union's Eurocrats have worthy ideas, such as persuading the continent's governments to agree on harmonious environmental and immigration policies. But the real overriding goal of the union and its executive arm, the European Commission (there's also a European Parliament here, but we can skip that), is self-aggrandizement. In conversations, Eurocrats are frank about their maneuvering for more money and empire: to wrest \"competence,\" or jurisdiction, away from national governments and vest it in Brussels is the open objective.", "Public strikes, particularly ones blocking traffic and commerce, are a regular event here, making it somewhat of a mystery how Belgium maintains its high living standard. In the past year, teachers, students, firefighters, civil servants, airline workers, and others have closed off large sections of Brussels to chant for higher benefits. Ground crews for Sabena, the national flag carrier, ran amok during a 1996 strike day at the airport, smashing the terminal's glass walls and doing millions of francs worth of damage, then demanding more money from the very government that was going to have to pay for the repairs. \n\n What are the protesters striking about? Typical working conditions in Belgium include retirement at 60 or younger, full pay for 32 hours of work, six weeks' paid vacation, and essentially unlimited sick days. Much more than high wages (which a profitable enterprise can bear), such work rules are what stymie the continent's economies, with overall Western European unemployment now at 10.9 percent, double the U.S. figure.", "Many tongues are spoken here, but multilingualism serves mainly to delineate constituent groups, not to facilitate communication. Southern Belgium, called Wallonia, is French; the northern portion, Flanders, is Dutch. The civic sphere", "In a sense, all European governments are angling to shift the blame for financial reality onto someone else via the euro. In theory, national currencies such as the pound, mark, and lira will all disappear, replaced by one universal tender. A unified currency makes economic sense, but trade efficiency is only one motive for many governments. Participation in the new currency requires nations to cut their national debt below 3 percent of GDP. A dirty little secret of Western Europe is that it has gone further into hock than the United States. U.S. public debt was down to 1.4 percent of GDP in 1996, and may drop below 1 percent this fiscal year. Germany, France, and Belgium all are running public debts at 3 percent or more, and Italy is at 7.4 percent. European national leaders know they've got to tackle their deficits, but none of them wants the heat for cutting featherbedding or generous social-payment systems. So the euro plan allows them to blame foreign interests for required reductions.", "more benefits. Their economic power on the rise, the Flemish have pressured for a dominant position in politics. The result is an uneasy compromise giving Flanders and Wallonia semiautonomy.", "The European Union's behavior synchs with its opulent circumstances. Meetings are held in secret, and few public-disclosure regulations apply. This is the future of European government? Just how competent the new organization may be is on display at Berlaymont, the first European Commission headquarters. Forerunner of the current sumptuous building, this vast skyscraper now sits near the center of Brussels unoccupied, its entire outer structure swathed in heavy tarpaulin. Berlaymont has been closed for nine years after an asbestos scare and a botched cleanup: European taxpayers have paid $50 million so far merely to keep the building closed, with air pumps running around the clock to prevent any fibers from wafting out. A mountain of scientific studies has shown that asbestos in walls is almost never dangerous: The only dangerous thing is trying to rip it out because that causes fibers to become airborne--exactly what has happened at Berlaymont. And if the European Union can't manage its continent any better than it manages its own buildings ...", "These rapacious European phone monopolies have given birth to independent call-back services. Once registered, you dial a number in the United States, where a computer with caller-ID recognizes you after one ring. You hang up to avoid a Belgacom charge, and the computer calls you back, providing you with a stateside dial tone so you can dial as if you were in the United States. Call-back services allow me to call the United States for 70 cents a minute, vs. the $2.60-per-minute Belgacom charge, and make it cheaper to call Antwerp--just 40 miles away--via California than directly. Naturally, European governments want to tax call-back services out of existence. Supposedly, the European telecom market will deregulate in 1999, and in anticipation of being phaser-blasted by true competition, Belgacom just sold 45 percent of itself to a consortium led by Ameritech. Foreign managers will now be blamed for cutting the deadwood.", "industry throughout Europe, and Wallonia now produces only 13 percent of Belgium's exports, vs. 68 percent for Flanders. The Flemish have jumped into electronics, trading, and other growth sectors, while the Walloons have stagnated, devoting their energies to demanding", "The ossified state of European telecom monopolies would stun American Webheads. One reason Slate is not a national obsession in Europe (as, of course, it is in the United States) is that Internet use remains a luxury here. The phone monopolies have priced out 800 access. Belgacom charges 5 cents per minute for connections to any Internet service provider, making the connection more expensive than the provider's service. Ten years ago Robert Reich, having seen the French Minitel experiment, warned that Europe would beat the United States to the next communication revolution--instead, U.S. Web entrepreneurs left Europe in the dust. Now European telecoms and communication bureaucrats spend their energies on blocking innovation and searching for ways to monopolize a new enterprise whose entire soul is decentralization." ] ]
valid	51256	[ "Why did Pashkov sell small arms to the Cubans?", "What best describes the relationship between Pashkov and Colonel James?", "Why is Zubov a comedic and ironic character for this story?", "What is a rest cure?", "Which of the following best describes the relationship between Pashkov and Nadezhda Brunhildova?", "Which of the following best describes the tone of this story?", "How did Colonel James get away at the end?", "What was Colonel James' mission?", "What was Boris Knackenpast's great accomplishment?", "Why isn't Pashkov angry with Medvedev?" ]	[ [ "It was actually Colonel James who sold small arms to the Cubans", "He wanted to use them as a scapegoat for his own plans", "He wanted to help another Communist country", "He wanted the Cubans to cause trouble for the Americans" ], [ "They are enemies", "They have no relationship", "They respect each other", "They are the same person" ], [ "He is cross-eyed", "He kidnaps people", "He trains animals", "He is dumb" ], [ "A drug", "A vacation", "A punishment", "A weapon" ], [ "They have no relationship", "They are friends", "They are enemies", "They are lovers" ], [ "Serious", "Romantic", "Comedic", "Scary" ], [ "He hid in a robot costume", "He threw a rock", "He did not get away", "He threw a grenade" ], [ "Impersonate Pashkov to gain information", "Capture Pashkov", "Kill Boris Knackenpast", "Get Boris Knackenpast to Sweden" ], [ "Evading capture by the Americans", "Evading capture by the Russians", "Pretending to be a robot", "Nobel prize for literature" ], [ "Medvedev is too talented for Pashkov to be angry with him", "Pashkov likes Boris too much", "Pashkov is dishonest too", "Petchareff ordered Pashkov to hide his feelings" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 1, 3, 4, 3, 2, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"No gun-play, caballeros,\" Pashkov went on in Spanish. \"We are in the\n Salvation Army charity house, not in a two-peso thriller. Besides, I\n deliver before I ask payment.\"\n\n\n \"Deliver what, senor?\"\n\n\n \"We favor any disturbance close to the United States. May I sit down?\"\n\n\n Between two beds were stacked some dozen crates of explosives. A small\n table was littered with papers.\n\n\n Sitting down at the table, Pashkov's elbow rested on an invoice, and\n moments later the invoice was tucked in his pocket.\n\n\n \"What kind of ammunition do you need, caballeros?\"\n\n\n The Cubans looked at each other. \"Thirty-o-six caliber, two-twenty\n grain. How much can you deliver?\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand rounds.\"\n\n\n \"Not much.\"", "Pashkov took four Havanas from the box they held out to him, stuck\n three in his breast pocket, and lit one.\n\n\n \"You come again, senor. We make much business.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Help retire Latin-American dictators to Siberia. More gold in\n Siberia than in Las Vegas.\"\n\n\n \"Hyi, hyi, that is funny. You come again.\"", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver.", "Pashkov picked up the phone, dialed the Soviet embassy, and got the\n chargé d'affaires. \"How is your underdeveloped countries fund?\" he\n asked.\n\n\n \"Always depleted, always replenished.\"\n\n\n \"I don't want any Russian brands.\"\n\n\n \"Nothing but foreign,\" the chargé buzzed. \"We got almost everything now\n through an American surplus outlet in Hamburg. Nationals get caught\n with American goods, Americans get blamed. Wonderful confusion. What do\n you need?\"\n\n\n \"Thirty-o-six two-twenty, three thousand—if you have it.\"\n\n\n \"Most popular. What else?\"\n\n\n \"Pineapples—one crate.\"\n\n\n \"Only confiscated German potatoes. Will that do?\"\n\n\n \"Fine. And a small can of sentimental caviar.\"", "\"Maybe three thousand. I'll toss in a box of hand grenades and a can of\n lysergic acid diethylamide.\"\n\n\n \"You have that? You have LSD-25?\"\n\n\n \"I have that. When are you leaving Stockholm?\"\n\n\n Again the young beards exchanged looks. \"Maybe we stay till tomorrow\n if you have more business. Three thousand rounds is not much. How much\n payment, senor?\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand kronor,\" Pashkov said, taking an envelope on the table\n and addressing it to Nadezhda Brunhildova, Kremlin, Moscow. No return\n address.\n\n\n \"Do you trust us to send the money?\"\n\n\n \"It is bad for you if I do not trust you,\" Pashkov said, smiling up at\n them.\n\n\n \"You can trust us. We shall send the money. Please take a cigar.\"", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's\n transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the\n ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It\n was traced to the Cubans in half an hour.\"\n\n\n Pashkov climbed into his flier. \"Well, it's fashionable to blame the\n Russians for everything.\" He waved his chubby hand, and took off.\n Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam.\n\n\n Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's\n office.\n\n\n \"Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff—no, let me talk to\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Seven One ... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference\n with Comrade Petchareff.\"", "\"What do you expect for seven thousand bucks—service? Look, boys, I'm\n just a honest businessman. I can't get it for you today. Have a seegar,\n Pablo.\"\n\n\n \"Tfu!\"\n\n\n \"All rightie, your cause is my cause. Maybe I can get it for you\n tonight. But you'll have to pay in advance. What do you say, Francisco?\"\n\n\n \"I counted the money. It is waiting for you. You deliver, we pay.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I trust you? I like you boys, I know you like me, but\n business is business. I gotta give something to my jobber, don't I?\"\n\n\n \"Gringo!\"\n\n\n At that moment Pashkov knocked on the door.\n\n\n From within: \"Shh!\nAlguien llama a la puerta.\n\"", "Professor Kristin saw Pashkov to the door. \"One suggestion, Colonel.\n Your r's are still too soft for a real Russian. Why do you Americans\n slur them like that? And I beg you, if you value your life, do not fail\n to watch your fricatives.\"\nThe roof captain saluted as Pashkov stepped out of the lift. His flier\n was serviced and ready.\n\n\n \"What weather in Moscow, Captain?\"\n\n\n \"Ceiling four thousand. We're having patrols half way out to sea. They\n are instructed to let you pass.\"\n\n\n A small incident, the roof captain explained. A Swedish Red Cross flier\n was missing from the National Hospital. Two Cuban agents had been\n arrested and a cache of small arms and ammunition was found. But no\n trace of the ambulance.\n\n\n \"I suppose the Cubans deny stealing the ambulance?\" Pashkov asked.", "\"My Cuban friends,\" Pashkov inquired in fluent English at the desk on\n the top floor. \"Are they in?\"\n\n\n The old desk clerk looked like a stork. \"Yu, room six fifteen,\" he\n clacked. \"Tree floors down. Aer yu Amerikan?\"\n\n\n \"Brazil.\"\n\n\n \"Ah so? You sprikker goot Inglish laik me.\"\n\n\n \"Very kind of you.\"\n\n\n He rode down three floors, found room 615, and stopped as he heard\n voices within.\n\n\n \"...\ndos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete\n. By seven o'clock tonight,\n okay, Gringo?\"", "He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. \"Take my flier back\n to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell\n Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today.\"\n\n\n Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded\n out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take\n off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service\n stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got\n into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three\n leaning forward.\n\n\n In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross\n flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the\n front seat of the stolen car, and followed.\n\n\n A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising\n ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee.", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"Too risky.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect\n more—make sure they stay in town.\nZubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, \"With your\n pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alive.\"\n\n\n Zubov pulled a long face. \"Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin\n Pashkov. Fast, clean job.\"\n\n\n Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. \"Have you had your eyes\n examined lately?\"\n\n\n \"No need,\" Zubov assured him with a smile. \"I see more than most\n people.\"\n\n\n Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. \"How many cigars in my hand?\"", "\"Twins?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight,\n Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why\n didn't you shave your hands today?\"\n\n\n Kolya looked guiltily at his hands.\n\n\n \"They've made progress,\" Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip\n from his hip pocket. \"Straight, lads, straight,\" he flicked the whip.\n \"We have company.\"\n\n\n \"Are their costumes your own idea?\"\n\n\n \"With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?\"\n\n\n Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and\n deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile.\n\n\n \"We have autos at the embassy pool,\" Zubov suggested.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "An addendum to the Stockholm file listed two Cuban agents operating\n from Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings. They were buying small arms\n and ammunition. He thought a moment, impressed the Cubans' address on\n his memory, and went to his flier.\n\n\n He did not fly to Hotel Reisen at once. Zubov's kidnaping team could\n wait. Coming slowly over Stockholm he spotted the National Hospital and\n circled.\n\n\n A line of ambulance fliers was parked on the ground in the ambulance\n court. On the hospital roof, he noticed, apart from private fliers,\n stood a flier that resembled his own.\n\n\n He veered away, detoured around Riddarholmen, and five minutes later\n landed on the roof of Fralsningsarmen's Economy Lodgings—the Salvation\n Army flophouse.", "A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the\n mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit\n eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with\n trembling forepaws and bowed twice again.\n\n\n Petchareff tore open the package. \"You got the real thing? No bad\n imitation?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly, exactly,\" the mouse piped. \"No difference, Comrade.\" He held\n his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered.\n\n\n Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was\n printed in indelible ink:\nstockholm national hospital\n\n courtesy of\n\n Coca-Cola\n\n\n Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. \"This is what Colonel James is\n wearing,\" he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried\n out.", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "\"Try and split the allies,\" Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the\n gown.\n\n\n Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. \"If Colonel James makes a\n monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your\n job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to\n our Cultural Information Center in Chicago.\"\n\n\n Pashkov winced.\n\n\n \"Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American\n colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is\n there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with\n a kidnaping team?\"\n\n\n \"His team is more agile. On your way.\"" ], [ "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "\"I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to\n talk very often.\"\n\n\n \"And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full\n of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted,\" Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster\n with a flourish.\n\"Your treatment is over, then?\" Pashkov asked. \"You are ready for your\n assignment?\"\n\n\n \"Ready.\"\n\n\n \"And that is?\"\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning.\"", "\"My God, sir,\" said Pashkov, \"what are you doing?\"\nThe robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he\n looked up. \"Ah, Colonel James,\" Boris said in a voice that seemed to\n come from a deep well. \"Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we\n have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin\n Pashkov.\"\nThe door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels.\n Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. \"Colonel James!\n What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on\n his way.\"\n\n\n Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov\n saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face.", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"Try and split the allies,\" Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the\n gown.\n\n\n Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. \"If Colonel James makes a\n monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your\n job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to\n our Cultural Information Center in Chicago.\"\n\n\n Pashkov winced.\n\n\n \"Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American\n colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is\n there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with\n a kidnaping team?\"\n\n\n \"His team is more agile. On your way.\"", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "\"Stupid!\" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker\n clicked and went dead.\n\n\n Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop.\n\n\n Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear,\n was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And\n Zubov was probably getting a rest cure.\n\n\n Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris\n Knackenpast's villa.\n\n\n \"You came fast, sir,\" the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. \"We\n did not expect you for another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\n Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time.", "\"I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming.\"\n\n\n Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow\n about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning.\n\n\n A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves,\n escorted Pashkov through rooms hung with chandeliers, tapestries,\n paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door\n clicked shut behind him.\nIn the room were three men, all of whom he recognized: Professor\n Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind,\n intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his\n Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur\n Fanti, the make-up surgeon.\n\n\n Pashkov bowed his head. \"Your majesty. Gentlemen.\"", "\"I'll never understand,\" said Petchareff, \"why all top secret agents\n have to look like bankers. Anastina says Colonel James was operated on\n by a Monsieur Fanti. What do you know about him?\"\n\n\n \"He's a theatrical surgeon.\"\n\n\n \"You're not playing one of your jokes, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be in my office in ten minutes. What size hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Short and fat,\" Pashkov said, and switched off.\n\n\n Most countries wanted to break his neck, and his own Motherland did not\n always trust him. But he enjoyed his work—enjoyed it as much as his\n closest professional rival, Colonel James, U.S.A.\nPashkov landed on the roof of Intelligence in the northeast corner of\n the Kremlin, hitched up his pants and rode down.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "\"Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's\n cross-eyed and buck-toothed.\"\n\n\n \"Beast!\" She switched him to Petchareff.\n\n\n \"What's been keeping you, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?\"\n\n\n \"Hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a\n hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James\n again. He looks like you now.\"\n\n\n Pashkov grunted.", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver." ], [ "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two\n assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last\n of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova.\n\n\n \"Pretend not to know me, will he?\" she yelled at Colonel James, picking\n up a rock.\n\n\n \"Hold it, citizenress,\" Colonel James said.\n\n\n \"Citizenress, is it?\" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov.\n\n\n \"I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty,\" Petchareff\n roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the\n guards surrounded the house.", "\"Two.\"\n\n\n At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered\n in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red\n trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun\n glasses.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here?\" cried Zubov. \"Why aren't you observing the\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened,\" the first\n ape said in a thick voice.\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Victim's room lights out,\" the ape said.\n\n\n \"My assistants,\" Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. \"Line up, line up,\n lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is\n Kolya. No,\nthis\nis Kolya and this one is Petya.\"", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "\"I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to\n talk very often.\"\n\n\n \"And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full\n of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted,\" Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster\n with a flourish.\n\"Your treatment is over, then?\" Pashkov asked. \"You are ready for your\n assignment?\"\n\n\n \"Ready.\"\n\n\n \"And that is?\"\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning.\"", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "\"Too risky.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect\n more—make sure they stay in town.\nZubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, \"With your\n pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alive.\"\n\n\n Zubov pulled a long face. \"Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin\n Pashkov. Fast, clean job.\"\n\n\n Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. \"Have you had your eyes\n examined lately?\"\n\n\n \"No need,\" Zubov assured him with a smile. \"I see more than most\n people.\"\n\n\n Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. \"How many cigars in my hand?\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's\n cross-eyed and buck-toothed.\"\n\n\n \"Beast!\" She switched him to Petchareff.\n\n\n \"What's been keeping you, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?\"\n\n\n \"Hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a\n hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James\n again. He looks like you now.\"\n\n\n Pashkov grunted.", "\"Twins?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight,\n Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why\n didn't you shave your hands today?\"\n\n\n Kolya looked guiltily at his hands.\n\n\n \"They've made progress,\" Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip\n from his hip pocket. \"Straight, lads, straight,\" he flicked the whip.\n \"We have company.\"\n\n\n \"Are their costumes your own idea?\"\n\n\n \"With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?\"\n\n\n Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and\n deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile.\n\n\n \"We have autos at the embassy pool,\" Zubov suggested.", "\"Try and split the allies,\" Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the\n gown.\n\n\n Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. \"If Colonel James makes a\n monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your\n job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to\n our Cultural Information Center in Chicago.\"\n\n\n Pashkov winced.\n\n\n \"Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American\n colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is\n there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with\n a kidnaping team?\"\n\n\n \"His team is more agile. On your way.\"", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov\n came in. \"Medvedev get my orders?\"\n\n\n \"He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris\n Knackenpast,\" Pashkov reported. \"When you give the word, he will call\nIzvestia\nand tell them Boris is dead.\"\n\n\n Petchareff glanced at his calendar. \"We have two other state funerals\n this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of\n Knackenpast's peace nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature,\" Pashkov\n promised, raising a chubby finger, \"will be a pearl necklace of\n government slogans.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. \"The man from the Bolshoi Theater is\n here, Comrade.\"\n\n\n \"Send him in.\"" ], [ "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund—alias Anastasia\n Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee,\n Moscow Third Worker's District.\n\n\n \"Wonderful morning, Colonel James!\"\n\n\n Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing.\n\n\n She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. \"Cloudy, damp, and\n windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine\n in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general\n strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an\n idealist want?\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Miss Bjorklund.\"", "\"I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to\n talk very often.\"\n\n\n \"And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full\n of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted,\" Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster\n with a flourish.\n\"Your treatment is over, then?\" Pashkov asked. \"You are ready for your\n assignment?\"\n\n\n \"Ready.\"\n\n\n \"And that is?\"\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning.\"", "A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the\n mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit\n eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with\n trembling forepaws and bowed twice again.\n\n\n Petchareff tore open the package. \"You got the real thing? No bad\n imitation?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly, exactly,\" the mouse piped. \"No difference, Comrade.\" He held\n his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered.\n\n\n Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was\n printed in indelible ink:\nstockholm national hospital\n\n courtesy of\n\n Coca-Cola\n\n\n Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. \"This is what Colonel James is\n wearing,\" he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried\n out.", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "\"Two.\"\n\n\n At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered\n in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red\n trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun\n glasses.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here?\" cried Zubov. \"Why aren't you observing the\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened,\" the first\n ape said in a thick voice.\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Victim's room lights out,\" the ape said.\n\n\n \"My assistants,\" Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. \"Line up, line up,\n lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is\n Kolya. No,\nthis\nis Kolya and this one is Petya.\"", "The breakfast tray was crammed with a liter of orange juice, four\n boiled eggs, six slices of bacon, four pancakes, two pork chops, four\n slices of toast, a tumbler of vodka, a pot of coffee and two cigars.\n\n\n \"Ah, Colonel,\" Anastina said as Pashkov fell to, \"why did you let them\n change your face? It does not become you at all.\"\n\n\n \"Part of my job. Don't you think I am more handsome now?\"\n\n\n Anastina laughed shrilly. \"That bulbous nose handsome? What woman could\n fall in love with a nose like that?\"\n\n\n \"It shows determination. I wish I had this nose permanently.\"\n\n\n \"You mustn't talk like that. But I'll ignore your nose if you tell me\n more about White Sands Proving Grounds, as you promised.\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "\"Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's\n cross-eyed and buck-toothed.\"\n\n\n \"Beast!\" She switched him to Petchareff.\n\n\n \"What's been keeping you, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?\"\n\n\n \"Hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a\n hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James\n again. He looks like you now.\"\n\n\n Pashkov grunted.", "\"I want a vehicle off the street. Then report back here with your\n lads.\"\n\n\n Petya gave Kolya a box on the ear.\n\n\n \"Boys, boys!\" Zubov cracked the whip. \"Out you go. A job for Gospodin\n Pashkov, lads. They don't get enough exercise,\" he grinned, backing out\n after them. \"With your pardon, I'll thrash them later.\"\n\n\n And they were gone. Pashkov turned to the hospital maps and studied\n them before taking a nap.\nShortly before dawn, Zubov's team returned, their mission accomplished.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, an excellent Mercedes,\" Zubov reported.\n\n\n Pashkov had changed into the hospital gown with the Coca-Cola legend on\n the back. He glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock in the morning.", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "\"How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?\" the king\n asked.\n\n\n \"A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left\n side of his face—it's all lopsided.\"\n\n\n \"But we can't spare a week,\" Professor Kristin said.\n\n\n \"With your majesty's permission,\" Pashkov offered, \"I am willing to go\n as I am. Indeed, my plans call for immediate departure.\"\n\n\n \"It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James,\" Gustavus IX said,\n \"and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks.\"", "\"I'll never understand,\" said Petchareff, \"why all top secret agents\n have to look like bankers. Anastina says Colonel James was operated on\n by a Monsieur Fanti. What do you know about him?\"\n\n\n \"He's a theatrical surgeon.\"\n\n\n \"You're not playing one of your jokes, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hardly.\"\n\n\n \"You'd better be in my office in ten minutes. What size hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Short and fat,\" Pashkov said, and switched off.\n\n\n Most countries wanted to break his neck, and his own Motherland did not\n always trust him. But he enjoyed his work—enjoyed it as much as his\n closest professional rival, Colonel James, U.S.A.\nPashkov landed on the roof of Intelligence in the northeast corner of\n the Kremlin, hitched up his pants and rode down.", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"Listen carefully, lieutenant.\" Pashkov described the American agent.\n \"But his left cheekbone is lower than mine—about four centimeters. He\n may be armed, so be careful.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant stared. \"Shall we kill him?\"\n\n\n \"No, no. Put him in a cage.\"\n\n\n As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule\n window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty.\n\n\n He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody.\n The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and\n listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing\n desk, sat Boris Knackenpast.\n\n\n The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck.", "He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and\n flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio\n and got Petchareff's secretary. \"Nadezhda?\"\n\n\n \"I know what you're up to, Seven One Three,\" Nadezhda Brunhildova said.\n \"Don't try to fool\nme\n, you confidence man. You are coming in?\"\n\n\n \"In ten minutes. What have I done now?\"\n\n\n \"You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so\n what are you doing in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina,\n that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?\"" ], [ "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova\n goodby. \"I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender\n kiss.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom\n brigade. \"Monster!\" She seized him by the collar. \"Is Anastina\n dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"Darling!\"\n\n\n \"Bitter sweetness!\" she howled, dropping him. \"Go, love. Make me\n miserable.\"\nPashkov spent an hour at Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on\n in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session,\n a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from\n India.", "He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and\n flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio\n and got Petchareff's secretary. \"Nadezhda?\"\n\n\n \"I know what you're up to, Seven One Three,\" Nadezhda Brunhildova said.\n \"Don't try to fool\nme\n, you confidence man. You are coming in?\"\n\n\n \"In ten minutes. What have I done now?\"\n\n\n \"You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so\n what are you doing in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina,\n that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?\"", "Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two\n assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last\n of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova.\n\n\n \"Pretend not to know me, will he?\" she yelled at Colonel James, picking\n up a rock.\n\n\n \"Hold it, citizenress,\" Colonel James said.\n\n\n \"Citizenress, is it?\" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov.\n\n\n \"I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty,\" Petchareff\n roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the\n guards surrounded the house.", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "\"Stupid!\" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker\n clicked and went dead.\n\n\n Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop.\n\n\n Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear,\n was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And\n Zubov was probably getting a rest cure.\n\n\n Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris\n Knackenpast's villa.\n\n\n \"You came fast, sir,\" the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. \"We\n did not expect you for another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\n Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time.", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver.", "He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. \"Take my flier back\n to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell\n Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today.\"\n\n\n Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded\n out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take\n off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service\n stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got\n into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three\n leaning forward.\n\n\n In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross\n flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the\n front seat of the stolen car, and followed.\n\n\n A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising\n ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee.", "The two apes took up the cry, \"Grenade, grenade!\" and flattened\n themselves behind the tree.\n\n\n Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet.\n\n\n Only Petchareff remained standing. \"Stop the robot!\"\n\n\n Nobody moved.\n\n\n Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine\n hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the\n clouds towards Stockholm.\n\n\n Petchareff relit his cigar. \"Tfui, tastes of monkey hair.\"\n\n\n Medvedev shambled over. \"Was the grenade a dud?\"\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov,\" Petchareff spat. \"Your\n deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—\"", "In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov\n came in. \"Medvedev get my orders?\"\n\n\n \"He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris\n Knackenpast,\" Pashkov reported. \"When you give the word, he will call\nIzvestia\nand tell them Boris is dead.\"\n\n\n Petchareff glanced at his calendar. \"We have two other state funerals\n this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of\n Knackenpast's peace nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature,\" Pashkov\n promised, raising a chubby finger, \"will be a pearl necklace of\n government slogans.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. \"The man from the Bolshoi Theater is\n here, Comrade.\"\n\n\n \"Send him in.\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "\"I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming.\"\n\n\n Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow\n about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning.\n\n\n A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves,\n escorted Pashkov through rooms hung with chandeliers, tapestries,\n paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door\n clicked shut behind him.\nIn the room were three men, all of whom he recognized: Professor\n Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind,\n intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his\n Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur\n Fanti, the make-up surgeon.\n\n\n Pashkov bowed his head. \"Your majesty. Gentlemen.\"", "He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund—alias Anastasia\n Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee,\n Moscow Third Worker's District.\n\n\n \"Wonderful morning, Colonel James!\"\n\n\n Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing.\n\n\n She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. \"Cloudy, damp, and\n windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine\n in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general\n strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an\n idealist want?\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Miss Bjorklund.\"", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"" ], [ "A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the\n mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit\n eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with\n trembling forepaws and bowed twice again.\n\n\n Petchareff tore open the package. \"You got the real thing? No bad\n imitation?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly, exactly,\" the mouse piped. \"No difference, Comrade.\" He held\n his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered.\n\n\n Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was\n printed in indelible ink:\nstockholm national hospital\n\n courtesy of\n\n Coca-Cola\n\n\n Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. \"This is what Colonel James is\n wearing,\" he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried\n out.", "The breakfast tray was crammed with a liter of orange juice, four\n boiled eggs, six slices of bacon, four pancakes, two pork chops, four\n slices of toast, a tumbler of vodka, a pot of coffee and two cigars.\n\n\n \"Ah, Colonel,\" Anastina said as Pashkov fell to, \"why did you let them\n change your face? It does not become you at all.\"\n\n\n \"Part of my job. Don't you think I am more handsome now?\"\n\n\n Anastina laughed shrilly. \"That bulbous nose handsome? What woman could\n fall in love with a nose like that?\"\n\n\n \"It shows determination. I wish I had this nose permanently.\"\n\n\n \"You mustn't talk like that. But I'll ignore your nose if you tell me\n more about White Sands Proving Grounds, as you promised.\"", "\"Extraordinary!\" Professor Kristin said.\n\n\n Pashkov turned to the surgeon. \"Monsieur, should my face have such a\n frivolous expression?\"\n\n\n M. Fanti raised his eyebrows, but did not answer.\n\n\n \"I thought,\" said Pashkov, \"that Gospodin Pashkov's face has a more\n brutal look.\"\n\n\n \"Propaganda,\" said the artist. But he came closer and looked at\n Pashkov's face with sudden interest.\n\n\n Professor Kristin said, \"Colonel James, we presume you have studied\n the problem in detail. I'm afraid we have delayed announcing the Nobel\n prize for literature much too long. How soon can you bring Boris\n Knackenpast to Stockholm?\"", "\"Listen carefully, lieutenant.\" Pashkov described the American agent.\n \"But his left cheekbone is lower than mine—about four centimeters. He\n may be armed, so be careful.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant stared. \"Shall we kill him?\"\n\n\n \"No, no. Put him in a cage.\"\n\n\n As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule\n window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty.\n\n\n He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody.\n The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and\n listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing\n desk, sat Boris Knackenpast.\n\n\n The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck.", "\"What do you expect for seven thousand bucks—service? Look, boys, I'm\n just a honest businessman. I can't get it for you today. Have a seegar,\n Pablo.\"\n\n\n \"Tfu!\"\n\n\n \"All rightie, your cause is my cause. Maybe I can get it for you\n tonight. But you'll have to pay in advance. What do you say, Francisco?\"\n\n\n \"I counted the money. It is waiting for you. You deliver, we pay.\"\n\n\n \"But how can I trust you? I like you boys, I know you like me, but\n business is business. I gotta give something to my jobber, don't I?\"\n\n\n \"Gringo!\"\n\n\n At that moment Pashkov knocked on the door.\n\n\n From within: \"Shh!\nAlguien llama a la puerta.\n\"", "The two apes took up the cry, \"Grenade, grenade!\" and flattened\n themselves behind the tree.\n\n\n Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet.\n\n\n Only Petchareff remained standing. \"Stop the robot!\"\n\n\n Nobody moved.\n\n\n Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine\n hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the\n clouds towards Stockholm.\n\n\n Petchareff relit his cigar. \"Tfui, tastes of monkey hair.\"\n\n\n Medvedev shambled over. \"Was the grenade a dud?\"\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov,\" Petchareff spat. \"Your\n deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"Two.\"\n\n\n At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered\n in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red\n trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun\n glasses.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here?\" cried Zubov. \"Why aren't you observing the\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened,\" the first\n ape said in a thick voice.\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Victim's room lights out,\" the ape said.\n\n\n \"My assistants,\" Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. \"Line up, line up,\n lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is\n Kolya. No,\nthis\nis Kolya and this one is Petya.\"", "\"My Cuban friends,\" Pashkov inquired in fluent English at the desk on\n the top floor. \"Are they in?\"\n\n\n The old desk clerk looked like a stork. \"Yu, room six fifteen,\" he\n clacked. \"Tree floors down. Aer yu Amerikan?\"\n\n\n \"Brazil.\"\n\n\n \"Ah so? You sprikker goot Inglish laik me.\"\n\n\n \"Very kind of you.\"\n\n\n He rode down three floors, found room 615, and stopped as he heard\n voices within.\n\n\n \"...\ndos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete\n. By seven o'clock tonight,\n okay, Gringo?\"", "In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov\n came in. \"Medvedev get my orders?\"\n\n\n \"He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris\n Knackenpast,\" Pashkov reported. \"When you give the word, he will call\nIzvestia\nand tell them Boris is dead.\"\n\n\n Petchareff glanced at his calendar. \"We have two other state funerals\n this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of\n Knackenpast's peace nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature,\" Pashkov\n promised, raising a chubby finger, \"will be a pearl necklace of\n government slogans.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. \"The man from the Bolshoi Theater is\n here, Comrade.\"\n\n\n \"Send him in.\"", "\"Twins?\"\n\n\n \"Not exactly. Same genetic experiment. Good lads. Stand straight,\n Petya. Don't curl your feet like that, Kolya, I've told you before. Why\n didn't you shave your hands today?\"\n\n\n Kolya looked guiltily at his hands.\n\n\n \"They've made progress,\" Zubov assured Pashkov, pulling a small whip\n from his hip pocket. \"Straight, lads, straight,\" he flicked the whip.\n \"We have company.\"\n\n\n \"Are their costumes your own idea?\"\n\n\n \"With your pardon, for purposes of concealment. What are your orders?\"\n\n\n Pashkov told them to pick up the boxes of ammunition at the embassy and\n deliver them to the Cubans, and then to commandeer a private automobile.\n\n\n \"We have autos at the embassy pool,\" Zubov suggested.", "In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova\n goodby. \"I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender\n kiss.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom\n brigade. \"Monster!\" She seized him by the collar. \"Is Anastina\n dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"Darling!\"\n\n\n \"Bitter sweetness!\" she howled, dropping him. \"Go, love. Make me\n miserable.\"\nPashkov spent an hour at Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on\n in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session,\n a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from\n India.", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "\"They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's\n transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the\n ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It\n was traced to the Cubans in half an hour.\"\n\n\n Pashkov climbed into his flier. \"Well, it's fashionable to blame the\n Russians for everything.\" He waved his chubby hand, and took off.\n Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam.\n\n\n Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's\n office.\n\n\n \"Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff—no, let me talk to\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Seven One ... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference\n with Comrade Petchareff.\"", "\"Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's\n cross-eyed and buck-toothed.\"\n\n\n \"Beast!\" She switched him to Petchareff.\n\n\n \"What's been keeping you, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?\"\n\n\n \"Hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a\n hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James\n again. He looks like you now.\"\n\n\n Pashkov grunted.", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver." ], [ "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. \"Take my flier back\n to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell\n Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today.\"\n\n\n Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded\n out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take\n off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service\n stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got\n into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three\n leaning forward.\n\n\n In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross\n flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the\n front seat of the stolen car, and followed.\n\n\n A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising\n ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "\"Stupid!\" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker\n clicked and went dead.\n\n\n Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop.\n\n\n Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear,\n was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And\n Zubov was probably getting a rest cure.\n\n\n Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris\n Knackenpast's villa.\n\n\n \"You came fast, sir,\" the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. \"We\n did not expect you for another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\n Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time.", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two\n assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last\n of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova.\n\n\n \"Pretend not to know me, will he?\" she yelled at Colonel James, picking\n up a rock.\n\n\n \"Hold it, citizenress,\" Colonel James said.\n\n\n \"Citizenress, is it?\" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov.\n\n\n \"I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty,\" Petchareff\n roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the\n guards surrounded the house.", "\"Too risky.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect\n more—make sure they stay in town.\nZubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, \"With your\n pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alive.\"\n\n\n Zubov pulled a long face. \"Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin\n Pashkov. Fast, clean job.\"\n\n\n Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. \"Have you had your eyes\n examined lately?\"\n\n\n \"No need,\" Zubov assured him with a smile. \"I see more than most\n people.\"\n\n\n Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. \"How many cigars in my hand?\"", "The two apes took up the cry, \"Grenade, grenade!\" and flattened\n themselves behind the tree.\n\n\n Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet.\n\n\n Only Petchareff remained standing. \"Stop the robot!\"\n\n\n Nobody moved.\n\n\n Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine\n hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the\n clouds towards Stockholm.\n\n\n Petchareff relit his cigar. \"Tfui, tastes of monkey hair.\"\n\n\n Medvedev shambled over. \"Was the grenade a dud?\"\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov,\" Petchareff spat. \"Your\n deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—\"", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to\n talk very often.\"\n\n\n \"And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full\n of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted,\" Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster\n with a flourish.\n\"Your treatment is over, then?\" Pashkov asked. \"You are ready for your\n assignment?\"\n\n\n \"Ready.\"\n\n\n \"And that is?\"\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning.\"", "\"How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?\" the king\n asked.\n\n\n \"A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left\n side of his face—it's all lopsided.\"\n\n\n \"But we can't spare a week,\" Professor Kristin said.\n\n\n \"With your majesty's permission,\" Pashkov offered, \"I am willing to go\n as I am. Indeed, my plans call for immediate departure.\"\n\n\n \"It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James,\" Gustavus IX said,\n \"and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks.\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "\"My God, sir,\" said Pashkov, \"what are you doing?\"\nThe robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he\n looked up. \"Ah, Colonel James,\" Boris said in a voice that seemed to\n come from a deep well. \"Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we\n have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin\n Pashkov.\"\nThe door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels.\n Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. \"Colonel James!\n What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on\n his way.\"\n\n\n Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov\n saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face." ], [ "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"I hope your sacrifice won't be permanent?\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"That would be too much. How is my Russian? The truth, now.\"\n\n\n \"Excellent. Put up your gun, Zubov. Colonel James and I don't get to\n talk very often.\"\n\n\n \"And a pity we don't. Good manners accomplish more than an opera full\n of cloaks and daggers. Cigarette?\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted,\" Zubov said, slipping his gun into its holster\n with a flourish.\n\"Your treatment is over, then?\" Pashkov asked. \"You are ready for your\n assignment?\"\n\n\n \"Ready.\"\n\n\n \"And that is?\"\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate. I must report to the Palace this morning.\"", "\"Try and split the allies,\" Pashkov muttered, reading the legend on the\n gown.\n\n\n Petchareff blew cigar smoke in his face. \"If Colonel James makes a\n monkey of you once more, you're through, Pashkov. You don't take your\n job seriously enough. You bungle this and I'll have you transferred to\n our Cultural Information Center in Chicago.\"\n\n\n Pashkov winced.\n\n\n \"Now, you'll go to Stockholm and switch places with the American\n colonel and find out what they're up to. Zubov's kidnaping team is\n there already, at Hotel Reisen. Any questions?\"\n\n\n \"I thought Zubov was a zoological warfare expert. What is he doing with\n a kidnaping team?\"\n\n\n \"His team is more agile. On your way.\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "Zubov's big tooth settled respectfully over his lower lip. His small\n eyes were so closely set that he looked cockeyed when he focused them\n on his superior.\n\n\n \"With your pardon, I shall conduct you to our suite. Plans for\n kidnaping of Colonel James all ready.\"\n\n\n \"Here's a cigar for you.\"\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Reduced unavoidable fatalities to six.\" Zubov\n counted on his long hard fingers. \"Two watchmen, three nurses, one\n doctor.\"\n\n\n In the hotel corridor, Zubov looked before and after, his eyes crossed\n suspiciously, and peered around corners. They got to their suite\n without incident, and Pashkov gave him another cigar.\n\n\n \"Gratefully accepted. Here is a map of hospital and grounds. Here is a\n map of twenty-third floor. Here is a map of Colonel James' room. Here\n is hospital routine between midnight and dawn. With your pardon—\"", "Zubov leaped out next, his big front tooth flashing. Then his two\n assistants, Petya and Kolya, tumbled out in their coats and hats. Last\n of all to emerge from the flier was Nadezhda Brunhildova.\n\n\n \"Pretend not to know me, will he?\" she yelled at Colonel James, picking\n up a rock.\n\n\n \"Hold it, citizenress,\" Colonel James said.\n\n\n \"Citizenress, is it?\" The rock flew over his head and felled Zubov.\n\n\n \"I warned you both, no kitchen squabbles while on duty,\" Petchareff\n roared. He snapped an order to the lieutenants of guards, and the\n guards surrounded the house.", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "\"How much time to correct the error then, Monsieur Fanti?\" the king\n asked.\n\n\n \"A week at least. His skin needs a rest. I must rework the whole left\n side of his face—it's all lopsided.\"\n\n\n \"But we can't spare a week,\" Professor Kristin said.\n\n\n \"With your majesty's permission,\" Pashkov offered, \"I am willing to go\n as I am. Indeed, my plans call for immediate departure.\"\n\n\n \"It is a good thing you do for us, Colonel James,\" Gustavus IX said,\n \"and a courageous thing. Please accept our thanks.\"", "\"Stupid!\" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker\n clicked and went dead.\n\n\n Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop.\n\n\n Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear,\n was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And\n Zubov was probably getting a rest cure.\n\n\n Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris\n Knackenpast's villa.\n\n\n \"You came fast, sir,\" the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. \"We\n did not expect you for another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\n Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time.", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"Too risky.\"\n\n\n \"It's all right. It will fall to local authorities by tomorrow.\"\n\n\n Pashkov put down the receiver. Give the Cubans enough to expect\n more—make sure they stay in town.\nZubov was cross-checking his kidnaping plans. He said, \"With your\n pardon, do we take Colonel James alive or dead-or-alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alive.\"\n\n\n Zubov pulled a long face. \"Dead-or-alive would be easier, Gospodin\n Pashkov. Fast, clean job.\"\n\n\n Pashkov squinted at Zubov's crossed eyes. \"Have you had your eyes\n examined lately?\"\n\n\n \"No need,\" Zubov assured him with a smile. \"I see more than most\n people.\"\n\n\n Pashkov held up his remaining cigar. \"How many cigars in my hand?\"", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "He tossed his bundle of clothing to the first ape. \"Take my flier back\n to Moscow, Kolya lad. Give my clothes to Nadezhda Brunhildova, and tell\n Comrade Petchareff to expect Colonel James today.\"\n\n\n Clutching the bundle, Kolya stuck his tongue out at Petya and bounded\n out of the room. They waited at the window until they saw Kolya take\n off in Pashkov's flier. Then they made their way down the service\n stairs to the alley, Pashkov dressed only in the hospital gown; got\n into the stolen Mercedes and drove to the National Hospital, all three\n leaning forward.\n\n\n In the ambulance court, Zubov and Petya moved quickly to a Red Cross\n flier. Pashkov dropped the invoice he had lifted from the Cubans on the\n front seat of the stolen car, and followed.\n\n\n A watchman emerged from his hut, looked idly up at the rising\n ambulance, and shuffled back to his morning coffee.", "\"My God, sir,\" said Pashkov, \"what are you doing?\"\nThe robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he\n looked up. \"Ah, Colonel James,\" Boris said in a voice that seemed to\n come from a deep well. \"Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we\n have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin\n Pashkov.\"\nThe door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels.\n Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. \"Colonel James!\n What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on\n his way.\"\n\n\n Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov\n saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "A small man hurried into the room. He had a narrow face and the\n mustache of a mouse and a mousy nose, but his eyes were big rabbit\n eyes. He bowed twice quickly, placed a package on the desk with\n trembling forepaws and bowed twice again.\n\n\n Petchareff tore open the package. \"You got the real thing? No bad\n imitation?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly, exactly,\" the mouse piped. \"No difference, Comrade.\" He held\n his paws as in prayer and his pointed mouth quivered.\n\n\n Petchareff held up the hospital gown. On the back of the gown was\n printed in indelible ink:\nstockholm national hospital\n\n courtesy of\n\n Coca-Cola\n\n\n Petchareff tossed the gown to Pashkov. \"This is what Colonel James is\n wearing,\" he said, dismissing the mouse, who bowed twice and scurried\n out." ], [ "So there it was: Boris Knackenpast a supreme success, as Pashkov had\n suspected. It would be amusing to tell robotist Medvedev about it.\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate,\" Pashkov said. \"Everything depends on my not\n running into Gospodin Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"We can't wait any longer,\" Professor Kristin said. \"Fortunately, we\n have an ally in the enemy camp. The robotist, Medvedev, is expecting\n you at Knackenpast's villa.\"\n\n\n \"Bad show,\" M. Fanti said suddenly. \"No good. His left cheekbone is at\n least four centimeters too high.\"\n\n\n The men looked at the surgeon, then at Pashkov.\n\n\n M. Fanti fingered Pashkov's cheekbone. \"How could I have made such a\n mistake! Just look at him. People laugh at such faces.\"", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"", "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"Extraordinary!\" Professor Kristin said.\n\n\n Pashkov turned to the surgeon. \"Monsieur, should my face have such a\n frivolous expression?\"\n\n\n M. Fanti raised his eyebrows, but did not answer.\n\n\n \"I thought,\" said Pashkov, \"that Gospodin Pashkov's face has a more\n brutal look.\"\n\n\n \"Propaganda,\" said the artist. But he came closer and looked at\n Pashkov's face with sudden interest.\n\n\n Professor Kristin said, \"Colonel James, we presume you have studied\n the problem in detail. I'm afraid we have delayed announcing the Nobel\n prize for literature much too long. How soon can you bring Boris\n Knackenpast to Stockholm?\"", "\"Listen carefully, lieutenant.\" Pashkov described the American agent.\n \"But his left cheekbone is lower than mine—about four centimeters. He\n may be armed, so be careful.\"\n\n\n The lieutenant stared. \"Shall we kill him?\"\n\n\n \"No, no. Put him in a cage.\"\n\n\n As Pashkov ran up the steps to the villa, the curtain in the vestibule\n window stirred. But when he entered, the vestibule was empty.\n\n\n He looked in the dining room, the music room, the library. Nobody.\n The house was strangely quiet. He came to the door of the study and\n listened. Not a sound. He went in and there, behind the large writing\n desk, sat Boris Knackenpast.\n\n\n The robot was unscrewing screws imbedded in his neck.", "\"Capitalist hell and damnation, now I can't tell them apart myself,\"\n Petchareff said. \"Zubov!\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n \"Which one's the real Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Hhng?\"\n\n\n But Colonel James was running to the flier, throwing Nadezhda's rock at\n Petchareff and running.\n\n\n \"Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled, and flung himself to the ground.\n\n\n At the same moment Boris Knackenpast ran from the house to the flier,\n his robot gear clattering like Don Quixote's armor.\n\n\n The guards scattered and dove for cover.\n\n\n \"Down, lads! Grenade!\" Pashkov yelled.", "In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov\n came in. \"Medvedev get my orders?\"\n\n\n \"He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris\n Knackenpast,\" Pashkov reported. \"When you give the word, he will call\nIzvestia\nand tell them Boris is dead.\"\n\n\n Petchareff glanced at his calendar. \"We have two other state funerals\n this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of\n Knackenpast's peace nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature,\" Pashkov\n promised, raising a chubby finger, \"will be a pearl necklace of\n government slogans.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. \"The man from the Bolshoi Theater is\n here, Comrade.\"\n\n\n \"Send him in.\"", "\"Stupid!\" Petchareff's voice sounded behind Nadezhda's, and the speaker\n clicked and went dead.\n\n\n Pashkov dove into the clouds and brought his flier to a hovering stop.\n\n\n Petchareff did not believe he was Pashkov. Colonel James, it was clear,\n was at that moment in Petchareff's office, impersonating Pashkov. And\n Zubov was probably getting a rest cure.\n\n\n Pashkov crawled out of the cloud and skimmed northeast to Mir, Boris\n Knackenpast's villa.\n\n\n \"You came fast, sir,\" the lieutenant of guards welcomed him at Mir. \"We\n did not expect you for another fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\n Fifteen minutes. The colonel was not wasting time.", "He took off for Moscow, poking his flier up through the clouds and\n flying close to them, as was his habit. Then he switched on the radio\n and got Petchareff's secretary. \"Nadezhda?\"\n\n\n \"I know what you're up to, Seven One Three,\" Nadezhda Brunhildova said.\n \"Don't try to fool\nme\n, you confidence man. You are coming in?\"\n\n\n \"In ten minutes. What have I done now?\"\n\n\n \"You were supposed to make funeral arrangements for Knackenpast, so\n what are you doing in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"You're lying and I'll kill you. Don't you think I know about Anastina,\n that she-nurse in the Stockholm National Hospital?\"", "He was awakened by the nurse, Anastina Bjorklund—alias Anastasia\n Semionovna Bezumnaya, formerly of the Stakhanovite Booster's Committee,\n Moscow Third Worker's District.\n\n\n \"Wonderful morning, Colonel James!\"\n\n\n Petchareff seldom let one agent know what another was doing.\n\n\n She put a big breakfast tray on Pashkov's lap. \"Cloudy, damp, and\n windy. London stock market caves in, race riots in South Africa, famine\n in India, earthquake in Japan, floods in the United States, general\n strike in France, new crisis in Berlin. I ask you, what more can an\n idealist want?\"\n\n\n \"Good morning, Miss Bjorklund.\"", "\"I am Gospodin Pashkov now, Captain. To everybody.\"\n\n\n \"Of course, sir. I'll ring down you are coming.\"\n\n\n Pashkov glanced at his watch. Colonel James would be landing in Moscow\n about now and taken to Comrade Petchareff for questioning.\n\n\n A manservant in velvet cutaways, patent leather shoes and white gloves,\n escorted Pashkov through rooms hung with chandeliers, tapestries,\n paintings. Pashkov entered the last room and stopped as the door\n clicked shut behind him.\nIn the room were three men, all of whom he recognized: Professor\n Kristin of the Swedish Academy, a white-haired old man with a kind,\n intelligent face; the king, Gustavus IX, a thin old man stroking his\n Vandyke, sitting under a portrait of Frederick the Great; and Monsieur\n Fanti, the make-up surgeon.\n\n\n Pashkov bowed his head. \"Your majesty. Gentlemen.\"", "The two apes took up the cry, \"Grenade, grenade!\" and flattened\n themselves behind the tree.\n\n\n Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet.\n\n\n Only Petchareff remained standing. \"Stop the robot!\"\n\n\n Nobody moved.\n\n\n Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine\n hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the\n clouds towards Stockholm.\n\n\n Petchareff relit his cigar. \"Tfui, tastes of monkey hair.\"\n\n\n Medvedev shambled over. \"Was the grenade a dud?\"\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov,\" Petchareff spat. \"Your\n deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—\"", "\"My God, sir,\" said Pashkov, \"what are you doing?\"\nThe robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he\n looked up. \"Ah, Colonel James,\" Boris said in a voice that seemed to\n come from a deep well. \"Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we\n have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin\n Pashkov.\"\nThe door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels.\n Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. \"Colonel James!\n What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on\n his way.\"\n\n\n Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov\n saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face.", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "In the front office, Pashkov stopped to kiss Nadezhda Brunhildova\n goodby. \"I may not return from this dangerous mission. Give me a tender\n kiss.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda was a big girl with hefty arms, captain of her local broom\n brigade. \"Monster!\" She seized him by the collar. \"Is Anastina\n dangerous?\"\n\n\n \"Darling!\"\n\n\n \"Bitter sweetness!\" she howled, dropping him. \"Go, love. Make me\n miserable.\"\nPashkov spent an hour at Central Intelligence. Nothing unusual going on\n in Stockholm: an industrial exhibit, the Swedish Academy in session,\n a sociology seminar on prison reform, a forty-man trade mission from\n India.", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver.", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James." ], [ "The sad thing about us, thought Pashkov, is that Medvedev could not\n trust even me. But then I could not trust Medvedev, either. Yes, that's\n the trouble with us.\n\n\n \"I hope you need no luggage, Mister Knackenpast,\" Pashkov said. \"We\n must be off at once.\"\n\n\n \"Too late!\" the old valet said from the window.\n\n\n Colonel James had landed. But as he climbed down from his flier, the\n guards closed a circle about him.\n\n\n \"He'll keep,\" Pashkov said, hitching up his pants. \"Let's be off,\n Mister Knackenpast. It won't take long for Petchareff to smell us out.\"\n\n\n \"Look!\"\n\n\n The guards fell back from the flier and snapped to attention. Chewing\n on his cigar furiously, out stepped Petchareff.", "\"Darling!\" Nadezhda threw on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Not in public,\" Pashkov said.\n\n\n \"Wait a minute,\" Petchareff said. \"Nadezhda Brunhildova, how do you\n know he really is Pashkov? If he's actually Colonel James, I can shoot\n him summarily. He\ndoes\nlook like Colonel James to me.\"\n\n\n \"But if you're mistaken?\" Medvedev put in nervously.\n\n\n \"We all make mistakes,\" Petchareff said. \"What would history be without\n mistakes?\"\n\n\n \"I don't trust him either,\" Nadezhda said. \"But I know my Pashkov. If\n he's not Pashkov, I shall let you know in the morning.\"", "\"Don't you know me, chief? Me, Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"Curse me,\" Nadezhda said, staring at him. \"Another Pashkov.\"\n\n\n A terrible howl came from Zubov. Petya and Kolya, imitating\n Petchareff's efforts to revive their master, were battering Zubov's\n face with their slouched hats.\n\n\n \"Stand back!\" Kolya screamed, smashing his hat into Zubov's face. \"He\n is trying to say something!\"\n\n\n \"He's moving!\" Petya kicked Zubov and looked up for approval, his hair\n standing up like spikes.\n\n\n Petchareff slapped Kolya's face and crushed the glowing end of his\n cigar on Petya's forehead. The apes reeled back to a tree.\nPashkov whispered to Colonel James.", "\"Hold your claws, Zubov lad,\" Pashkov said. \"You have got the wrong\n man, can't you see?\nThat\nis Colonel James.\"\n\n\n \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Use your eyes, blockhead.\nI\nam Pashkov.\"\n\n\n Zubov did use his eyes. He looked from one to the other, and back. The\n more he focused, the more his eyes crossed. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sat calmly on the bed. He said, \"Carry him out.\"\n\n\n Zubov lifted Pashkov off the floor, crashed with his weight against the\n wall, but held on, grinned and staggered with Pashkov in his arms to\n the window.\n\n\n \"You miserable idiot,\" Pashkov shouted. \"You'll get a rest cure for\n this!\"", "\"My God, sir,\" said Pashkov, \"what are you doing?\"\nThe robot's eyes, large disks of glittering mirror, flashed as he\n looked up. \"Ah, Colonel James,\" Boris said in a voice that seemed to\n come from a deep well. \"Excuse the poor welcome, but I understand we\n have little time. You scared my valet; he thought you were Gospodin\n Pashkov.\"\nThe door burst open and Medvedev rushed in, the old valet at his heels.\n Medvedev stopped, gaped, then seized Pashkov's hand. \"Colonel James!\n What an artist, that Monsieur Fanti. But quick, Boris, Pashkov is on\n his way.\"\n\n\n Boris pulled off his head, and crawled out of the robot shell. Pashkov\n saw Boris as he really was, a tall human with a gaunt, ascetic face.", "Pashkov glanced back at the house. Since the publication of\nDentist\n Amigovitch\n, this house had become known all over the world as Boris\n Knackenpast's villa. Now the house was guarded by a company of\n soldiers to keep visitors out. From an open window Pashkov heard the\n clicking of a typewriter.\n\n\n \"It's when they're not like robots that everybody suspects them,\" he\n said, climbing into his flier. \"Petchareff will send you word when to\n announce his 'death'.\"\n\n\n \"A question, brother.\"\n\n\n \"No questions.\"\n\n\n \"Who smuggled the manuscript out of Russia?\"\n\n\n Pashkov frowned convincingly. \"Comrade Petchareff has suspected even\n me.\"", "Pashkov knocked again and a scuffle ensued within, the crack of a chair\n on a skull, the dragging of a beefy body into a closet, and the slam\n of the closet door.\n\n\n \"\nYu?\n\"\n\n\n \"\nBuenas tardes\n,\" Pashkov said through the door. \"\nAsuntos muy\n importantes.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened a crack and two dark eyes in a young bearded face\n peered out. \"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"\nGospodin Pashkov, para servir a usted.\n\"\n\n\n The door opened enough to admit the roly-poly visitor into the room.\n The other Cuban, also bearded and wearing a fatigue cap, held a\n revolver.", "\"Shall I kidnap him now?\" Zubov interrupted, puffing conceitedly on his\n cigarette.\n\n\n \"Mind your language, Zubov. May I ask, Colonel—do you want me to think\n I am falling into a trap?\"\n\n\n \"No, no, my friend. I am only doing my best not to show my surprise at\n seeing you again.\" The colonel got out of bed and sat down on Pashkov's\n other side.\n\n\n \"Zubov will make your trip to Moscow comfortable. All right, Zubov.\"\n\n\n Zubov focused his crossed eyes on Pashkov.\n\n\n \"Take him straight to Petchareff,\" Colonel James said to Zubov. \"I'll\n report as soon as I know what these Swedes are up to.\"\n\n\n Zubov seized Pashkov by the scruff of the neck and dragged him towards\n the window.", "In his office, Petchareff removed the cigar from his mouth as Pashkov\n came in. \"Medvedev get my orders?\"\n\n\n \"He's preparing a new super-patriotic writer to replace Boris\n Knackenpast,\" Pashkov reported. \"When you give the word, he will call\nIzvestia\nand tell them Boris is dead.\"\n\n\n Petchareff glanced at his calendar. \"We have two other state funerals\n this week. You made it plain, I hope, we want no repetition of\n Knackenpast's peace nonsense?\"\n\n\n \"No more Gandhi or Schweitzer influences. The new literature,\" Pashkov\n promised, raising a chubby finger, \"will be a pearl necklace of\n government slogans.\"\n\n\n Nadezhda buzzed the intercom. \"The man from the Bolshoi Theater is\n here, Comrade.\"\n\n\n \"Send him in.\"", "As Petya brought the flier to a hovering stop against Colonel James'\n window, Pashkov bounced into the room; Zubov drew his gun and jumped in\n after.\n\n\n Colonel James awoke, turned on the night lamp, and sat up in the bed,\n his eyes blinking.\n\n\n Pashkov stood looking at Colonel James. The resemblance between them\n was remarkable. Zubov's eyes were crossed with astonishment.\n\n\n \"My dear Gospodin Pashkov!\" Colonel James greeted him in Russian,\n yawning. \"How kind of you to visit me. Do sit down.\" Not only was his\n Russian good; his voice was a good imitation of Pashkov's voice.\n\n\n \"You're not really sick?\" Pashkov asked, sitting down on the bed.\n\n\n \"Not physically. But imagine my psychological condition. When I look\n in the mirror—\" The colonel shuddered.", "So there it was: Boris Knackenpast a supreme success, as Pashkov had\n suspected. It would be amusing to tell robotist Medvedev about it.\n\n\n \"Delicate, very delicate,\" Pashkov said. \"Everything depends on my not\n running into Gospodin Pashkov.\"\n\n\n \"We can't wait any longer,\" Professor Kristin said. \"Fortunately, we\n have an ally in the enemy camp. The robotist, Medvedev, is expecting\n you at Knackenpast's villa.\"\n\n\n \"Bad show,\" M. Fanti said suddenly. \"No good. His left cheekbone is at\n least four centimeters too high.\"\n\n\n The men looked at the surgeon, then at Pashkov.\n\n\n M. Fanti fingered Pashkov's cheekbone. \"How could I have made such a\n mistake! Just look at him. People laugh at such faces.\"", "\"They say they've been framed by a fat little Russian. But it's\n transparent, a clumsy job. Imagine, they left a stolen car in the\n ambulance court and in it an invoice for six cases of ammunition. It\n was traced to the Cubans in half an hour.\"\n\n\n Pashkov climbed into his flier. \"Well, it's fashionable to blame the\n Russians for everything.\" He waved his chubby hand, and took off.\n Flying over the Baltic, he set the controls on the Moscow beam.\n\n\n Ten minutes west of Moscow he tuned the communicator in on Petchareff's\n office.\n\n\n \"Seven One Three here, Nadezhda. Tell Petchareff—no, let me talk to\n him.\"\n\n\n \"Seven One ... but that's impossible! Gospodin Pashkov is in conference\n with Comrade Petchareff.\"", "On his way up to the roof, Pashkov studied the invoice he had lifted.\n It was from a manufacturer of sporting arms to Francisco Jesus Maria\n Gonzales, Salvation Army Economy Lodgings. He tucked the invoice into\n his inner pocket with a satisfied grunt, climbed into his flier and\n hopped over to Hotel Reisen, where Zubov's kidnaping team was waiting\n for him.\nComrade Zubov, the kidnaping expert, was pacing the roof of Hotel\n Reisen. As Pashkov eased down in his flier, Zubov's big front tooth\n flashed with delight. Pashkov felt like tossing him a bone.\n\n\n \"Everything in order, Gospodin Pashkov. Constant vigilance maintained\n at hospital by my two assistants. With your pardon, Comrade Petchareff\n urges all haste. Colonel James is due to leave the hospital tomorrow.\"\n\n\n \"Comrade Petchareff always urges haste. What else?\"", "Pashkov took four Havanas from the box they held out to him, stuck\n three in his breast pocket, and lit one.\n\n\n \"You come again, senor. We make much business.\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Help retire Latin-American dictators to Siberia. More gold in\n Siberia than in Las Vegas.\"\n\n\n \"Hyi, hyi, that is funny. You come again.\"", "\"With pleasure, with pleasure,\" he said, sinking his teeth into a pork\n chop, having seasoned the chop with the soft-boiled egg yolk. \"But\n right now I'm in a hurry to get to the Palace. Give my shoes an extra\n shine, there's a good girl.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you and your secrets!\"\n\n\n An hour later, Pashkov landed on the Palace roof in Colonel James'\n flier—an exact copy of his own flier. The Palace roof captain stared\n at him, then smiled nervously.\n\n\n \"They are waiting for you in the Gustavus room, Colonel.\"\n\n\n \"Colonel? Do I still look like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Do I talk like Colonel James?\"\n\n\n \"You've changed completely, sir. If I didn't know, I would swear you\n were the notorious Gospodin Pashkov.\"", "The two apes took up the cry, \"Grenade, grenade!\" and flattened\n themselves behind the tree.\n\n\n Nadezhda and Medvedev collided, digging in behind the valet.\n\n\n Only Petchareff remained standing. \"Stop the robot!\"\n\n\n Nobody moved.\n\n\n Boris reached the flier, Colonel James pulled him in, the engine\n hummed, and they were off. A moment later the flier vanished in the\n clouds towards Stockholm.\n\n\n Petchareff relit his cigar. \"Tfui, tastes of monkey hair.\"\n\n\n Medvedev shambled over. \"Was the grenade a dud?\"\n\n\n \"One of these days I'll catch you, Pashkov,\" Petchareff spat. \"Your\n deviousness, that's one thing. It could be useful. But your levity—\"", "\"Two.\"\n\n\n At that moment the door opened and Zubov's kidnaping team lumbered\n in. They were a couple of big apes dressed in blue canvas shoes, red\n trousers, yellow jackets, white silk scarves, sport caps and sun\n glasses.\n\n\n \"What are you doing here?\" cried Zubov. \"Why aren't you observing the\n hospital?\"\n\n\n \"Dhh, you said to report ... um ... if something happened,\" the first\n ape said in a thick voice.\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"Victim's room lights out,\" the ape said.\n\n\n \"My assistants,\" Zubov introduced them to Pashkov. \"Line up, line up,\n lads. With your pardon, they are good lads. This is Petya, and this is\n Kolya. No,\nthis\nis Kolya and this one is Petya.\"", "\"Darling, why so cruel? Anastina is one of our contacts. Besides, she's\n cross-eyed and buck-toothed.\"\n\n\n \"Beast!\" She switched him to Petchareff.\n\n\n \"What's been keeping you, Pashkov?\"\n\n\n \"Consoling Medvedev. Am I supposed to be in Stockholm?\"\n\n\n \"Never mind, get here at once. What size hospital gown do you wear?\"\n\n\n \"Hospital gown?\"\n\n\n \"Stockholm embassy says you're in the National Hospital there. In a\n hospital gown. I got through to Anastina. She says it's Colonel James\n again. He looks like you now.\"\n\n\n Pashkov grunted.", "Zubov dropped him, pulled his gun and backed off into a corner. \"How\n can I tell you two apart just by looking!\" he cried hysterically. \"I'm\n not a learned man.\"\n\n\n \"One small but decisive proof,\" Pashkov said, unbuttoning his hospital\n gown. \"I have a mole.\"\n\n\n Zubov yanked the colonel up by an arm. \"Send\nme\nto rest cures, will\n you?\"\n\n\n Colonel James sighed. \"I guess we have to keep up appearances,\" he\n muttered, and climbed out the window into the hovering ambulance. Zubov\n leaped in after, and they were off.\nThe suit of clothes hanging in the closet might have been Pashkov's\n own, identical with the clothes Kolya had taken to Moscow not an hour\n before. Even the underwear had facsimiles of the Order of Lenin sewn in.\n\n\n Satisfied, he crawled into the bed and fell into a pleasant snooze.", "\"No alarm, no alarm,\" Pashkov said, pulling Boris away from the window.\n \"Mister Knackenpast, when you see your way clear to my flier, run for\n it. But get back into your robot costume.\"\n\n\n \"I can't operate the machine.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right behind you. The rest of us will go out to Petchareff.\"\n\n\n As they came out, Petchareff was reviving Zubov by slapping his face.\n The kidnaping expert lay stretched cold on the ground, and Nadezhda\n Brunhildova stood by, holding the rock and weeping.\n\n\n Colonel James said, \"There he is, the American spy.\"\n\n\n Petchareff looked up as Pashkov was led forward by the guards. \"Not\n bad,\" Petchareff said. \"We could use Monsieur Fanti. What's his price?\"" ] ]
valid	22073	[ "Is the main character good at his job?", "Why are the beacons important?", "Why were the buttons in the temple so polished?", "Which of the following words best describes the main character's personality?", "Why didn't the main character use his gun to fix the problem with the locals?", "Why did the main character spend so much time with Goat-boy?", "Which of the following technologies does the main character not use to impress the natives?", "Why did the natives believe the main character was who he said he was?", "How did the main character feel while he was in the temple?", "What would have happened if the main character had been less diplomatic and more aggressive?" ]	[ [ "Yes, he will break any rule to fulfill his duties.", "No, he wants to quit.", "No, he spends too much time drinking and messing around.", "Yes, he is both creative and professional." ], [ "Ships travel through beacons in hyperspace.", "Beacons are religious focal points for natives.", "They aren't; ships can travel without them.", "Beacons are like landmarks or stars for ships to use in navigation." ], [ "The original builders had built them well.", "They were cleaned by the priests in reverence.", "They were worn from overuse.", "They were cleaned with the Holy Waters." ], [ "Sarcastic", "Good-natured", "Serious", "Reverent" ], [ "He did not want to kill off a species just to fix a beacon.", "His time with the natives caused him to respect them.", "He was not allowed to use violence.", "He did not have a gun." ], [ "He needed time to think of a plan.", "He needed to continue learning the language.", "He needed an ally to infiltrate the community.", "He needed to understand the culture and current events." ], [ "Robots", "The Beacon", "Explosives", "Microphones" ], [ "The natives were credulous.", "They did not really believe him.", "The plastiskin made him look like the natives.", "The main character tricked them with technology." ], [ "Angry", "Relaxed", "Happy", "Worried" ], [ "All of the options are correct.", "He would have needed to resort to violence.", "He would have been fined for disrupting the natives.", "He could make future repairs more difficult." ] ]	[ 4, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4, 2, 4, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "The Repairman\nBy Harry Harrison\nIllustrated by Kramer\nBeing an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad …\n if I could shoot the trouble!\n\n\n The\n Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone\n was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat\n of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack\n being the best defense and so forth.\n\n\n “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have\n cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal\n company secrets to me.”\n\n\n The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a\n button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery\n slot onto his desk.\n\n\n “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and\n when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you\n couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.”", "I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single\n motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle\n shot, burned the contract to ashes.\n\n\n The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on\n his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now.\n\n\n “I should have said a\n duplicate\n of your contract—like this\n one here.” He made a quick note on his secretary plate. “I\n have deducted 13 credits from your salary for the cost of the\n duplicate—as well as a 100-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a\n building.”\n\n\n I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled\n my contract.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to\n keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every\n day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the\n money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was\n figuring a way to outfigure me.\n\n\n It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to\n the spaceport.\nBy\n the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest\n beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the\n planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only\n about nine days in hyperspace.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "This job didn’t turn out to be quite that bad. I zeroed on the\n Beta Circinus beacon and ran a complicated eight-point problem through\n the navigator, using every beacon I could get an accurate fix on. The\n computer gave me a course with an estimated point-of-arrival as well as\n a built-in safety factor I never could eliminate from the machine.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "“Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling.\n “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They\n found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the\n earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering\n its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well\n be the first beacon.”\nI looked\n at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with\n horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery\n than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high.\n I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over\n 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”\n\n\n The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It\n would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too\n expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have\n ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.”", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "“According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore\n I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri\n beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…”\n\n\n “\n What\n kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired\n hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure\n I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this\n kind.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke." ], [ "To understand the importance of the beacons, you have to understand\n hyperspace. Not that many people do, but it is easy enough to understand\n that in this\n non\n -space the regular rules don’t apply. Speed and\n measurements are a matter of relationship, not constant facts like the\n fixed universe.\n\n\n The first ships to enter hyperspace had no place to go—and no way\n to even tell if they had moved. The beacons solved that problem and\n opened the entire universe. They are built on planets and generate\n tremendous amounts of power. This power is turned into radiation that is\n punched through into hyperspace. Every beacon has a code signal as part\n of its radiation and represents a measurable point in hyperspace.\n Triangulation and quadrature of the beacons works for\n navigation—only it follows its own rules. The rules are complex\n and variable, but they are still rules that a navigator can follow.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "“Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling.\n “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They\n found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the\n earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering\n its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well\n be the first beacon.”\nI looked\n at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with\n horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery\n than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high.\n I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over\n 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”\n\n\n The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It\n would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too\n expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have\n ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.”", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "For a hyperspace jump, you need at least four beacons for an accurate\n fix. For long jumps, navigators use as many as seven or eight. So every\n beacon is important and every one has to keep operating. That is where I\n and the other trouble-shooters came in.\n\n\n We travel in well-stocked ships that carry a little bit of everything;\n only one man to a ship because that is all it takes to operate the\n overly efficient repair machinery. Due to the very nature of our job, we\n spend most of our time just rocketing through normal space. After all,\n when a beacon breaks down, how do you find it?\n\n\n Not through hyperspace. All you can do is approach as close as you can\n by using other beacons, then finish the trip in normal space. This can\n take months, and often does.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be\n far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was\n about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at\n least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the\n rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be\n some\n sign of wear.\n\n\n The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that.\n Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no\n wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear,\n but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe\n walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself\n no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I\n made a list of parts.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "“According to this document, you can’t quit. Ever. Therefore\n I have a little job I know you’ll enjoy. Repair job. The Centauri\n beacon has shut down. It’s a Mark III beacon.…”\n\n\n “\n What\n kind of beacon?” I asked him. I have repaired\n hyperspace beacons from one arm of the Galaxy to the other and was sure\n I had worked on every type or model made. But I had never heard of this\n kind.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”" ], [ "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true." ], [ "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "The Repairman\nBy Harry Harrison\nIllustrated by Kramer\nBeing an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad …\n if I could shoot the trouble!\n\n\n The\n Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone\n was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat\n of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack\n being the best defense and so forth.\n\n\n “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have\n cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal\n company secrets to me.”\n\n\n The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a\n button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery\n slot onto his desk.\n\n\n “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and\n when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you\n couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.”", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to\n keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every\n day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the\n money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was\n figuring a way to outfigure me.\n\n\n It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to\n the spaceport.\nBy\n the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest\n beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the\n planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only\n about nine days in hyperspace.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single\n motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle\n shot, burned the contract to ashes.\n\n\n The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on\n his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now.\n\n\n “I should have said a\n duplicate\n of your contract—like this\n one here.” He made a quick note on his secretary plate. “I\n have deducted 13 credits from your salary for the cost of the\n duplicate—as well as a 100-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a\n building.”\n\n\n I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled\n my contract.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "“Mark III,” the Old Man repeated, practically chortling.\n “I never heard of it either until Records dug up the specs. They\n found them buried in the back of their oldest warehouse. This was the\n earliest type of beacon ever built—by Earth, no less. Considering\n its location on one of the Proxima Centauri planets, it might very well\n be the first beacon.”\nI looked\n at the blueprints he handed me and felt my eyes glaze with\n horror. “It’s a monstrosity! It looks more like a distillery\n than a beacon—must be at least a few hundred meters high.\n I’m a repairman, not an archeologist. This pile of junk is over\n 2000 years old. Just forget about it and build a new one.”\n\n\n The Old Man leaned over his desk, breathing into my face. “It\n would take a year to install a new beacon—besides being too\n expensive—and this relic is on one of the main routes. We have\n ships making fifteen-light-year detours now.”", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle." ], [ "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "I checked the readings carefully and found just what I had suspected.\n One of the eager lizards had managed to open a circuit box and had\n polished the switches inside. While doing this, he had thrown one of the\n switches and that had caused the trouble.\nRather\n , that had\n started\n the trouble. It wasn’t going to be ended\n by just reversing the water-valve switch. This valve was supposed to be\n used only for repairs, after the pile was damped. When the water was cut\n off with the pile in operation, it had started to overheat and the\n automatic safeties had dumped the charge down the pit.\n\n\n I could start the water again easily enough, but there was no fuel left\n in the reactor.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "The Repairman\nBy Harry Harrison\nIllustrated by Kramer\nBeing an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad …\n if I could shoot the trouble!\n\n\n The\n Old Man had that look of intense glee on his face that meant someone\n was in for a very rough time. Since we were alone, it took no great feat\n of intelligence to figure it would be me. I talked first, bold attack\n being the best defense and so forth.\n\n\n “I quit. Don’t bother telling me what dirty job you have\n cooked up, because I have already quit and you do not want to reveal\n company secrets to me.”\n\n\n The grin was even wider now and he actually chortled as he thumbed a\n button on his console. A thick legal document slid out of the delivery\n slot onto his desk.\n\n\n “This is your contract,” he said. “It tells how and\n when you will work. A steel-and-vanadium-bound contract that you\n couldn’t crack with a molecular disruptor.”", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true." ], [ "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "I would much rather take a chance of breaking through near some star\n than spend time just barreling through normal space, but apparently Tech\n knows this, too. They had a safety factor built into the computer so you\n couldn’t end up inside a star no matter how hard you tried.\n I’m sure there was no humaneness in this decision. They just\n didn’t want to lose the ship.\nIt\n was a twenty-hour jump, ship’s time, and I came through in the\n middle of nowhere. The robot analyzer chuckled to itself and scanned all\n the stars, comparing them to the spectra of Proxima Centauri. It finally\n rang a bell and blinked a light. I peeped through the eyepiece.\n\n\n A fast reading with the photocell gave me the apparent magnitude and a\n comparison with its absolute magnitude showed its distance. Not as bad\n as I had thought—a six-week run, give or take a few days. After\n feeding a course tape into the robot pilot, I strapped into the\n acceleration tank and went to sleep.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "The old boys had enough brains to choose a traceable site for the\n beacon, equidistant on a line between two of the most prominent mountain\n peaks. I located the peaks easily enough and started the eye out from\n the first peak and kept it on a course directly toward the second. There\n was a nose and tail radar in the eye and I fed their signals into a\n scope as an amplitude curve. When the two peaks coincided, I spun the\n eye controls and dived the thing down.\n\n\n I cut out the radar and cut in the nose orthicon and sat back to watch\n the beacon appear on the screen.\n\n\n The image blinked, focused—and a great damn pyramid swam into\n view. I cursed and wheeled the eye in circles, scanning the surrounding\n country. It was flat, marshy bottom land without a bump. The only thing\n in a ten-mile circle was this pyramid—and that definitely\n wasn’t my beacon.\n\n\n Or wasn’t it?" ], [ "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "I had a pryeye of my own construction. It looked like a piece of rock\n about a foot long. Once on the ground, it would never be noticed, though\n it was a little disconcerting to see it float by. I located a lizard\n town about a thousand kilometers from the pyramid and dropped the eye.\n It swished down and landed at night in the bank of the local mud wallow.\n This was a favorite spot that drew a good crowd during the day. In the\n morning, when the first wallowers arrived, I flipped on the recorder.", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "The time went fast. I rebuilt my camera for about the twentieth time and\n just about finished a correspondence course in nucleonics. Most\n repairmen take these courses. Besides their always coming in handy, the\n company grades your pay by the number of specialties you can handle. All\n this, with some oil painting and free-fall workouts in the gym, passed\n the time. I was asleep when the alarm went off that announced planetary\n distance.\n\n\n Planet two, where the beacon was situated according to the old charts,\n was a mushy-looking, wet kind of globe. I tried to make sense out of\n the ancient directions and finally located the right area. Staying\n outside the atmosphere, I sent a flying eye down to look things over. In\n this business, you learn early when and where to risk your own skin. The\n eye would be good enough for the preliminary survey.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "I wasn’t going to play with the fuel problem at all. It would be\n far easier to install a new power plant. I had one in the ship that was\n about a tenth the size of the ancient bucket of bolts and produced at\n least four times the power. Before I sent for it, I checked over the\n rest of the beacon. In 2000 years, there should be\n some\n sign of wear.\n\n\n The old boys had built well, I’ll give them credit for that.\n Ninety per cent of the machinery had no moving parts and had suffered no\n wear whatever. Other parts they had beefed up, figuring they would wear,\n but slowly. The water-feed pipe from the roof, for example. The pipe\n walls were at least three meters thick—and the pipe opening itself\n no bigger than my head. There were some things I could do, though, and I\n made a list of parts.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear." ], [ "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "It all began with the land bridge. Apparently the local lizards had been\n living in the swamps when the beacon was built, but the builders\n didn’t think much of them. They were a low type and confined to a\n distant continent. The idea that the race would develop and might reach\n this\n continent never occurred to the beacon mechanics. Which is, of\n course, what happened.\n\n\n A little geological turnover, a swampy land bridge formed in the right\n spot, and the lizards began to wander up beacon valley. And found\n religion. A shiny metal temple out of which poured a constant stream of\n magic water—the reactor-cooling water pumped down from the\n atmosphere condenser on the roof. The radioactivity in the water\n didn’t hurt the natives. It caused mutations that bred true.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate." ], [ "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "The First Lizard knew I was talking sense then and immediately called a\n meeting of the shamans. It, of course, took place in the public bathtub\n and I had to join them there. We jawed and gurgled for about an hour and\n settled all the major points.\n\n\n I found out that they were new priests; the previous ones had all been\n boiled for letting the Holy Waters cease. They found out I was there\n only to help them restore the flow of the waters. They bought this,\n tentatively, and we all heaved out of the tub and trickled muddy paths\n across the floor. There was a bolted and guarded door that led into the\n pyramid proper. While it was being opened, the First Lizard turned to\n me.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "Before they could think up a good answer, I was inside.\nThe\n temple was a small one built against the base of the pyramid. I\n hoped I wasn’t breaking too many taboos by going in. I\n wasn’t stopped, so it looked all right. The temple was a single\n room with a murky-looking pool at one end. Sloshing in the pool was an\n ancient reptile who clearly was one of the leaders. I waddled toward him\n and he gave me a cold and fishy eye, then growled something.\n\n\n The MT whispered into my ear, “Just what in the name of the\n thirteenth sin are you and what are you doing here?”\n\n\n I drew up my scaly figure in a noble gesture and pointed toward the\n ceiling. “I come from your ancestors to help you. I am here to\n restore the Holy Waters.”", "The parts, the new power plant and a few other odds and ends were chuted\n into a neat pile on the ship. I checked all the parts by screen before\n they were loaded in a metal crate. In the darkest hour before dawn, the\n heavy-duty eye dropped the crate outside the temple and darted away\n without being seen.\n\n\n I watched the priests through the pryeye while they tried to open it.\n When they had given up, I boomed orders at them through a speaker in the\n crate. They spent most of the day sweating the heavy box up through the\n narrow temple stairs and I enjoyed a good sleep. It was resting inside\n the beacon door when I woke up.\nThe\n repairs didn’t take long, though there was plenty of groaning\n from the blind lizards when they heard me ripping the wall open to get\n at the power leads. I even hooked a gadget to the water pipe so their\n Holy Waters would have the usual refreshing radioactivity when they\n started flowing again. The moment this was all finished, I did the job\n they were waiting for.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "It must have been a grand sight. The eye was camouflaged to look like a\n flying lizard, sort of a cardboard pterodactyl, and the slowly flapping\n wings obviously had nothing to do with our flight. But it was impressive\n enough for the natives. The first one that spotted me screamed and\n dropped over on his back. The others came running. They milled and\n mobbed and piled on top of one another, and by that time I had landed in\n the plaza fronting the temple. The priesthood arrived.\n\n\n I folded my arms in a regal stance. “Greetings, O noble servers of\n the Great God,” I said. Of course I didn’t say it out loud,\n just whispered loud enough for the throat mike to catch. This was\n radioed back to the MT and the translation shot back to a speaker in my\n jaws.\n\n\n The natives chomped and rattled and the translation rolled out almost\n instantly. I had the volume turned up and the whole square echoed.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "A crumbling and cracked stone stairway brought us up to a solid metal\n doorway labeled in archaic script\n MARK III BEACON—AUTHORIZED\n PERSONNEL ONLY\n . The trusting builders counted on the sign to do the\n whole job, for there wasn’t a trace of a lock on the door. One\n lizard merely turned the handle and we were inside the beacon.\n\n\n I unzipped the front of my camouflage suit and pulled out the\n blueprints. With the faithful priests stumbling after me, I located the\n control room and turned on the lights. There was a residue of charge in\n the emergency batteries, just enough to give a dim light. The meters and\n indicators looked to be in good shape; if anything, unexpectedly bright\n from constant polishing.", "When the head was done, I peeled it off and attached it to an attractive\n suit of green plastic, complete with tail. I was really glad they had\n tails. The lizards didn’t wear clothes and I wanted to take along\n a lot of electronic equipment. I built the tail over a metal frame that\n anchored around my waist. Then I filled the frame with all the equipment\n I would need and began to wire the suit.\n\n\n When it was done, I tried it on in front of a full-length mirror. It was\n horrible but effective. The tail dragged me down in the rear and gave me\n a duck-waddle, but that only helped the resemblance.\n\n\n That night I took the ship down into the hills nearest the pyramid, an\n out-of-the-way dry spot where the amphibious natives would never go. A\n little before dawn, the eye hooked onto my shoulders and we sailed\n straight up. We hovered above the temple at about 2,000 meters, until it\n was light, then dropped straight down.", "I dived the eye lower. The pyramid was a crude-looking thing of\n undressed stone, without carvings or decorations. There was a shimmer of\n light from the top and I took a closer look at it. On the peak of the\n pyramid was a hollow basin filled with water. When I saw that, something\n clicked in my mind.\nLocking\n the eye in a circular course, I dug through the Mark III\n plans—and there it was. The beacon had a precipitating field and a\n basin on top of it for water; this was used to cool the reactor that\n powered the monstrosity. If the water was still there, the beacon was\n still there—inside the pyramid. The natives, who, of course,\n weren’t even mentioned by the idiots who constructed the thing,\n had built a nice heavy, thick stone pyramid around the beacon.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet." ], [ "Diplomacy was called for. I sighed and dragged out the plastiflesh\n equipment.\nWorking\n from 3D snaps of Grandson, I modeled a passable reptile head\n over my own features. It was a little short in the jaw, me not having\n one of their toothy mandibles, but that was all right. I didn’t\n have to look\n exactly\n like them, just something close, to soothe the\n native mind. It’s logical. If I were an ignorant aborigine of\n Earth and I ran into a Spican, who looks like a two-foot gob of dried\n shellac, I would immediately leave the scene. However, if the Spican was\n wearing a suit of plastiflesh that looked remotely humanoid, I would at\n least stay and talk to him. This was what I was aiming to do with the\n Centaurians.", "This raised a buzz of conversation behind me, but got no rise out of the\n chief. He sank slowly into the water until only his eyes were showing. I\n could almost hear the wheels turning behind that moss-covered forehead.\n Then he lunged up and pointed a dripping finger at me.\n\n\n “You are a liar! You are no ancestor of ours! We\n will—”\n\n\n “Stop!” I thundered before he got so far in that he\n couldn’t back out. “I said your ancestors sent me as\n emissary—I am not one of your ancestors. Do not try to harm me or\n the wrath of those who have Passed On will turn against you.”\n\n\n When I said this, I turned to jab a claw at the other priests, using the\n motion to cover my flicking a coin grenade toward them. It blew a nice\n hole in the floor with a great show of noise and smoke.", "“What lack of courtesy!” I shouted. He made little bubbles\n in the water. “The ancestors are annoyed and have decided to\n forbid entrance to the Inner Temple forever; though, out of kindness,\n they will let the waters flow. Now I must return—on with the\n ceremony!”\n\n\n The torture-master was too frightened to move, so I grabbed out his hot\n iron. A touch on the side of my face dropped a steel plate over my eyes,\n under the plastiskin. Then I jammed the iron hard into my phony\n eye-sockets and the plastic gave off an authentic odor.\n\n\n A cry went up from the crowd as I dropped the iron and staggered in\n blind circles. I must admit it went off pretty well.\nBefore\n they could get any more bright ideas, I threw the switch and my\n plastic pterodactyl sailed in through the door. I couldn’t see it,\n of course, but I knew it had arrived when the grapples in the claws\n latched onto the steel plates on my shoulders.", "Some of the more credulous natives prostrated themselves and others fled\n screaming. One doubtful type raised a spear, but no one else tried that\n after the pterodactyl-eye picked him up and dropped him in the swamp.\n The priests were a hard-headed lot and weren’t buying any lizards\n in a poke; they just stood and muttered. I had to take the offensive\n again.\n\n\n “Begone, O faithful steed,” I said to the eye, and pressed\n the control in my palm at the same time.\n\n\n It took off straight up a bit faster than I wanted; little pieces of\n wind-torn plastic rained down. While the crowd was ogling this ascent, I\n walked through the temple doors.\n\n\n “I would talk with you, O noble priests,” I said.", "I nodded moodily at his pointing finger.\n\n\n “How I wish I could fire you all! Combination space-jockeys,\n mechanics, engineers, soldiers, con-men and anything else it takes to do\n the repairs. I have to browbeat, bribe, blackmail and bulldoze you thugs\n into doing a simple job. If you think you’re fed up, just think\n how I feel. But the ships must go through! The beacons must\n operate!”\n\n\n I recognized this deathless line as the curtain speech and crawled to my\n feet. He threw the Mark III file at me and went back to scratching in\n his papers. Just as I reached the door, he looked up and impaled me on\n his finger again.\n\n\n “And don’t get any fancy ideas about jumping your contract.\n We can attach that bank account of yours on Algol II long before you\n could draw the money out.”", "“What—you dare interfere with the messenger of your\n ancestors!” I had the speaker on full volume and the vibration\n almost shook my head off.\n\n\n The lizards cringed and I set my Solar for a narrow beam and ran it\n around the door jamb. There was a great crunching and banging from the\n junk piled against it, and then the door swung free. I threw it open.\n Before they could protest, I had pushed the priests out through it.\n\n\n The rest of their clan showed up at the foot of the stairs and made a\n great ruckus while I finished welding the door shut. Running through the\n crowd, I faced up to the First Lizard in his tub. He sank slowly beneath\n the surface.", "A city was built around the temple and, through the centuries, the\n pyramid was put up around the beacon. A special branch of the priesthood\n served the temple. All went well until one of the priests violated the\n temple and destroyed the holy waters. There had been revolt, strife,\n murder and destruction since then. But still the holy waters would not\n flow. Now armed mobs fought around the temple each day and a new band of\n priests guarded the sacred fount.\n\n\n And I had to walk into the middle of that mess and repair the thing.\n\n\n It would have been easy enough if we were allowed a little mayhem. I\n could have had a lizard fry, fixed the beacon and taken off. Only\n “native life-forms” were quite well protected. There were\n spy cells on my ship, all of which I hadn’t found, that would\n cheerfully rat on me when I got back.", "“Undoubtedly you know of the rule,” he said. “Because\n the old priests did pry and peer, it was ruled henceforth that only the\n blind could enter the Holy of Holies.” I’d swear he was\n smiling, if thirty teeth peeking out of what looked like a crack in an\n old suitcase can be called smiling.\n\n\n He was also signaling to him an underpriest who carried a brazier of\n charcoal complete with red-hot irons. All I could do was stand and watch\n as he stirred up the coals, pulled out the ruddiest iron and turned\n toward me. He was just drawing a bead on my right eyeball when my brain\n got back in gear.", "I had got turned around after the eye-burning and my flying beast hooked\n onto me backward. I had meant to sail out bravely, blind eyes facing\n into the sunset; instead, I faced the crowd as I soared away, so I made\n the most of a bad situation and threw them a snappy military salute.\n Then I was out in the fresh air and away.\n\n\n When I lifted the plate and poked holes in the seared plastic, I could\n see the pyramid growing smaller behind me, water gushing out of the base\n and a happy crowd of reptiles sporting in its radioactive rush. I\n counted off on my talons to see if I had forgotten anything.\n\n\n One: The beacon was repaired.\n\n\n Two: The door was sealed, so there should be no more sabotage,\n accidental or deliberate.", "“Of course,” I said, “blinding is only right. But in\n my case you will have to blind me before I\n leave\n the Holy of Holies, not\n now. I need my eyes to see and mend the Fount of Holy Waters. Once the\n waters flow again, I will laugh as I hurl myself on the burning\n iron.”\nHe\n took a good thirty seconds to think it over and had to agree with me.\n The local torturer sniffled a bit and threw a little more charcoal on\n the fire. The gate crashed open and I stalked through; then it banged to\n behind me and I was alone in the dark.\n\n\n But not for long—there was a shuffling nearby and I took a chance\n and turned on my flash. Three priests were groping toward me, their\n eye-sockets red pits of burned flesh. They knew what I wanted and led\n the way without a word.", "“Here is some money from paradise, because you have been a good\n boy.” Not really from paradise—I had lifted it from the\n treasury the night before. “Come back tomorrow and we will talk\n some more,” I called after the fleeing figure. I was pleased to\n notice that he took the cash before taking off.\n\n\n After that, Grandpa in paradise had many heart-to-heart talks with\n Grandson, who found the heavenly loot more than he could resist. Grandpa\n had been out of touch with things since his death and Goat-boy happily\n filled him in.\n\n\n I learned all I needed to know of the history, past and recent, and it\n wasn’t nice.\n\n\n In addition to the pyramid being around the beacon, there was a nice\n little religious war going on around the pyramid.", "I threw the switch that started the water flowing again.\n\n\n There were a few minutes while the water began to gurgle down through\n the dry pipe. Then a roar came from outside the pyramid that must have\n shaken its stone walls. Shaking my hands once over my head, I went down\n for the eye-burning ceremony.\n\n\n The blind lizards were waiting for me by the door and looked even\n unhappier than usual. When I tried the door, I found out why—it\n was bolted and barred from the other side.\n\n\n “It has been decided,” a lizard said, “that you shall\n remain here forever and tend the Holy Waters. We will stay with you and\n serve your every need.”\n\n\n A delightful prospect, eternity spent in a locked beacon with three\n blind lizards. In spite of their hospitality, I couldn’t accept.", "I smiled, a little weakly, I’m afraid, as if I had never meant to\n keep that account a secret. His spies were getting more efficient every\n day. Walking down the hall, I tried to figure a way to transfer the\n money without his catching on—and knew at the same time he was\n figuring a way to outfigure me.\n\n\n It was all very depressing, so I stopped for a drink, then went on to\n the spaceport.\nBy\n the time the ship was serviced, I had a course charted. The nearest\n beacon to the broken-down Proxima Centauri Beacon was on one of the\n planets of Beta Circinus and I headed there first, a short trip of only\n about nine days in hyperspace.", "When you get enough reference phrases like this in the memory bank, the\n MT brain takes over and starts filling in the missing pieces. As soon as\n the MT could give a running translation of any conversation it heard, I\n figured it was time to make a contact.\nI found\n him easily enough. He was the Centaurian version of a\n goat-boy—he herded a particularly loathsome form of local life in\n the swamps outside the town. I had one of the working eyes dig a cave in\n an outcropping of rock and wait for him.\n\n\n When he passed next day, I whispered into the mike: “Welcome, O\n Goat-boy Grandson! This is your grandfather’s spirit speaking from\n paradise.” This fitted in with what I could make out of the local\n religion.\n\n\n Goat-boy stopped as if he’d been shot. Before he could move, I\n pushed a switch and a handful of the local currency, wampum-type shells,\n rolled out of the cave and landed at his feet.", "He leaned back, wiped his hands on his handkerchief and gave me Lecture\n Forty-four on Company Duty and My Troubles.\n\n\n “This department is officially called Maintenance and Repair, when\n it really should be called trouble-shooting. Hyperspace beacons are made\n to last forever—or damn close to it. When one of them breaks down,\n it is\n never\n an accident, and repairing the thing is never a matter of\n just plugging in a new part.”\n\n\n He was telling\n me\n —the guy who did the job while he sat back on his\n fat paycheck in an air-conditioned office.\n\n\n He rambled on. “How I wish that were all it took! I would have a\n fleet of parts ships and junior mechanics to install them. But its not\n like that at all. I have a fleet of expensive ships that are equipped to\n do almost anything—manned by a bunch of irresponsibles like\n you\n .”", "Normally, a repairman stays away from native cultures. They are poison.\n Anthropologists may not mind being dissected for their science, but a\n repairman wants to make no sacrifices of any kind for his job. For this\n reason, most beacons are built on uninhabited planets. If a beacon\n has\n to go on a planet with a culture, it is usually built in some\n inaccessible place.\n\n\n Why this beacon had been built within reach of the local claws, I had\n yet to find out. But that would come in time. The first thing to do was\n make contact. To make contact, you have to know the local language.\n\n\n And, for\n that\n , I had long before worked out a system that was\n fool-proof.", "Three: The priests should be satisfied. The water was running again, my\n eyes had been duly burned out, and they were back in business. Which\n added up to—\n\n\n Four: The fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under\n the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done\n nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them\n antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers.\n\n\n I stripped off my tattered lizard suit back in the ship, very glad that\n it would be some other repairman who’d get the job.\n—\nHarry Harrison\nTranscriber’s Note\n\n\n This etext was produced from\n Galaxy\n February 1958. Extensive research\n did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication\n was renewed.", "I leaned out quickly, grabbed it and threw it into the air with a single\n motion. Before it could fall, I had my Solar out and, with a wide-angle\n shot, burned the contract to ashes.\n\n\n The Old Man pressed the button again and another contract slid out on\n his desk. If possible, the smile was still wider now.\n\n\n “I should have said a\n duplicate\n of your contract—like this\n one here.” He made a quick note on his secretary plate. “I\n have deducted 13 credits from your salary for the cost of the\n duplicate—as well as a 100-credit fine for firing a Solar inside a\n building.”\n\n\n I slumped, defeated, waiting for the blow to land. The Old Man fondled\n my contract.", "After about five of the local days, I had a sea of native conversation\n in the memory bank of the machine translator and had tagged a few\n expressions. This is fairly easy to do when you have a machine memory to\n work with. One of the lizards gargled at another one and the second one\n turned around. I tagged this expression with the phrase, “Hey,\n George!” and waited my chance to use it. Later the same day, I\n caught one of them alone and shouted “Hey, George!” at him.\n It gurgled out through the speaker in the local tongue and he turned\n around.", "I took another look at the screen and realized that I had locked the eye\n into a circular orbit about twenty feet above the pyramid. The summit of\n the stone pile was now covered with lizards of some type, apparently the\n local life-form. They had what looked like throwing sticks and arbalasts\n and were trying to shoot down the eye, a cloud of arrows and rocks\n flying in every direction.\n\n\n I pulled the eye straight up and away and threw in the control circuit\n that would return it automatically to the ship.\n\n\n Then I went to the galley for a long, strong drink. My beacon was not\n only locked inside a mountain of handmade stone, but I had managed to\n irritate the things who had built the pyramid. A great beginning for a\n job and one clearly designed to drive a stronger man than me to the\n bottle." ] ]
valid	99915	[ "Why was Rai collecting data on the forests in Kumaon?", "What were the forests of Kumaon used for traditionally?", "What are the forests of Kumaon being used for more in modern day?", "Why is studying forests and important aspect of understanding climate change?", "Why did Rai decide to start working in forestry?", "Why did Narenda want to return to the forest from the city?", "Why are people less connected with the forest than in times past?", "What is meant by \"full-stomach\" environmentalism?", "Why is Kumaon a good region for potential forest preservation?", "Why does the author think that it is important to monetarily incentivize the local population to preserve their environment?" ]	[ [ "To do research for a sporting goods company looking to build a factory there", "To determine the level of carbon sequestration happening there", "The collect census data on the number of people who live in the forest", "To do research for the government on the amount of cattle in the forest" ], [ "Small-scale farming of produce such as daikon and tomatoes", "Feed for the livestock that was raised in the area", "Protected religious sites of great cultural importance", "Burning the wood to warm nuclear families in individual houses" ], [ "Feed for the livestock that was raised in the area", "Burning the wood to warm nuclear families in individual houses", "Small-scale farming of produce such as daikon and tomatoes", "Protected religious sites of great cultural importance" ], [ "Forests consume large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere", "Forests house a large portion of the human population", "Forests offer a great wealth of potential resources that are necessary for economic development", "Forests absorb a large amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" ], [ "He wanted be somewhere that was much different than where he grew up", "He wanted to be able to save money by not living in an urban environment", "He was forced into the field by his university ", "He was passionate about stopping climate change" ], [ "He wanted to be able to save money by not living in an urban environment", "He was tired of the heat and wanted to live somewhere rural", "Rai had asked him directly for his help", "He lost his job at the Nestle factory" ], [ "Ways of life from the past that involved the forest are less economically viable", "Technology has convinced more people to spend time indoors", "The majority of people would prefer to live in an urban environment", "People are having more children now and do not have time to spend in the forest" ], [ "Environmentalism that is based on a collective social agreement of protection", "Environmentalism that places monetary value on the long-term benefits of preservation", "Environmentalism with a focus on creating a secure network of food production", "Environmental advocates from developed nations judging people for destructive survival practices" ], [ "There is a rich history of environmentalism", "It is very bio-diverse", "All of the other choices are correct", "It has a large area of forest" ], [ "People are greedy and will exploit the environment at any possible chance", "To convince people to resist the encroachment on the environment by the government", "People have become less connected to the environment as technology has progressed", "People do not understand the importance of technological development" ] ]	[ 2, 2, 2, 4, 1, 2, 1, 4, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "The forests bear the carbon\nAmogh Rai is standing on a small patch of wooded hillside, his Android phone held up above him, taking in the canopies of the trees that rise up around us. There's a problem though. It's a winter's day in the northern Indian foothills of the Himalayas, and the sun isn't breaking through the clouds with its usual clarity. Rai is using an app on his phone to help him understand the canopy's interception of light, but a layer of haze is preventing the 27-year-old Indian from collecting any meaningful data. \n\n Around him are some other tools of the trade: a portable device known as a ceptometer, used for measuring leaf area index; a spherical densiometer, for understanding canopy foliage and foliage covering the ground; and a laser rangefinder, which is used to estimate the height of trees but which has a tendency to malfunction. I'm six feet tall. The laser rangefinder is often convinced that I'm actually 17 metres.", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department.", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "I watch some of the news coverage from Paris with Rai. There is so much to be done, so many vested interests to vanquish. \"I find it extremely political,\" Rai says. \"Climate change talks are an interesting window into how the world that doesn't actually work on scientific principles or doesn't understand the science behind global warming – which is an extremely complicated science – operates. I find it interesting, working in a forest over here, to hear about these things; interesting and funny.\" As the world fights over how best to tackle climate change – over how, more importantly, to get any of the world's big polluters to do anything differently – a battle about how this global phenomenon should be understood and dealt with takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas. \n\n \"Darkly funny?\" I ask Rai for his assessment. \n\n \"Yeah, gallows humour.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article." ], [ "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "No one seems to be sure what has happened to this money. There is a timber mafia in the region that is generous to local politicians, many of whom are widely believed to be corrupt. Since I left the area at the end of last year, a drought has resulted in a series of forest fires, which have not been dealt with properly.\nIt is hoped that the\nVan Panchayats\n– the forest councils – will be immune to the corruption found in local government and that they could hold the key to any scheme that seeks to compensate local people for maintaining the forest. These established councils can link villages to the money made available for forest maintenance. A tripartite system involving the Van Panchayats, the NGOs and the government could then be set up to make sure the money falls into the right hands. \n\n Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department." ], [ "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "No one seems to be sure what has happened to this money. There is a timber mafia in the region that is generous to local politicians, many of whom are widely believed to be corrupt. Since I left the area at the end of last year, a drought has resulted in a series of forest fires, which have not been dealt with properly.\nIt is hoped that the\nVan Panchayats\n– the forest councils – will be immune to the corruption found in local government and that they could hold the key to any scheme that seeks to compensate local people for maintaining the forest. These established councils can link villages to the money made available for forest maintenance. A tripartite system involving the Van Panchayats, the NGOs and the government could then be set up to make sure the money falls into the right hands. \n\n Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution." ], [ "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "\"We have very big ambitions to limit climate change well below two degrees… In terms of delivering a policy to achieve this, you absolutely need to have your forest in place and you absolutely need to tackle deforestation, because you cannot reach that level of climate stabilisation without it. Reforestation and afforestation is one of the best ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and forests have so many additional benefits for cleaning the air, cleaning the water, and so on.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "Forests are an important part of this increase. They are, along with the planet's oceans, one of two major carbon sinks. Deforestation puts carbon into the atmosphere while at the same time removing that sink. \"You can say that one quarter of this increase in carbon concentrations since the 18th century has been caused by deforestation,\" says Corinne Le Quéré, author of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a professor of climate change science and policy at the University of East Anglia.", "In 2014, the IPCC found that 11 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions were caused by forestry and other land use. Other sources claim this figure is anything up to 30 per cent. While Le Quéré points out that the effect of deforestation was more pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was a key driver in the process of industrialisation, she emphasises the ongoing importance of forests in the fight for a better environment.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "The forests bear the carbon\nAmogh Rai is standing on a small patch of wooded hillside, his Android phone held up above him, taking in the canopies of the trees that rise up around us. There's a problem though. It's a winter's day in the northern Indian foothills of the Himalayas, and the sun isn't breaking through the clouds with its usual clarity. Rai is using an app on his phone to help him understand the canopy's interception of light, but a layer of haze is preventing the 27-year-old Indian from collecting any meaningful data. \n\n Around him are some other tools of the trade: a portable device known as a ceptometer, used for measuring leaf area index; a spherical densiometer, for understanding canopy foliage and foliage covering the ground; and a laser rangefinder, which is used to estimate the height of trees but which has a tendency to malfunction. I'm six feet tall. The laser rangefinder is often convinced that I'm actually 17 metres.", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "Understanding the basic mechanism of carbon sequestration and the level of human disturbance in these forests can then provide the framework for a plan that seeks to pay local people to maintain the forests. If the project can determine how much human interaction with the forest has affected the trees' ability to photosynthesise, then local people can be paid to preserve the forest. Otherwise, its ability to act as a 'carbon sink' (anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases) risks damage from overuse.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "I watch some of the news coverage from Paris with Rai. There is so much to be done, so many vested interests to vanquish. \"I find it extremely political,\" Rai says. \"Climate change talks are an interesting window into how the world that doesn't actually work on scientific principles or doesn't understand the science behind global warming – which is an extremely complicated science – operates. I find it interesting, working in a forest over here, to hear about these things; interesting and funny.\" As the world fights over how best to tackle climate change – over how, more importantly, to get any of the world's big polluters to do anything differently – a battle about how this global phenomenon should be understood and dealt with takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas. \n\n \"Darkly funny?\" I ask Rai for his assessment. \n\n \"Yeah, gallows humour.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood." ], [ "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "I watch some of the news coverage from Paris with Rai. There is so much to be done, so many vested interests to vanquish. \"I find it extremely political,\" Rai says. \"Climate change talks are an interesting window into how the world that doesn't actually work on scientific principles or doesn't understand the science behind global warming – which is an extremely complicated science – operates. I find it interesting, working in a forest over here, to hear about these things; interesting and funny.\" As the world fights over how best to tackle climate change – over how, more importantly, to get any of the world's big polluters to do anything differently – a battle about how this global phenomenon should be understood and dealt with takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas. \n\n \"Darkly funny?\" I ask Rai for his assessment. \n\n \"Yeah, gallows humour.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "The forests bear the carbon\nAmogh Rai is standing on a small patch of wooded hillside, his Android phone held up above him, taking in the canopies of the trees that rise up around us. There's a problem though. It's a winter's day in the northern Indian foothills of the Himalayas, and the sun isn't breaking through the clouds with its usual clarity. Rai is using an app on his phone to help him understand the canopy's interception of light, but a layer of haze is preventing the 27-year-old Indian from collecting any meaningful data. \n\n Around him are some other tools of the trade: a portable device known as a ceptometer, used for measuring leaf area index; a spherical densiometer, for understanding canopy foliage and foliage covering the ground; and a laser rangefinder, which is used to estimate the height of trees but which has a tendency to malfunction. I'm six feet tall. The laser rangefinder is often convinced that I'm actually 17 metres.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "No one seems to be sure what has happened to this money. There is a timber mafia in the region that is generous to local politicians, many of whom are widely believed to be corrupt. Since I left the area at the end of last year, a drought has resulted in a series of forest fires, which have not been dealt with properly.\nIt is hoped that the\nVan Panchayats\n– the forest councils – will be immune to the corruption found in local government and that they could hold the key to any scheme that seeks to compensate local people for maintaining the forest. These established councils can link villages to the money made available for forest maintenance. A tripartite system involving the Van Panchayats, the NGOs and the government could then be set up to make sure the money falls into the right hands. \n\n Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters." ], [ "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"" ], [ "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "In 2014, the IPCC found that 11 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions were caused by forestry and other land use. Other sources claim this figure is anything up to 30 per cent. While Le Quéré points out that the effect of deforestation was more pronounced in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was a key driver in the process of industrialisation, she emphasises the ongoing importance of forests in the fight for a better environment.", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "Understanding the basic mechanism of carbon sequestration and the level of human disturbance in these forests can then provide the framework for a plan that seeks to pay local people to maintain the forests. If the project can determine how much human interaction with the forest has affected the trees' ability to photosynthesise, then local people can be paid to preserve the forest. Otherwise, its ability to act as a 'carbon sink' (anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases) risks damage from overuse.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation." ], [ "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"", "\"In developing economies, green investment has not gained any worthwhile traction,\" says Rai. \"In developed countries without much ecological diversity, an understanding of their importance is an important driver in decisions to invest in research in the developing world. So, it is beneficial. The problem arises when these 'investments' get turned into market-oriented solutions. So yes, when companies in Germany 'gift' improved cookstoves in Tanzania and earn carbon credit, it is a problem.\"", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "I watch some of the news coverage from Paris with Rai. There is so much to be done, so many vested interests to vanquish. \"I find it extremely political,\" Rai says. \"Climate change talks are an interesting window into how the world that doesn't actually work on scientific principles or doesn't understand the science behind global warming – which is an extremely complicated science – operates. I find it interesting, working in a forest over here, to hear about these things; interesting and funny.\" As the world fights over how best to tackle climate change – over how, more importantly, to get any of the world's big polluters to do anything differently – a battle about how this global phenomenon should be understood and dealt with takes place in the foothills of the Himalayas. \n\n \"Darkly funny?\" I ask Rai for his assessment. \n\n \"Yeah, gallows humour.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department." ], [ "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. \n\n There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. \n\n This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. \"The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place,\" Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. \"They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.'", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. \n\n In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "No one seems to be sure what has happened to this money. There is a timber mafia in the region that is generous to local politicians, many of whom are widely believed to be corrupt. Since I left the area at the end of last year, a drought has resulted in a series of forest fires, which have not been dealt with properly.\nIt is hoped that the\nVan Panchayats\n– the forest councils – will be immune to the corruption found in local government and that they could hold the key to any scheme that seeks to compensate local people for maintaining the forest. These established councils can link villages to the money made available for forest maintenance. A tripartite system involving the Van Panchayats, the NGOs and the government could then be set up to make sure the money falls into the right hands. \n\n Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters.", "Protests became more common and led to massive demonstrations in the second decade of the 20th century. These together with forest fires intersected with outrage at the coolie system of forced labour extraction, under which villagers were obliged to work for the colonial administration. In 1922, the forest department's annual report conceded that local campaigning had led to the breakdown of British control of the forests. The Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee recommended the establishment of forest councils that, following the return of the land to the people, would manage forests belonging to the villages. \n\n In 1931, the Forest Council Rules made this recommendation a formal reality and 3,000 elected forest councils –\nVan Panchayats\n– were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism.", "Rai started working on the project in March 2014. He grew up in Delhi and was something of a tech prodigy. But as his career was advancing at the kind of rate that would leave most people sick with jealousy, he also felt something akin to the call of the wild. More intellectually curious than professionally ambitious, he enrolled at Dr BR Ambedkar University as a master's student and, in December 2013, travelled to Kumaon to work on his dissertation, which was on a tree called\nMyrica esculenta\n, known locally as\nkafal\n.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood.", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department." ], [ "Once upon a time, the strong social system – the ecologically minded functioning of the rural villages extolled by Gandhi – and dependence on the forest meant the environment was preserved. Now, these things are changing fairly rapidly. The whole idea of working as a social group is getting lost and so, Rai argues, \"incentives are going to play a larger role. I've had conversations with people where they've said, 'The forests are great, we want to protect them but we don't have any money.' So it's not just about giving them an incentive to protect the forest, it's that they need money to protect the forest.\"", "There is a conflict and a contradiction here: local people may be paid to preserve the forest by using it less, but using the forest less will weaken their ties to it, thus making the desire to preserve it less urgent. It's the kind of dilemma globalised industrial capitalism throws up everywhere. The system itself has wreaked havoc on the environment, but in a structure where even people in remote areas often aspire to a certain kind of lifestyle and expect to be paid for things they might once have done for free as part of the collective harmony of a community, the monetising of things like forest maintenance has come to be seen as a potential solution.", "If a value is put on the forest, then, in a market-driven world, local communities will be able to better resist, for example, the planned construction of a massive hotel in an undisturbed patch of woodland. Right now, Rai argues, \"you only have aesthetic reasons, but we live and operate in a world that has a different set of values. For the first time, you can give a number to the value of a forest. It becomes a place that is [about] more than wondrous beasts.\"", "This 'gifting' is not what anyone has in mind for the Himalayan foothills. The idea is to create something fairly simple that can be executed neatly across a spectrum. A paper will be submitted to the Department of Science and Technology and then a conversation about incentive structures for the local community will begin, using the carbon sequestration data as a basis for what should be offered.\nThere are fears about corruption; and the dispersal of money remains a sketchy and murky affair but, as Rai says, \"the idea is that you at least need to get this thing started. If you don't pay people enough to maintain the forest, give me two reasons why they should keep the forests as they are, so that you or I could come and enjoy them? Because they are the ones who have to face the winters here, they are the ones who have to go and work in the forests here.\" Consultations are ongoing with villagers, various NGOs and the forest department.", "This expectation of money both jars with and is in keeping with Kumaon's past. When Rajesh Thadani first came to the area in the 90s, he was strongly influenced by Ramachandra Guha's book The Unquiet Woods, a short history of the Chipko movement published in 1990. A wonderful writer, Guha remains one of India's most influential thinkers on environmental and social issues. His and Joan Martinez-Alier's distinction between the 'full-stomach' environmentalism of the north and the 'empty-belly' environmentalism of the global south strikes a chord in Kumaon. There is a big difference between chopping down some trees in a forest to keep yourself warm in the Himalayan winter, and laying waste to the Amazon in the name of the fast food industry.", "\"There is a strong relationship between the people and the forest in the area but it has weakened, for good and for bad,\" Rajesh Thadani, who also worked closely with Narendra, tells me. Good because the forest is less disturbed, bad because caring for the forest now comes less naturally. \"People don't quite have the same religious and cultural attachment to it. Cattle became unprofitable. The quality of schools hasn't got better but most children now go to school, so they don't want to do agricultural work when they leave… If you don't feel a sense of ownership and belonging, you are less likely to do things. The expectation of money has arrived. The forest has become an externality.\"", "Understanding the basic mechanism of carbon sequestration and the level of human disturbance in these forests can then provide the framework for a plan that seeks to pay local people to maintain the forests. If the project can determine how much human interaction with the forest has affected the trees' ability to photosynthesise, then local people can be paid to preserve the forest. Otherwise, its ability to act as a 'carbon sink' (anything that absorbs more carbon than it releases) risks damage from overuse.", "No one seems to be sure what has happened to this money. There is a timber mafia in the region that is generous to local politicians, many of whom are widely believed to be corrupt. Since I left the area at the end of last year, a drought has resulted in a series of forest fires, which have not been dealt with properly.\nIt is hoped that the\nVan Panchayats\n– the forest councils – will be immune to the corruption found in local government and that they could hold the key to any scheme that seeks to compensate local people for maintaining the forest. These established councils can link villages to the money made available for forest maintenance. A tripartite system involving the Van Panchayats, the NGOs and the government could then be set up to make sure the money falls into the right hands. \n\n Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters.", "With the data now collected, allometric equations will determine how much carbon is sequestered in the forests. This information will then be used to put an economic value on the various plots, which will translate into payments made to local communities through the forest councils. This money could begin to pour in within the year. \n\n During my time in Kumaon, the Paris Climate Change Conference takes place. When I ask Rajesh Thadani how CEDAR's project fits into the bigger picture, he says: \"Carbon sinks are important and a good mitigation measure – but [they] would be effective only in conjunction with other measures.\"", "To begin working out how people in the Himalayan foothills might be reimbursed for preserving the forest, Amogh Rai and his colleagues need to find out how much carbon they are actually taking in. \"We don't know how much carbon these forests are sequestering,\" says Rai. \"If you are talking about the forest as a sink for carbon, you need to figure out how much carbon this place is storing, versus how much it is producing. And for that you need to go back to the basics of forestry. You need to figure it out by laying ecological plots measuring 400 metres squared in different areas, at different altitudes and in different disturbance gradients.\"", "But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. \n\n So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change?", "A handful of local NGOs give the impression that the government is \"selling up the mountains\". Though it is a plan driven by Indians rather than the British, it can still be seen by Kumaonis as coming from outside and on high, an imperialistic scam dreamed up \"for their own good\". Money, while desired, also generates suspicion. This is exacerbated by the fact that, two years ago, the Uttarakhand state government was given about $20m by the Japanese government and industry, which have a vested interest in promoting forestry around the globe.", "This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. \n\n Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. \"We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle,\" he says. \"The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure.\" Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest.", "\"In developing economies, green investment has not gained any worthwhile traction,\" says Rai. \"In developed countries without much ecological diversity, an understanding of their importance is an important driver in decisions to invest in research in the developing world. So, it is beneficial. The problem arises when these 'investments' get turned into market-oriented solutions. So yes, when companies in Germany 'gift' improved cookstoves in Tanzania and earn carbon credit, it is a problem.\"", "\"I love the forest because it is a place of silence and beauty,\" he says. \"Also, it is one of the last places of refuge from strident urbanisation. A typical city kid reaction to noise, and tempo of life, I suppose.\" Rai's boss at CEDAR, Rajesh Thadani, a Yale-educated forest ecologist in his forties, is equally romantic about his attachment to the forest, quoting Thoreau to me: \"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.\" It's not hard to imagine both men communing with woodland spirits.", "Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this.", "Now in his forties, Narendra is from Kumaon and has three small children. He doesn’t earn much but he is given supplementary income when he needs it and owns a small amount of land in the area. In a room furnished only with a single bed, we sit on the floor and eat food grown in the local fields: daikon, tomatoes sprinkled with marijuana (\"Yes, dude, welcome to the Himalayas,\" laughs Rai), nettles, smoked chilli and bread. Having left school at 17, Narendra tells me he worked in a Nestlé factory and then as a mechanic, before realising that he'd rather be back in the rural village he came from. Haldwani, the nearby town he was working in, was too hot and he just loved the forest too much.", "\"We have very big ambitions to limit climate change well below two degrees… In terms of delivering a policy to achieve this, you absolutely need to have your forest in place and you absolutely need to tackle deforestation, because you cannot reach that level of climate stabilisation without it. Reforestation and afforestation is one of the best ways to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and forests have so many additional benefits for cleaning the air, cleaning the water, and so on.\"", "What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. \n\n Spearheaded by the non-governmental Centre for Ecology Development and Research (CEDAR) and funded by India's Department of Science and Technology, this project is about climate change. It seeks to find out how much carbon is being absorbed by the region's forests. This is achieved by taking the information collected – foliage overlay, the height of the trees, leaf area index and canopy layer, among other things – and using it to make an allometric equation.", "But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree.\" \n\n British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood." ] ]
valid	99914	[ "A terrorist attack", "Because the world relies so heavily on the internet,", "The author of this piece", "The author is afraid", "What is ironic about the internet?", "One way the internet is damaging society is", "According to the author, who should govern the internet?" ]	[ [ "will one day wipe the internet out.", "will cause the world to have a different view of what goes on on the internet.", "is the only thing more frightening than what takes place online daily.", "will not be as detrimental as a well-placed attack on the internet." ], [ "our economy suffers.", "it must be censored for our own safety.", "countries have to place their own sanctions on it.", "our entire world could crash if it is destroyed." ], [ "has radical ideas concerning how the internet should be controlled.", "is warning us against what is, no doubt, going to happen to us as a society if we continue to rely so heavily on it.", "sees a truth that society is too blind to see.", "has an idealized version of what the internet should be like in mind." ], [ "that the dark web is going to cause long-lasting issues.", "government is going to cause a revolt through their internet sanctions.", "people have lost sight of what the internet is for.", "that huge problems can come from not having proper defenses in place on the internet." ], [ "It was never meant to be such a huge part of society.", "Almost everything that makes the internet function is found on land.", "Major corporations have corrupted it just like the corporate world.", "Donald Trump caused its demise." ], [ "by allowing social media to overtake the lives of the youth of society.", "through the propagation of false stories and skewing things in the wrong way.", "by dumbing down society.", "giving everyone a platform to say anything uncensored." ], [ "The \"Big Four\"", "Individual governments.", "The private sector.", "A body made of multiple entities." ] ]	[ 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well." ], [ "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies." ], [ "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well." ], [ "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well." ], [ "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so." ], [ "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.", "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years." ], [ "In principle, no single actor should be in charge of the internet governance processes. Ideally, these should be overseen by a multi-stakeholder model where governments, the private sector and advocacy groups would have an equal voice and where anyone could be allowed to become involved. In practice, however, it is US government institutions and companies – yes, the usual suspects – that set the rules. They tend to be over-represented in meetings, and in charge of some of the largest regulatory bodies. American stewardship over the internet has long been an area of contention. Countries like China, Russia, and many (mainly developing) countries want more control over their own domestic networks, preferring to see the current model replaced by something more Westphalian, perhaps resembling the United Nations.", "With various nations eyeing each other suspiciously and traditional alliances crumbling, building alternative structures to make foreign interference more difficult seems a logical consequence.\nWho rules the internet?\nIt won't just be the actual infrastructure and 'hard' elements of the internet where governments will seek more independence. Internet governance, the catch-all term to describe the processes and decisions that determine how the internet is managed, and how its technical norms and standards are set, is increasingly complex.", "One necessary component of such an internet commons is that it should be decentralised. Decentralising the internet and rethinking its structure would allow users to take back control over the network of networks, letting them manage their own personal data rather than giving it away to large companies, as well as offering them more choice over the tools they use. It is also often said that distributed internets would also inherently be much safer: largescale cyber-attacks are easier to prevent if we reduce the number of central nodes that traffic can travel through.", "If the US government does decide to overturn the transition (and Trump has certainly shown enthusiasm for overturning decisions of the previous administration), it will do a lot of damage to the American-led governance process. How much credibility can it have when the most important partner doesn't even play by the rules? \n\n As these tensions increase, we'll likely see a push for more government bodies to take control of internet governance (such as the short-lived, Brazil-led NETMundial initiative), abandoning the more inclusive and cooperative approach involving businesses and civil society organisations. Then if the process fell even further apart, it would be a substantial challenge to the interoperable global internet, as regulations and standards swiftly went in different directions.\nThe Big Four\nThough the internet was initially heralded as the greatest democratiser of information since Gutenberg, most data now flows through only a handful of companies. Silicon Valley tech giants, with the 'Big Four' of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon at the helm, rake in most of the spoils of the all-conquering global online economy.", "The fallibility of this shared infrastructure also makes it impossible to keep foreign or hostile actors out of domestic affairs. Though governments that heavily restrict internet access might find it easier to prevent information from flowing in and out of the country, they are still reliant on the same co-owned systems, with some parts inevitably falling under other countries' jurisdictions. \n\n This became very clear after the 2013 Snowden revelations, which showed that the US routinely tapped into foreign internet traffic routed through the country. The massive scale of this monitoring even led then president of Brazil Dilma Rousseff to call for the construction of an undersea cable from Brazil directly to Europe, bypassing the prying eyes of the National Security Agency altogether. And US intelligence agencies are by no means the only ones doing this kind of snooping, as we know all too well.", "This discussion will likely flair up again soon as the Trump administration seeks ways to reverse the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition: an arcane but highly controversial policy issue. IANA is the agency in charge of maintaining the global DNS (Domain Name System) as well as managing Internet Protocol (IP) address allocation and other important basic structural functions of the internet. The internet’s IANA functions had traditionally been managed by the non-profit ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), but remained under contract of the US Department of Commerce, which oversaw its processes – effectively leaving it under US government control. After almost 20 years of bickering and international kowtowing, IANA was brought under full ICANN control last October, finally becoming fully independent. This to the great dismay of many Republican lawmakers; particularly senator Ted Cruz, who has been fighting to stop the process for years.", "With domestic and geopolitical tensions rising, governments are finding it increasingly hard to function amid a constant barrage of uncontrollable information and potential cyber-attacks, making them grow more wary both of the internet's influence and their ability to control it.\nThe fallout from this means we are facing the prospect of countries around the world pulling the plug on the open, global internet and creating their own independent networks. We might be about to see the end of the world wide internet as we know it.\nWith globalisation under attack, the ultimate bastion of borderlessness – the global internet – might very well be one the biggest scalps taken by the newly emerging world order heralded in by Brexit and Trump. If a global orthodoxy of free trade, soft power and international organisations is overpowered by belligerent nations and isolationism, the net will inevitably be swept away with it.", "The growing urge to control the internet has also become apparent over the influence of so-called fake news. Distorting public opinion and fact as a manipulation technique is nothing new: it's been used since Roman times. But the relentless pace and scope with which the internet allows information to disseminate is quite unprecedented. Governments and the media (who have themselves often swapped truth for clicks) are having an increasingly hard time stemming the flow of biased or misleading news stories. So the democratic process suffers.", "Yet although fragmentation – and ultimately also Balkanisation – will carry great social and economic cost, it could also be an opportunity. Europe, which has already been flexing its muscles when it comes to internet policy, now finds itself forced to rely less on US cooperation. It should therefore become a frontrunner in developing an alternative, decentralised internet, with its root values of fairness, openness and democracy restored. This could help the net – and indeed Europe – to become more resilient again. As much as we fear the 'splinternet', we should welcome the Euronet.\nWeaponisation of the internet\nSince we've become dependent on the internet for almost everything we do, dangers to the network's integrity threaten devastating effects. Governments may be tempted to turn inwards in an attempt to shield themselves and their citizens from cyber-attacks.", "In their ambition to expand even further, these tech companies are themselves also an important cause of internet fragmentation, erecting 'walled gardens' all over the world. Facebook's controversial Free Basics service, which offers free data plans to users in developing countries, but which restricts access to a small number of Facebook-approved websites, is a prime example. Some call it digital colonialism. \n\n These moves aimed at generating even more revenue, concentrated in the hands of the few as inequality rises, understandably cause concern among governments and citizens alike. But our main worry should not be about economics. The Big Four – controlling our data, as well as our access to information – wield an inordinate amount of power. Indeed, Denmark recently announced it would appoint a igital ambassador specifically to deal with these technology giants, citing their influence as larger than that of many countries.", "But a European internet would above all need to be radically ambitious – especially with the EU in a fractured state. The rules for the decentralised, new internet are still wide open, and we have the opportunity to set them. The emergence of a new world order is forcing Europe to rethink itself, come closer together and defend its values in the world. Creating a completely new internet built around these values – and open to any like-minded country to join – might be one extraordinarily effective way of achieving it.\nThis is an extended version of a piece originally published in Nesta's 10 predictions for 2017 series\nCorrection 20 February 2017: this article was updated to correct a few instances of 'web' to 'internet'\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The end of the web\nIn the past year, as we have witnessed the upending of the political order, the internet has been the theatre where many of the battles have been fought: from the hacking and leaking of Democratic party emails, to the proliferation of fake news and alternative facts, and yes, the outpourings of @realDonaldTrump.", "While this is a moment of disharmony and uncertainty for the European project, the EU has much it agrees upon when it comes to policy and regulating the internet's mostly American corporate giants: from its ambitious data protection policies and the right to be forgotten, to Apple tax case. But it could do more. The global internet as we know it today began as a public space where everyone had an equal opportunity to use it as we liked. But it has quickly privatised, locking us into platforms that 'harvest' our data. As European citizens grow increasingly concerned about the negative impacts of the internet, the EU has a great opportunity. \n\n The EU should take a different approach to the internet and, rather than making it an unregulated free-for-all, consider it a 'commons': a public good open to all, excluding none. The EU could create and fund the infrastructure for this and help ensure safety for all. Meanwhile, small businesses and individuals would do their bit by creating a variety of tools to add to this commons, which would become fully interoperable through shared standards and underpinning technologies.", "Foreign governments, which in the current political climate cannot rely on Google abiding by its mantra, 'Don't be evil', will aggressively start to pursue the construction of domestic alternatives. It is something we are already seeing happening worldwide.\nThe splinternet\nThough the dream of the web internet pioneers was one of a completely open, non-hierarchical internet, over the years barriers have been springing up that restrict this freedom. Bit by bit, the internet is becoming more cordoned off. \n\n The idea of splitting up the internet into different, Balkanised internets – with a completely separate infrastructure – is not new. After the Snowden revelations, Germany took action and started looking into the construction of the 'Internetz', a German-only network (although one that allows for the possibility of expanding to the rest of the EU).", "The solutions offered by the reluctant tech giants providing a platform for fake news won't be sufficient to stop it altogether. This will prompt more countries to follow Russia and China in building their own platforms like VKontakte and Baidu, thus reducing foreign influence and allowing for extensive censorship and monitoring. The desire of developing countries to establish their own social networks will see them retreat into their own national bubbles.\nFragile infrastructure\nWhile cyber attacks and false information campaigns use the internet to attack the infrastructure by which our societies function, the internet's own infrastructure is also at risk. Despite the internet's ephemeral, lawless appeal, its underlying network of cables, tubes and wires is very much rooted in the physical world. Over 99 per cent of all global internet communications are facilitated by an impressive web of undersea cables, connecting all corners of the world. A submarine deliberately destroying one of these cables in a hard-to-reach place could bring down access to parts of the internet for weeks; and so, by extension, all the systems that rely upon it.", "Now that we are so used to a ubiquitous and global internet, it's hard to imagine what a world of fragmented, national internets might look like. What we do know is that the internet of fun and games, of unfettered access, is quickly coming to an end. When it does, it will be another big nail in the coffin for globalisation.\nBreaking free\nThe idea of a Balkanised internet, of different national and supranational internet islands, is a dark one. What living in such a future would look like, no one knows. Inevitably, though, it would herald a world of less mutual understanding, less shared prosperity and shrinking horizons. \n\n However, the fragmentation of the internet need not be bad news. As the limitations of its original incarnation are becoming increasingly clear, starting from scratch provides us with an important opportunity to right our initial wrongs. We can build a network or networks that are more ethical, inclusive and resilient to outside threats.", "We do not currently have an example of a real internet island in place, but the closest version we see is probably the Great Firewall of China. Though China hasn't built an entirely separate infrastructure, its internet looks entirely different from what we are used to, with content heavily censored and many platforms and websites completely banned. \n\n Russia appears to be following suit. Last November, Russia banned LinkedIn from operating in the country because the social network did not adhere to a new law decreeing that all data generated by Russian users should be stored within Russia itself. In recent weeks, news has also emerged that Moscow has been working with Beijing to implement something similar to the Great Firewall for its own domestic users. Democracies and autocracies alike have long come to understand the great power of the internet and have learned how to both harness and restrict it. \n\n Who will be the first to go it alone? It's difficult to say yet but the usual suspects are lining up: China; Russia; Europe; even Trump's America\n.\nOther countries like Brazil or Turkey might see a compelling reason to do so as well.", "Last October, unknown hackers used an array of badly secured 'internet of things' (IoT) devices to bring down most of the internet on the east coast of America in one of the largest DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks to date. While depriving Americans of Amazon and Facebook for several hours was surely an inconvenience, the potential of the weaponised internet to do harm is infinitely greater.", "Citizens worldwide have become so dependent on these platforms that there are effectively no readily available alternatives to move to if things turn sour. The sheer scale of the Women's March and similar demonstrations in recent weeks would not have been possible without the ability to organise online. What if these channels fall away, their freedom restricted by companies under the yoke of a hostile government? \n\n Though many American technology companies have already pledged they will not assist with the creation of a 'Muslim registry' – and have pushed back on Trump’s latest immigration restrictions\n–\nwe have to be very aware that the amount of personal data they have on each of us would make it far too easy for them to do so.", "As more of the components of a country's critical infrastructure move online, the number of possible targets grows too. Hackers shut down a significant part of Ukraine's electricity grid in 2015, and crippled several important Estonian industries, including its banks, in 2007.\nMany cyber-security experts warn about the lacklustre defence of everything from air traffic control towers and voting machines to nuclear plants. One well-placed attack could do more damage than the most aggressive of traditional military campaigns, at a fraction of the cost. Because of the high degree of uncertainty surrounding cyber-capabilities – 'know your enemy' is a hard adage to follow if potential culprits and their capabilities are so tough to track – it has become impossible for governments to completely shield their countries from cyber-attacks." ] ]
test	32667	[ "Around what year does the story take place?", "Why might Stanley's four-piece combo go to Neptune?", "Why did the reporter leave the bar swiftly after talking to John?", "Why did Jimmie want John to stay with the band so badly?", "What was John's profession?", "How does John return to his previous dimension?", "How did the band replace John?", "Why did Ziggy volunteer for the trip to Neptune?", "Why was the Zloomph so mesmerizing?" ]	[ [ "2021", "2070", "1990", "2040" ], [ "The uranium pits there make a good home for five years.", "It's where musicians past their prime go.", "It is home to Lunar City.", "Fat Boy suggested it." ], [ "He had enough information for his story.", "John had told him about the holes.", "He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sounds produced by the Zloomph.", "He had finished his beer." ], [ "Mr. Ke-teeli liked John, and that made Jimmie believe his job was safe.", "His music was bringing customers to the bar and therefore provided job security.", "He was fascinated by the potential of the holes to travel to other dimensions.", "He was interested in learning how to play the Zoomph." ], [ "He dug holes for a living.", "He researched ancient history at a university.", "He studied force fields and time-dimension holes at a university.", "He was a musician from another dimension." ], [ "He falls into a manhole left open because of the early-morning hour and cold weather.", "The beautiful melodies of the Zloomph re-open the portal.", "He figures out a way to use the Zloomph to access the dimension.", "He discovers his body is full of holes and manages to crawl into one." ], [ "Jimmie found the guy who forgot to set the force field and had him re-open the portal.", "Ziggy's could use his fingers again.", "They scoured the uranium pits on Neptune.", "They searched hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, and hotels for a replacement. " ], [ "His finger healed, so he was now able to make the trip.", "He agreed with Fat Boy's suggestion and wanted to live among other musicians.", "Mr. Ka-teeli was not happy with the band's music and would not renew the contract.", "To help in the search for John Smith." ], [ "Its sheer size made it seem as if it was unaccompanied even when John carried it.", "The sounds it made were unparalleled and entrancing.", "Its deep, midnight-black color was hypnotic.", "The unusual hole in the front of it was captivating because of its mystery." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "\"Certainly. Look around you. All\n you see is holes. These beer bottles\n are just holes surrounded by glass.\n The doors and windows—they're\n holes in walls. The mine tunnels\n make a network of holes under the\n desert. Caves are holes, animals live\n in holes, our faces have holes,\n clothes have holes—millions and\n millions of holes!\"\n\n\n I winced and thought, humor\n him because you gotta eat, you\n gotta eat.\n\n\n His voice trembled with emotion.\n \"Why, they're everywhere. They're\n in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket\n jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes\n and well holes, and shoelace\n holes. There are doughnut\n holes and stocking holes and woodpecker\n holes and cheese holes.\n Oceans lie in holes in the earth,\n and rivers and canals and valleys.\n The craters of the Moon are holes.\n Everything is—\"", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.", "I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.", "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.", "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"" ], [ "Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.", "\"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always\n the uranium pits of Neptune.\n Course, you don't live more than\n five years there—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we could make it back\n to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n\n\n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n \"Your brains?\"\n\n\n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I\n guess it'll have to be the black pits\n of Neptune. The home of washed-up\n interplanetary musicians. It's too\n bad. We're so young, too.\"\n\n\n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli\n was casting his razor-edged glare in\n our direction. I brushed the chewed\n finger nails from the keyboard of\n my electronic piano.", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "Which was why Ke-teeli, our\n boss, was descending upon us with\n all the grace of an enraged Venusian\n vinosaur.\n\n\n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled\n in his nasal tenor. He was almost\n skeleton thin, like most Martians,\n and so tall that if he fell down he'd\n be half way home.\n\n\n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't\n be here, but we've called the Marsport\n local for another. He'll be here\n any minute.\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to\n as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered\n coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three.\n His eyes were like black\n needle points set deep in a mask of\n dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n\n\n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\"\n he squeaked.", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "I sighed. This was the week our\n contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed\n little enough enthusiasm for\n our music as it was. His comments\n were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\"\n or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real\n cause of his concern being, I suspected,\n the infrequency with which\n his cash register tinkled.\n\n\n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new\n man doesn't come,\nwe're\nstill here.\n We'll play for you.\" I glanced at\n the conglomeration of uniformed\n spacemen, white-suited tourists,\n and loin-clothed natives who sat at\n ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't\n want to disappoint your customers,\n would you?\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better\n dey be deesappointed. Ees better\n no museek den bad museek.\"", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"" ], [ "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"", "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "\"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life." ], [ "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "\"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"" ], [ "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"" ], [ "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.", "I closed my eyes. \"Now wait a\n minute. Did you drop something,\n lose it in the hole—is that why you\n have to find it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh I didn't lose anything important,\"\n he snapped, \"\njust\nmy own\n time dimension. And if I don't get\n back they will think I couldn't prove\n my theory, that I'm ashamed to\n come back, and I'll be discredited.\"\n\n\n His chest sagged for an instant.\n Then he straightened. \"But there's\n still time for my plan to work out—with\n the relative difference taken\n into account. Only I get so tired\n just thinking about it.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see where thinking\n about it would tire any one.\"\n\n\n He nodded. \"But it can't be too\n far away.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to hear more about it,\"\n I said. \"But if you're not going to\n play with us—\"", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "\"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life.", "I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"", "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "It was early afternoon when I\n trudged back to my apartment.\n\n\n John was squatting on the living\n room floor, surrounded by a forest\n of empty beer bottles. His eyes were\n bulging, his hair was even wilder\n than usual, and he was swaying.\n\n\n \"John!\" I cried. \"You're drunk!\"\n\n\n His watery eyes squinted at me.\n \"No, not drunk. Just scared. I'm\n awful scared!\"\n\n\n \"But you mustn't be scared. That\n reporter was just stupid. We'll help\n you with your theory.\"\n\n\n His body trembled. \"No, it isn't\n that. It isn't the reporter.\"\n\n\n \"Then what is it, John?\"\n\n\n \"It's my body. It's—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, what about your body?\n Are you sick?\"", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"" ], [ "\"Then some old-fashioned beer?\"\n\n\n He smiled. \"Yes, I\nlike\nbeer.\"\n\n\n I escorted him to the bar and assisted\n him in his arduous climb onto\n a stool.\n\n\n \"John,\" I ventured after he'd\n taken an experimental sip, \"where\n have you been hiding? A guy like\n you should be playing every night.\"\n\n\n John yawned. \"Just got here. Figured\n I might need some money so\n I went to the union. Then I worked\n on my plan.\"\n\n\n \"Then you need a job. How\n about playing with us steady? We\n like your style a lot.\"\n\n\n He made a long, low humming\n sound which I interpreted as an\n expression of intense concentration.\n \"I don't know,\" he finally drawled.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale.", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "Which was why Ke-teeli, our\n boss, was descending upon us with\n all the grace of an enraged Venusian\n vinosaur.\n\n\n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled\n in his nasal tenor. He was almost\n skeleton thin, like most Martians,\n and so tall that if he fell down he'd\n be half way home.\n\n\n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't\n be here, but we've called the Marsport\n local for another. He'll be here\n any minute.\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to\n as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered\n coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three.\n His eyes were like black\n needle points set deep in a mask of\n dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n\n\n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\"\n he squeaked.", "We were too late. The reporter\n had already slapped on his hat and\n was striding to the exit. John turned\n to us, dazed, his enthusiasm vanishing\n like air from a punctured balloon.\n\n\n \"He wouldn't listen,\" he said,\n weakly. \"I tried to tell him, but he\n said he'd come back when I'm\n sober. I'm sober now. So I quit.\n I've got to find my hole.\"\n\n\n I patted him on the back. \"No,\n John, we'll help you. Don't quit.\n We'll—well, we'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We're working on a plan, too,\"\n said Fat Boy in a burst of inspiration.\n \"We're going to make a more\n scientific approach.\"\n\n\n \"How?\" John asked.\n\n\n Fat Boy gulped.", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.", "I sighed. This was the week our\n contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed\n little enough enthusiasm for\n our music as it was. His comments\n were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\"\n or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real\n cause of his concern being, I suspected,\n the infrequency with which\n his cash register tinkled.\n\n\n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new\n man doesn't come,\nwe're\nstill here.\n We'll play for you.\" I glanced at\n the conglomeration of uniformed\n spacemen, white-suited tourists,\n and loin-clothed natives who sat at\n ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't\n want to disappoint your customers,\n would you?\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better\n dey be deesappointed. Ees better\n no museek den bad museek.\"", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"" ], [ "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "\"Well,\" he muttered, \"there's always\n the uranium pits of Neptune.\n Course, you don't live more than\n five years there—\"\n\n\n \"Maybe we could make it back\n to Lunar City,\" suggested Hammer-Head.\n\n\n \"Using what for fare?\" I asked.\n \"Your brains?\"\n\n\n Hammer-Head groaned. \"No. I\n guess it'll have to be the black pits\n of Neptune. The home of washed-up\n interplanetary musicians. It's too\n bad. We're so young, too.\"\n\n\n The seconds swept by. Ke-teeli\n was casting his razor-edged glare in\n our direction. I brushed the chewed\n finger nails from the keyboard of\n my electronic piano.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.", "\"It'd be a steady job, John.\" Inspiration\n struck me. \"And listen, I\n have an apartment. It's got everything,\n solar shower, automatic chef,\n 'copter landing—if we ever get a\n 'copter. Plenty of room there for\n two people. You can stay with me\n and it won't cost you a cent. And\n we'll even pay you over union\n wages.\"\n\n\n His watery gaze wandered lazily\n to the bar mirror, down to the glittering\n array of bottles and then out\n to the dance floor.\n\n\n He yawned again and spoke\n slowly, as if each word were a leaden\n weight cast reluctantly from his\n tongue:\n\n\n \"No, I don't ... care much ...\n about playing.\"\n\n\n \"What\ndo\nyou like to do, John?\"", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "\"Oh, sure,\" I said. \"He'll stay—just\n as long as you want him.\"\n\n\n \"Den he sign contract, too. No\n beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. We'll get him to sign it.\"\n I laughed hollowly. \"Don't worry,\n Mr. Ke-teeli.\"\n\n\n Just a few minutes later tragedy\n struck.\n\n\n A reporter from the\nMarsport\n Times\nambled into interview the\n Man of The Hour. The interview,\n unfortunately, was conducted over\n the bar and accompanied by a generous\n guzzling of beer. Fat Boy,\n Hammer-Head and I watched\n from a table. Knowing John as we\n did, a silent prayer was in our eyes.\n\n\n \"This is the first time he's talked\n to anybody,\" Fat Boy breathed.\n \"I—I'm scared.", "I sighed. This was the week our\n contract ended. Goon-Face had displayed\n little enough enthusiasm for\n our music as it was. His comments\n were either, \"Ees too loud, too fast,\"\n or \"Ees too slow, too soft.\" The real\n cause of his concern being, I suspected,\n the infrequency with which\n his cash register tinkled.\n\n\n \"But,\" I added, \"even if the new\n man doesn't come,\nwe're\nstill here.\n We'll play for you.\" I glanced at\n the conglomeration of uniformed\n spacemen, white-suited tourists,\n and loin-clothed natives who sat at\n ancient stone tables. \"You wouldn't\n want to disappoint your customers,\n would you?\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli snorted. \"Maybe ees better\n dey be deesappointed. Ees better\n no museek den bad museek.\"", "\"Just wait another day,\" I said.\n \"We'll have it worked out. Just be\n patient another day. You can't\n leave now, not after all your work.\"\n\n\n \"No, I guess not,\" he sighed. \"I'll\n stay—until tomorrow.\"\nAll night the thought crept\n through my brain like a teasing\n spider:\nWhat can we do to make\n him stay? What can we tell him?\n What, what, what?\nUnable to sleep the next morning,\n I left John to his snoring and\n went for an aspirin and black coffee.\n All the possible schemes were\n drumming through my mind: finding\n an Earth blonde to capture\n John's interest, having him electro-hypnotized,\n breaking his leg, forging\n a letter from this mythical university\n telling him his theory was\n proved valid and for him to take\n a nice long vacation now. He was\n a screwball about holes and force\n fields and dimensional worlds but\n for that music of his I'd baby him\n the rest of his life.", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "\"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it.\"\n\n\n John Smith was gone, so utterly\n and completely and tragically gone\n it was as if he'd never existed....\nTonight is our last night at\nThe\n Space Room\n. Goon-Face is scowling\n again with the icy fury of a\n Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face\n has said, \"No beeg feedle, no contract.\"\n\n\n Without John, we're notes in a\n lost chord.\n\n\n We've searched everything, in\n hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs,\n hotels. We've hounded spaceports\n and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere\n is John Smith.", "Which was why Ke-teeli, our\n boss, was descending upon us with\n all the grace of an enraged Venusian\n vinosaur.\n\n\n \"Where ees museek?\" he shrilled\n in his nasal tenor. He was almost\n skeleton thin, like most Martians,\n and so tall that if he fell down he'd\n be half way home.\n\n\n I gulped. \"Our bass man can't\n be here, but we've called the Marsport\n local for another. He'll be here\n any minute.\"\n\n\n Ke-teeli, sometimes referred to\n as Goon-Face and The Eye, leered\n coldly down at me from his eight-foot-three.\n His eyes were like black\n needle points set deep in a mask of\n dry, ancient, reddish leather.\n\n\n \"Ees no feedle man, ees no job,\"\n he squeaked.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"" ], [ "His face was white with terror.\n \"No, my—\nmy body's full of holes\n.\n Suppose it's one of those holes!\n How will I get back if it is?\"\n\n\n He rose and staggered to his\nZloomph\n, clutching it as though it\n were somehow a source of strength\n and consolation.\n\n\n I patted him gingerly on the arm.\n \"Now John. You've just had too\n much beer, that's all. Let's go out\n and get some air and some strong\n black coffee. C'mon now.\"\n\n\n We staggered out into the morning\n darkness, the three of us. John,\n the\nZloomph\n, and I.", "But there was something else, too.\n There were overtones, so that John\n wasn't just playing a single note,\n but a whole chord with each beat.\n And the fullness, the depth of those\n incredible chords actually set my\n blood tingling. I could\nfeel\nthe\n tingling just as one can feel the vibration\n of a plucked guitar string.\n\n\n I glanced at the cash customers.\n They looked like weary warriors\n getting their first glimpse of Valhalla.\n Gap-jawed and wide-eyed,\n they seemed in a kind of ecstatic\n hypnosis. Even the silent, bland-faced\n Martians stopped sipping\n their wine-syrup and nodded their\n dark heads in time with the rhythm.\n\n\n I looked at The Eye. The transformation\n of his gaunt features\n was miraculous. Shadows of gloom\n dissolved and were replaced by\n a black-toothed, crescent-shaped\n smile of delight. His eyes shone like\n those of a kid seeing Santa Claus.", "Then it happened.\nFrom the entrance of\nThe\n Space Room\ncame a thumping\n and a grating and a banging. Suddenly,\n sweeping across the dance\n floor like a cold wind, was a bass\n fiddle, an enormous black monstrosity,\n a refugee from a pawnbroker's\n attic. It was queerly shaped. It was\n too tall, too wide. It was more like\n a monstrous, midnight-black hour-glass\n than a bass.\n\n\n The fiddle was not unaccompanied\n as I'd first imagined. Behind\n it, streaking over the floor in a\n waltz of agony, was a little guy, an\n animated matchstick with a flat,\n broad face that seemed to have\n been compressed in a vice. His sandcolored\n mop of hair reminded me\n of a field of dry grass, the long\n strands forming loops that flanked\n the sides of his face.", "I wondered what the hell he was\n talking about. I studied the black,\n mirror-like wood. The aperture in\n the vesonator was like that of any\n bass fiddle.\n\n\n \"Isn't right for what?\" I had to\n ask.\n\n\n He turned his sad eyes to me.\n \"For going home,\" he said.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.\nWe played. Tune after tune.\n John knew them all, from the\n latest pop melodies to a swing version\n of the classic\nRhapsody of The\n Stars\n. He was a quiet guy during\n the next couple of hours, and getting\n more than a few words from\n him seemed as hard as extracting a\n tooth. He'd stand by his fiddle—I\n mean, his\nZloomph\n—with a dreamy\n expression in those watery eyes,\n staring at nothing.", "I was hanging on to him trying\n to see around and over and even\n under the\nZloomph\n—steering by a\n sort of radar-like sixth sense. The\n street lights on Marsport are pretty\n dim compared to Earthside. I\n didn't see the open manhole that\n the workmen had figured would be\n all right at that time of night. It\n gets pretty damned cold around 4: A.M.\n of a Martian morning, and I\n guess the men were warming up\n with a little nip at the bar across\n the street.\n\n\n Then—he was gone.\n\n\n John just slipped out of my grasp—\nZloomph\nand all—and was gone—completely\n and irrevocably gone.\n I even risked a broken neck and\n jumped in the manhole after him.\n Nothing—nothing but the smell of\n ozone and an echo bouncing crazily\n off the walls of the conduit.", "\"Oh, I'll play with you,\" he\n beamed. \"I can talk to\nyou\n.\nYou\nunderstand.\"\n\n\n Thank heaven!\nHeaven lasted for just three\n days. During those seventy-two\n golden hours the melodious tinkling\n of The Eye's cash register was as\n constant as that of Santa's sleigh\n bells.\n\n\n John became the hero of tourists,\n spacemen, and Martians, but nevertheless\n he remained stubbornly\n aloof. He was quiet, moody, playing\n his\nZloomph\nautomatically. He'd\n reveal definite indications of belonging\n to Homo Sapiens only when\n drinking beer and talking about his\n holes.\n\n\n Goon-Face was still cautious.\n\n\n \"Contract?\" he wheezed. \"Maybe.\n We see. Eef feedleman stay, we\n have contract. He stay, yes?\"", "My eyes burst open. A shiver\n coursed down my spine like gigantic\n mice feet.\n\n\n The tones that surged from that\n monstrous bass were ecstatic. They\n were out of a jazzman's Heaven.\n They were great rolling clouds that\n seemed to envelop the entire universe\n with their vibrance. They\n held a depth and a volume and a\n richness that were astounding, that\n were like no others I'd ever heard.\n\n\n First they went\nBoom-de-boom-de-boom-de-boom\n,\n and then,\nboom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom-de-de-boom\n,\n just like the tones of all bass\n fiddles.", "We finished\nOn An Asteroid With\n You\n, modulated into\nSweet Sally\n from Saturn\nand finished with\nTighten Your Lips on Titan\n.\n\n\n We waited for the applause of\n the Earth people and the shrilling\n of the Martians to die down. Then\n I turned to John and his fiddle.\n\n\n \"If I didn't hear it,\" I gasped,\n \"I wouldn't believe it!\"\n\n\n \"And the fiddle's so old, too!\"\n added Hammer-Head who, although\n sober, seemed quite drunk.\n\n\n \"Old?\" said John Smith. \"Of\n course it's old. It's over five thousand\n years old. I was lucky to find\n it in a pawnshop. Only it's not a\n fiddle but a\nZloomph\n. This is the\n only one in existence.\" He patted\n the thing tenderly. \"I tried the hole\n in it but it isn't the right one.\"", "\"But, John,\" I said as patiently as\n possible, \"what have these holes\n got to do with you?\"\n\n\n He glowered at me as if I were\n unworthy of such a confidence.\n \"What have they to do with me?\"\n he shrilled. \"I can't find the right\n one—that's what!\"\n\n\n I closed my eyes. \"Which particular\n hole are you looking for, John?\"\n\n\n He was speaking rapidly again\n now.\n\n\n \"I was hurrying back to the University\n with the\nZloomph\nto prove\n a point of ancient history to those\n fools. They don't believe that instruments\n which make music actually\n existed before the tapes! It\n was dark—and some fool researcher\n had forgotten to set a force-field\n over the hole—I fell through.\"", "\"Certainly. Look around you. All\n you see is holes. These beer bottles\n are just holes surrounded by glass.\n The doors and windows—they're\n holes in walls. The mine tunnels\n make a network of holes under the\n desert. Caves are holes, animals live\n in holes, our faces have holes,\n clothes have holes—millions and\n millions of holes!\"\n\n\n I winced and thought, humor\n him because you gotta eat, you\n gotta eat.\n\n\n His voice trembled with emotion.\n \"Why, they're everywhere. They're\n in pots and pans, in pipes, in rocket\n jets, in bumpy roads. There are buttonholes\n and well holes, and shoelace\n holes. There are doughnut\n holes and stocking holes and woodpecker\n holes and cheese holes.\n Oceans lie in holes in the earth,\n and rivers and canals and valleys.\n The craters of the Moon are holes.\n Everything is—\"", "But after one number he studied\n Fat Boy's clarinet for a moment.\n \"Nice clarinet,\" he mused. \"Has an\n unusual hole in the front.\"\n\n\n Fat Boy scratched the back of\n his head. \"You—you mean here?\n Where the music comes out?\"\n\n\n John Smith nodded. \"Unusual.\"\n\n\n Hummm, I thought again.\n\n\n Awhile later I caught him eyeing\n my piano keyboard. \"What's\n the matter, John?\"\n\n\n He pointed.\n\n\n \"Oh, there,\" I said. \"A cigarette\n fell out of my ashtray, burnt a hole\n in the key. If The Eye sees it, he'll\n swear at me in seven languages.\"\n\n\n \"Even there,\" he said softly,\n \"even there....\"", "Ziggy, whose two fingers have\n healed, has already bowed to what\n seems inevitable. He's signed up for\n that trip to Neptune's uranium\n pits. There's plenty of room for\n more volunteers, he tells us. But I\n spend my time cussing the guy who\n forgot to set the force field at the\n other end of the hole and let John\n and his\nZloomph\nback into his own\n time dimension. I cuss harder when\n I think how we were robbed of the\n best bass player in the galaxy.\n\n\n And without a corpus delecti we\n can't even sue the city.\n... THE END", "Of course, the folders neglect to\n add that the most amazing aspect is\n the scent of the Canal's stagnant\n water—and that the most unforgettable\n experience is seeing the \"root-of-all-evil\"\n evaporate from your\n pocketbook like snow from the\n Great Red Desert.\n\n\n We were sitting on the bandstand\n of the candle-lit cocktail lounge.\n Me—Jimmie Stanley—and my\n four-piece combo. Maybe you've\n seen our motto back on Earth:\n \"The Hottest Music This Side of\n Mercury.\"\n\n\n But there weren't four of us tonight.\n Only three. Ziggy, our bass\n fiddle man, had nearly sliced off\n two fingers while opening a can of\n Saturnian ice-fish, thus decreasing\n the number of our personnel by a\n tragic twenty-five per cent.", "My gaze turned to the dance\n floor. Goon-Face had his eyes on\n us, and they were as cold as six Indians\n going South.\n\n\n \"We'll talk about your plan at\n intermission,\" I said, shivering.\n \"Now, we'd better start playing.\n John, do you know\nOn An Asteroid\n With You\n?\"\n\n\n \"I know\neverything\n,\" said John\n Smith.\n\n\n I turned to my piano with a\n shudder. I didn't dare look at that\n horrible fiddle again. I didn't dare\n think what kind of soul-chilling\n tones might emerge from its ancient\n depths.\n\n\n And I didn't dare look again at\n the second monstrosity, the one\n named John Smith. I closed my\n eyes and plunged into a four-bar\n intro.\n\n\n Hammer-Head joined in on\n vibro-drums and Fat Boy on clarinet,\n and then—", "There was no doubt about it.\n John Smith was peculiar, but he\n was the best bass man this side of a\n musician's Nirvana.\n\n\n It didn't take a genius to figure\n out our situation. Item one: Goon-Face's\n countenance had evidenced\n an excellent imitation of Mephistopheles\n before John began to play.\n Item two: Goon-Face had beamed\n like a kitten with a quart of cream\n after John began to play.\n\n\n Conclusion: If we wanted to\n keep eating, we'd have to persuade\n John Smith to join our combo.\n\n\n At intermission I said, \"How\n about a drink, John? Maybe a shot\n of wine-syrup?\"\n\n\n He shook his head.\n\n\n \"Then maybe a Venusian fizz?\"\n\n\n His grunt was negative.", "His pale blue eyes were watery,\n like twin pools of fog. His tightfitting\n suit, as black as the bass,\n was something off a park bench. It\n was impossible to guess his age. He\n could have been anywhere between\n twenty and forty.\n\n\n The bass thumped down upon\n the bandstand.\n\n\n \"Hello,\" he puffed. \"I'm John\n Smith, from the Marsport union.\"\n He spoke shrilly and rapidly, as if\n anxious to conclude the routine of\n introductions. \"I'm sorry I'm late,\n but I was working on my plan.\"\n\n\n A moment's silence.\n\n\n \"Your plan?\" I echoed at last.\n\n\n \"How to get back home,\" he\n snapped as if I should have known\n it already.\n\n\n Hummm, I thought.", "His string-bean of a body stiffened.\n \"I like to study ancient history ...\n and I must work on my\n plan.\"\n\n\n Oh Lord, that plan again!\n\n\n I took a deep breath. \"Tell me\n about it, John. It\nmust\nbe interesting.\"\n\n\n He made queer clicking noises\n with his mouth that reminded me\n of a mechanical toy being wound\n into motion. \"The whole foundation\n of this or any other culture is\n based on the history of all the time\n dimensions, each interwoven with\n the other, throughout the ages. And\n the holes provide a means of studying\n all of it first hand.\"\nOh, oh\n, I thought.\nBut you still\n have to eat. Remember, you still\n have to eat.\n\"Trouble is,\" he went on, \"there\n are so many holes in this universe.\"\n\n\n \"Holes?\" I kept a straight face.", "He was something out of a nightmare but his music was straight\n from heaven. He was a ragged little man out of a hole but he\n was money in the bank to Stanley's four-piece combo. He was\n—whoops!...\nThe Holes and John Smith\nBy Edward W. Ludwig\nIllustration by Kelly Freas\nIt all began on a Saturday\n night at\nThe Space Room\n. If\n you've seen any recent Martian\n travel folders, you know the place:\n \"A picturesque oasis of old Martian\n charm, situated on the beauteous\n Grand Canal in the heart of\n Marsport. Only half a mile from\n historic Chandler Field, landing\n site of the first Martian expedition\n nearly fifty years ago in 1990. A\n visitor to the hotel, lunch room or\n cocktail lounge will thrill at the\n sight of hardy space pioneers mingling\n side by side with colorful\n Martian tribesmen. An evening at\nThe Space Room\nis an amazing,\n unforgettable experience.\"", "\"Nothing can happen,\" I said,\n optimistically. \"This'll be good publicity.\"\n\n\n We watched.\n\n\n John murmured something. The\n reporter, a paunchy, balding man,\n scribbled furiously in his notebook.\n\n\n John yawned, muttered something\n else. The reporter continued\n to scribble.\n\n\n John sipped beer. His eyes\n brightened, and he began to talk\n more rapidly.\n\n\n The reporter frowned, stopped\n writing, and studied John curiously.\n\n\n John finished his first beer,\n started on his second. His eyes were\n wild, and he was talking more and\n more rapidly.\n\n\n \"He's doing it,\" Hammer-Head\n groaned. \"He's telling him!\"\n\n\n I rose swiftly. \"We better get\n over there. We should have known\n better—\"", "Fat Boy, our clarinetist who doubles\n on Martian horn-harp, made a\n feeble attempt at optimism. \"Don't\n worry, Mr. Ke-teeli. That new bass\n man will be here.\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Hammer-Head, our\n red-haired vibro-drummer. \"I think\n I hear him coming now.\"\n\n\n Suspiciously, Ke-teeli eyed the\n entrance. There was only silence.\n His naked, parchment-like chest\n swelled as if it were an expanding\n balloon.\n\n\n \"Five meenutes!\" he shrieked.\n \"Eef no feedle, den you go!\" And\n he whirled away.\n\n\n We waited.\n\n\n Fat Boy's two hundred and\n eighty-odd pounds were drooped\n over his chair like the blubber of an\n exhausted, beach-stranded whale." ] ]
test	62212	[ "What is Rat's main reason for wanting to pilot the ship back to Earth?", "What are the two main reasons for the crew to return to Earth?", "Who talks Rat into defying Roberts' orders?", "In order to prevent as many medical issues as possible from occurring away from Earth, potential crew members must", "Judith is dying from", "What brought Judith to Mars in the first place?", "One fundamental issue they encounter on the journey back to Earth is ", "What is the problem with the water?", "How does Rat amaze everyone?" ]	[ [ "He is in love with Judith and needs to ensure her safe return to Earth.", "He feels a need to help those less fortunate than himself.", "He does not want Roberts to lose his job.", "He wants to escape his prison." ], [ "Two sick people require medical attention, and they want to get them back to Earth simultaneously.", "Nurse Grey must answer for her charge becoming ill while in her care.", "A sick person needs medical attention, and they need to return Rat to prison on Earth.", "Rat must be returned to prison on Earth, and the crew needs to get more supplies to sustain them." ], [ "No one. Rat decides on his own.", "Peterson", "Nurse Gray", "Judith" ], [ "have all of their unnecessary organs removed.", "agree to quarantine themselves if they become ill, and if they cannot be cured, they are to take their own lives.", "complete a rigorous medical examination before leaving Earth.", "Be vaccinated against space viruses." ], [ "internal poisoning from one of her organs.", "a gunshot.", "Martian fever.", "an injury she received when she landed." ], [ "She was on an educational trip for college.", "She ran away to meet Rat on Mars", "She was out on an adventure, and she crashed when she became ill.", "She was traveling to meet her father on Mars." ], [ "They must ration their water to have enough to make the trip, and some of what they have is tainted.", "Rat is more concerned with his escape than getting the others back to Earth.", "They are going to run out of fuel before they can get to Earth.", "Judith is much sicker than they originally anticipated, and she is not going to live." ], [ "It boils due to the atmospheric changes, and it becomes undrinkable.", "It contains microorganisms that will make them ill.", "One of the crew members has siphoned off too much, leaving the others without enough to sustain them.", "Greasball forgot to rinse the fuel from the tank." ], [ "He approaches Earth much faster than anticipated.", "His love for Judith drives him to do the unthinkable in terms of sacrificing himself for her.", "He never sleeps or eats.", "He kills half of the crew to have enough water for him and Judith to make the trip." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"", "\"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again.", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!", "\"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"", "\"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up\n and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings\n as he padded away.\n\n\n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago.\n Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of\n bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian\n snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped\n for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n\n\n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his\n features. She tried to struggle up.\n\n\n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked\n several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n\n\n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.", "\"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"", "Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"", "\"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"", "\"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"" ], [ "\"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"", "\"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.", "\"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"", "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"", "Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"", "\"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "\"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"", "Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"", "\"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat\n down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell\n and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n\n\n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful\n he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he\n contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let\n some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and\n it cost him something.\n\n\n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in.\n Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n\n\n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste\n of the fuel.\n\n\n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"", "\"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.", "\"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\nRat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel,\n checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n\n\n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip\n her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the\n Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock.\n The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building.\n On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat\n outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n\n\n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the\n wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"" ], [ "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"", "\"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.", "Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"", "Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"", "\"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again.", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"", "Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was\n attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch.\n And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the\n Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n\n\n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around\n Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps\n on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that\n leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n\n\n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case.\n It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one\n word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"", "\"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"", "Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!", "Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"", "\"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "\"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\nRat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel,\n checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n\n\n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip\n her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the\n Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock.\n The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building.\n On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat\n outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n\n\n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the\n wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "\"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.", "\"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly." ], [ "\"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"", "\"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"", "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"", "\"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"", "The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.", "Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "\"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"", "\"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"", "\"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "\"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"", "PRISON PLANET\nBy BOB TUCKER\nTo remain on Mars meant death from agonizing\n\n space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay\n\n days of flight away. And there was only\n\n a surface rocket in which to escape—with\n\n a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n\"Listen, Rat!\" Roberds said, \"what\nI\nsay goes around here. It doesn't\n happen to be any of your business. I'm still in possession of my wits,\n and I know Peterson can't handle that ship. Furthermore Gladney will\n be in it too, right along side of that sick girl in there! And Rat,\n get this:\nI'm\ngoing to pilot that ship. Understand? Consulate or\n no Consulate, job or no job, I'm wheeling that crate to Earth because\n this is an emergency. And the emergency happens to be bigger than my\n position, to me at any rate.\" His tone dropped to a deadly softness.\n \"Now will you kindly remove your stinking carcass from this office?\"", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney." ], [ "\"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"", "\"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "\"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly.", "\"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.", "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "\"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"", "Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in\n the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded\nupward\n, beads\n glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again\n and she looked up.\n\n\n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at\n her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat.\n He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n\n\n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n\n\n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my\n back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the\n hammocks on their rope-axis.", "\"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again.", "\"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up\n and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings\n as he padded away.\n\n\n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago.\n Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of\n bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian\n snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped\n for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n\n\n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his\n features. She tried to struggle up.\n\n\n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked\n several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n\n\n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.", "Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"", "\"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or\n will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for\n work.\" She shivered.\n\n\n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat\n threw up a hand to stop her.\n\n\n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n\n\n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold,\n yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n\n\n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of\n course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from\n another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her\n face accented the fact.", "\"Better lock window,\" he cautioned. \"Stall, if Boss call. Back\n soon....\" and he was gone.\n\n\n To Nurse Gray the fifteen minute wait seemed like hours, impatient\n agonizing hours of tight-lipped anxiety.\nFeet first, she swung through the window, clutching a small bag in her\n hands. She never touched ground. Rat whispered \"Hold tight!\" in her\n ear and the wind was abruptly yanked from her! The ground fell away\n in a dizzy rush, unseen but felt, in the night! Her feet scraped on\n some projection, and she felt herself being lifted still higher. Wind\n returned to her throat, and she breathed again.\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" she managed to get out, gaspingly. \"I wasn't expecting\n that. I had forgotten you—\"", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"", "The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.", "Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.", "\"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"" ], [ "\"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.", "\"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was\n attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch.\n And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the\n Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n\n\n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around\n Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps\n on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that\n leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n\n\n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case.\n It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one\n word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"", "\"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "\"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.", "\"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"", "Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"", "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"", "Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"", "\"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"", "PRISON PLANET\nBy BOB TUCKER\nTo remain on Mars meant death from agonizing\n\n space-sickness, but Earth-surgery lay\n\n days of flight away. And there was only\n\n a surface rocket in which to escape—with\n\n a traitorous Ganymedean for its pilot.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1942.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.", "\"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.", "The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.", "\"Very! She is becoming worse. I'm afraid to wait until daylight.\n And ... well, we want\nyou\nto pilot it! She refuses to risk\n Mr. Roberds' job. She favors you.\"\n\n\n Rat stepped back, astonished. \"She?\"\n\n\n Nurse Gray moved from the window and Rat saw the second form in the\n room, a slight, quiet figure on a small cot. \"My patient,\" Nurse Gray\n explained. \"She overheard our conversation awhile ago. Quick, please,\n can you?\"\n\n\n Rat looked at her and then at the girl on the cot. He vanished from the\n window. Almost immediately, he was back again.\n\n\n \"When?\" he whispered.\n\n\n \"As soon as possible. Yes. Do you know...?\" but he had gone again.\n Nurse Gray found herself addressing blackness. On the point of turning,\n she saw him back again." ], [ "\"Back for another man. Remember the two miners who found us when we\n crashed? The burly one fell off a rock-bank as they were bringing us\n in. Stove in his ribs pretty badly. The other has a broken arm ...\n happened once while you were out. They wouldn't let me say anything for\n fear of worrying you.\"\nThe girl did not answer then and a hushed expectancy fell over the\n ship. Somewhere aft a small motor was running. Wind whistled past the\n open lock.\n\n\n \"I've caused plenty of trouble haven't I?\" she asked aloud, finally.\n \"This was certainly a fool stunt, and I'm guilty of a lot of fool\n stunts! I just didn't realize until now the\nwhy\nof that law.\"", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "\"Don't talk so much,\" the nurse admonished. \"A lot of people have found\n out the\nwhy\nof that law the hard way, just as you are doing, and\n lived to remember it. Until hospitals are built on this forlorn world,\n humans like you who haven't been properly conditioned will have to stay\n right at home.\"\n\n\n \"How about these men that live and work here?\"\n\n\n \"They never get here until they've been through the mill first.\n Adenoids, appendix', all the extra parts they can get along without.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Judith said. \"I've certainly learned my lesson!\"\n\n\n Gray didn't answer, but from out of the darkness surrounding her came a\n sound remarkably resembling a snort.\n\n\n \"Gray?\" Judith asked fearfully.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"\n\n\n \"Hasn't the pilot been gone an awfully long time?\"", "\"—he on Mars. I here. Boss nuts, too sad. He drive, it be eight days.\n Now only six.\" He cast a glance at Judith and found her eyes closed.\n \"Six days, no brake. No.\"\n\n\n \"I see your point, and appreciate it,\" Gray cut in. \"But now what? This\n deceleration business ... there is a whole lot I don't know, but some\n things I do!\"\n\n\n Rat refused the expected answer. \"Land tonight, I think. Never been to\n Earth before. Somebody meet us, I think.\"\n\n\n \"You can bet your leather boots somebody will meet us!\" Gladney cried.\n Gray turned to him. \"The Chief'll have the whole planet waiting for\nyou\n!\" He laughed with real satisfaction. \"Oh yes, Rat, they'll be\n somebody waiting for us all right.\" And then he added: \"If we land.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, we land.\" Rat confided, glad to share a secret.", "\"True enough.\" Roberds cast an anxious glance at the partly closed\n door, lowered his voice. \"It'll cost me my job, but that girl in there\n has to be taken to a hospital quickly! And it's her luck to be landed\n on a planet that doesn't boast even one! So it's Earth ... or she\n dies. I'd feel a lot better too if we could get Gladney to a hospital,\n I'm not too confident of that patching job.\" He pulled a pipe from a\n jacket pocket. \"So, might as well kill two birds with one stone ... and\n that wasn't meant to be funny!\"\n\n\n Peterson said nothing, sat watching the door.\n\n\n \"Rat has the right idea,\" Roberds continued, \"but I had already thought\n of it. About the bunks and lockers. Greaseball has been out there all\n night tearing them out. We just\nmight\nbe able to hop by dawn ... and\n hell of a long, grinding hop it will be!\"", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "\"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "\"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"", "Gray pointed out the location. The Centaurian considered this further\n and drifted into long contemplation. Watching him, Gray remembered his\n eyes that night ... only\nlast\nnight ... in the office. Peterson had\n refused to meet them. After awhile Rat came out of it.\n\n\n \"No,\" he waved. \"No appendix. Never nowhere appendix.\"\n\n\n \"Then Mother Nature has finally woke up!\" she exclaimed. \"But why do\n Centaurians rate it exclusively?\"\n\n\n Rat ignored this and asked one of her. \"What you and her doing up\n there?\" He pointed back and up, to where Mars obliterated the stars.\n\n\n \"You might call it a pleasure jaunt. She's only seventeen. We came over\n in a cruiser belonging to her father; it was rather large and easy to\n handle. But the cruise ended when she lost control of the ship because\n of an attack of space-appendicitis. The rest you know.\"\n\n\n \"So you?\"", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "\"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"", "The nurse came out of the door.\n\n\n \"How is she?\" Roberds asked.\n\n\n \"Sleeping,\" Gray whispered. \"But sinking....\"\n\n\n \"We can take off at dawn, I think.\" He filled the pipe and didn't look\n at her. \"You'll have to spend most of the trip in a hammock.\"\n\n\n \"I can take it.\" Suddenly she smiled, wanly. \"I was with the Fleet. How\n long will it take?\"\n\n\n \"Eight days, in\nthat\nship.\"\n\n\n Roberds lit his pipe, and carefully hid his emotions. He knew Peterson\n was harboring the same thoughts. Eight days in space, in a small ship\n meant for two, and built for planetary surface flights. Eight days in\n that untrustworthy crate, hurtling to save the lives of that girl and\n Gladney.", "\"What is your name?\" she asked. \"Your real one I mean.\"\n\n\n He grinned. \"Big. You couldn't say it. Sound like Christmas and\n bottlenose together real fast. Just say Rat. Everybody does.\" His eyes\n swept the panel and flashed back to her. \"Your name Gray. Have a front\n name?\"\n\n\n \"Patti.\"\n\n\n \"Pretty, Patti.\"\n\n\n \"No, just Patti. Say, what's the matter with the cooling system?\"\n\n\n \"Damn punk,\" he said. \"This crate for surface work. No space. Cooling\n system groan, damn punk. Won't keep cool here.\"\n\n\n \"And ...\" she followed up, \"it will get warmer as we go out?\"\n\n\n Rat turned back to his board in a brown study and carefully ignored\n her. Gray grasped an inkling of what the coming week could bring.", "Rat unlocked the master level and shoved!\n\"Whew!\" Nurse Gray came back to throbbing awareness, the all too\n familiar feeling of a misplaced stomach attempting to force its\n crowded way into her boots plaguing her. Rockets roared in the rear.\n She loosened a few straps and twisted over. Judith was still out, her\n face tensed in pain. Gray bit her lip and twisted the other way. The\n Centaurian was grinning at her.\n\n\n \"Do you always leave in a hurry?\" she demanded, and instantly wished\n she hadn't said it. He gave no outward sign.\n\n\n \"Long-time sleep,\" he announced. \"Four, five hours maybe.\" The chest\n strap was lying loose at his side.\n\n\n \"That long!\" she was incredulous. \"I'm never out more than three\n hours!\" Unloosening more straps, she sat up, glanced at the control\n panel.", "\"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat\n down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell\n and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n\n\n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful\n he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he\n contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let\n some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and\n it cost him something.\n\n\n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in.\n Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n\n\n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste\n of the fuel.\n\n\n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"" ], [ "\"But how about water?\" she demanded next. \"Is there enough?\"\n\n\n He faced about. \"For her—\" nodding to Judith, \"and him—\" to Gladney,\n \"yes. Sparingly. Four hours every time, maybe.\" Back to Gray. \"You,\n me ... twice a day. Too bad.\" His eyes drifted aft to the tank of\n water. She followed. \"One tank water. All the rest fuel. Too bad, too\n bad. We get thirsty I think.\"\nThey did get thirsty, soon. A damnable hot thirst accented by\n the knowledge that water was precious, a thirst increased by a\n dried-up-in-the-mouth sensation. Their first drink was strangely\n bitter; tragically disappointing. Patti Gray suddenly swung upright in\n the hammock and kicked her legs. She massaged her throat with a nervous\n hand, wiped damp hair from about her face.\n\n\n \"I have to have a drink.\"\n\n\n Rat stared at her without answer.", "\"I said, I have to have a drink!\"\n\n\n \"Heard you.\"\n\n\n \"Well...?\"\n\n\n \"Well, nothing. Stall. Keep water longer.\"\n\n\n She swung a vicious boot and missed by inches. Rat grinned, and made\n his way aft, hand over hand. He treaded cautiously along the deck. \"Do\n like this,\" he called over his shoulder. \"Gravity punk too. Back and\n under, gravity.\" He waited until she joined him at the water tap.\n\n\n They stood there glaring idiotically at each other.\n\n\n She burst out laughing. \"They even threw the drinking cups out!\" Rat\n inched the handle grudgingly and she applied lips to the faucet.", "\"Faugh!\" Gray sprang back, forgot herself and lost her balance, sat\n down on the deck and spat out the water. \"It's hot! It tastes like hell\n and it's hot! It must be fuel!\"\n\n\n Rat applied his lips to the tap and sampled. Coming up with a mouthful\n he swished it around on his tongue like mouthwash. Abruptly he\n contrived a facial contortion between a grin and a grimace, and let\n some of the water trickle from the edges of his mouth. He swallowed and\n it cost him something.\n\n\n \"No. I mean yes, I think. Water, no doubt. Yes. Fuel out, water in.\n Swish-swush. Dammit, Greaseball forget to wash tank!\"\n\n\n \"But what makes it so hot?\" She worked her mouth to dry-rinse the taste\n of the fuel.\n\n\n \"Ship get hot. Water on sun side. H-m-m-m-m-m-m.\"", "Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!", "No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in\n the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded\nupward\n, beads\n glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again\n and she looked up.\n\n\n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at\n her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat.\n He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n\n\n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n\n\n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my\n back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the\n hammocks on their rope-axis.", "\"Yeah,\" Gladney grated. \"But in how many little pieces?\"\n\n\n \"I've never been to Earth before. Nice, I think.\" Patti Gray caught\n something new in the tone and stared at him. Gladney must have noticed\n it, too.\n\n\n The Centaurian moved sideways and pointed. Gray placed her eyes in the\n vacated position.\n\n\n \"Earth!\" she shouted.\n\n\n \"Quite. Nice. Do me a favor?\"\n\n\n \"Just name it!\"\n\n\n \"Not drink long time. Some water?\"\n\n\n Gray nodded and went to the faucet. The drumming seemed remote, the\n tension vanished. She was an uncommonly long time in returning, at last\n she appeared beside him, outstretched hands dry.\n\n\n \"There isn't any left, Rat.\"", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "\"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"", "\"I'd like to burn 'em out!\" Peterson snarled.\nRat helped Greaseball fill the water tanks to capacity with fuel,\n checked the concentrated rations and grunted.\n\n\n Greaseball looked over the interior and chuckled. \"The boss said strip\n her, and strip her I did. All right, Rat, outside.\" He followed the\n Centaurian out, and pulled the ladder away from the lip of the lock.\n The two walked across the strip of sandy soil to the office building.\n On tiptoes, Greaseball poked his head through the door panel. \"All set.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded at him. \"Stick with it!\" and jerked a thumb at Rat\n outside. Grease nodded understanding.\n\n\n \"Okay, Rat, you can go to bed now.\" He dropped the ladder against the\n wall and sat on it. \"Good night.\" He watched Rat walk slowly away.", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"", "\"—had wings,\" he finished and chuckled. \"So likewise Greaseball.\" The\n pale office lights dropped away as they sped over the field. On the far\n horizon, a tinge of dawn crept along the uneven terrain.\n\n\n \"Oh, the bag!\" she gasped. \"I've dropped it.\"\n\n\n He chuckled again. \"Have got. You scare, I catch.\"\n\n\n She didn't see the ship because of the wind in her eyes, but without\n warning she plummeted down and her feet jarred on the lip of the lock.\n \"Inside. No noise, no light. Easy.\" But in spite of his warning she\n tripped in the darkness. He helped her from the floor and guided her to\n the hammocks.\n\n\n \"Judith?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Here. Beside you, trussed up so tight I can hardly breathe.\"", "Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"", "\"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.", "\"H-m-m-m-m-m-m-m what?\"\n\n\n \"Flip-flop.\" He could talk with his hands as well. \"Hot side over like\n pancake.\" Rat hobbled over to the board and sat down. An experimental\n flick on a lever produced nothing. Another flick, this time followed by\n a quivering jar. He contemplated the panel board while fastening his\n belt.\n\n\n \"H-m-m-m-m-m-m,\" the lower lip protruded.\n\n\n Gray protested. \"Oh, stop humming and do something! That wa—\" the\n word was queerly torn from her throat, and a scream magically filled\n the vacancy. Nurse Gray sat up and rubbed a painful spot that had\n suddenly appeared on her arm. She found her nose bleeding and another\n new, swelling bruise on the side of her head. Around her the place was\n empty. Bare.", "\"Not taking time,\" he stated simply and pointed to a dial. Gray shook\n her head and looked at the others.\n\n\n \"That isn't doing either of them any good!\"\n\n\n Rat nodded unhappily. \"What's her matter—?\" pointing.\n\n\n \"Appendix. Something about this atmosphere sends it haywire. The thing\n itself isn't diseased, but it starts manufacturing poison. Patient dies\n in a week unless it is taken out.\"\n\n\n \"Don't know it,\" he said briefly.\n\n\n \"Do you mean to say you don't have an appendix?\" she demanded.\n\n\n Rat folded his arms and considered this. \"Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe\n no. Where's it hurt?\"", "\"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or\n will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for\n work.\" She shivered.\n\n\n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat\n threw up a hand to stop her.\n\n\n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n\n\n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold,\n yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n\n\n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of\n course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from\n another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her\n face accented the fact.", "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "\"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly." ], [ "Rat himself provided the answer by alighting at the lip with a jar that\n shook the ship. He was breathing heavily and lugging something in his\n arms. The burden groaned.\n\n\n \"Gladney!\" Nurse Gray exclaimed.\n\n\n \"I got.\" Rat confirmed. \"Yes, Gladney. Damn heavy, Gladney.\"\n\n\n \"But how?\" she demanded. \"What of Roberds and Peterson?\"\n\n\n \"Trick,\" he sniggered. \"I burn down my shack. Boss run out. I run in.\n Very simple.\" He packed Gladney into the remaining hammock and snapped\n buckles.\n\n\n \"And Peterson?\" she prompted.\n\n\n \"Oh yes. Peterson. So sorry about Peterson. Had to fan him.\"\n\n\n \"\nFan\nhim? I don't understand.\"", "Rat batted his tired eyes expressively. \"Tasted punk,\" he grinned at\n her.\n\n\n She sat down on the floor suddenly and buried her face.\n\n\n \"Rat,\" she said presently, \"I want to ask you something, rather\n personal? Your ... name. 'Rat'? Roberds told me something about your\n record. But ... please tell me, Rat. You didn't know the attack was\n coming, did you?\"\n\n\n He grinned again and waggled his head at her. \"No. Who tell Rat?\"\n Suddenly he was deadly serious as he spoke to her. \"Rat a.w.o.l., go\n out to help sick man alone in desert. Rat leave post. Not time send\n call through. Come back with man, find horrible thing happen.\"\n\n\n \"But why didn't you explain?\"\n\n\n He grinned again. \"Who believe? Sick man die soon after.\"", "Peace of mind followed peace of body into a forgotten limbo of lost\n things, a slyly climbing madness directed at one another. Waspish\n words uttered in pain, fatigue and temper. Fractiousness. A hot,\n confined, stale hell. Sleep became a hollow mockery, as bad water\n and concentrated tablets brought on stomach pains to plague them.\n Consciousness punctured only by spasms of lethargy, shared to some\n extent by the invalids. Above all, crawling lassitude and incalescent\n tempers.\n\n\n Rat watched the white, drawn face swing in the hammock beside him. And\n his hands never faltered on the controls.\n\n\n Never a slackening of the terrific pace; abnormal speed, gruelling\n drive ... drive ... drive. Fear. Tantalizing fear made worse because\n Rat couldn't understand. Smothered moaning that ate at his nerves.\n Grim-faced, sleep-wracked, belted to the chair, driving!", "Unheeding, Rat swung his eyes around in the gloom and discovered the\n woman, a nurse in uniform. He blinked at her and she returned the look,\n wavering. She bit her lip and determination flowed back. She met the\n stare of his boring, off-colored eyes. Rat grinned suddenly. Nurse Gray\n almost smiled back, stopped before the others could see it.\n\n\n \"Won't go!\" The Centaurian resumed his fight. \"You not go, lose job,\n black-listed. Never get another. Look at me. I know.\" He retreated\n a precious step to escape a rolled up fist. \"Little ship carry four\n nice. Rip out lockers and bunks. Swing hammocks. Put fuel in water\n tanks. Live on concentrates. Earth hospital fix bellyache afterwards,\n allright. I pilot ship. Yes?\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Roberds screamed.", "\"No talk!\" Rat insisted. \"Much hush-hush needed. Other girl shipshape.\n You make likewise.\" Forcibly he shoved her into a hammock. \"Wrap up\n tight. Straps tight. When we go, we go fast. Bang!\" And he left her.\n\n\n \"Hey! Where are you going now?\"\n\n\n \"To get Gladney. He sick too. Hush hush!\" His voice floated back.\n\n\n \"Where has he gone?\" Judith called.", "\"And now, please, just\nhow\ndo I get into mine?\" she bit at Rat.\nExistence dragged. Paradoxically, time dropped away like a cloak as\n the sense of individual hours and minutes vanished, and into its place\n crept a slow-torturing substitute. As the ship revolved, monotonously,\n first the ceiling and then the floor took on dullish, maddening\n aspects, eyes ached continuously from staring at them time and again\n without surcease. The steady, drumming rockets crashed into the mind\n and the walls shrieked malevolently on the eyeballs. Dull, throbbing\n sameness of the poorly filtered air, a growing taint in the nostrils.\n Damp warm skin, reeking blankets. The taste of fuel in the mouth for\n refreshment. Slowly mounting mental duress. And above all the drumming\n of the rockets.", "\"Rat! Damn you Rat, listen to me!\nWhen're you going to start braking\n,\n Rat?\"\n\n\n \"I hear you.\" He turned on Gladney with dulled eyes. \"Lie down. You\n sick.\"\n\n\n \"I'll be damned if I'm going to lie here and let you drive us to Orion!\n We must be near the half-way line! When are you going to start braking?\"\n\n\n \"Not brake,\" Rat answered sullenly. \"No, not brake.\"\n\n\n \"\nNot brake?\n\" Gladney screamed and sat bolt upright. Nurse Gray jumped\n for him. \"Are you crazy, you skinny rat?\" Gray secured a hold on his\n shoulders and forced him down. \"You gotta brake! Don't you understand\n that? You have to, you vacuum-skull!\" Gray was pleading with him to\n shut-up like a good fellow. He appealed to her. \"He's gotta brake! Make\n him!\"", "\"How many days? How many days!\" Gray begged of him thousands of times\n until the very repetition grated on her eardrums. \"How many days?\"\n His only answer was an inhuman snarl, and the cruel blazing of those\n inhuman eyes.\n\n\n She fell face first to the floor. \"I can't keep it up!\" she cried. The\n sound of her voice rolled along the hot steel deck. \"I cant! I cant!\"\n\n\n A double handful of tepid water was thrown in her face. \"Get up!\" Rat\n stood over her, face twisted, his body hunched. \"Get up!\" She stared at\n him, dazed. He kicked her. \"Get up!\" The tepid water ran off her face\n and far away she heard Judith calling.... She forced herself up. Rat\n was back in the chair.\nGladney unexpectedly exploded. He had been awake for a long time,\n watching Rat at the board. Wrenching loose a chest strap he attempted\n to sit up.", "Once, a sudden, frightening change of pitch in the rockets and a wild,\n sickening lurch. Meteor rain. Maddening, plunging swings to the far\n right and left, made without warning. A torn lip as a sudden lurch\n tears the faucet from her mouth. A shattered tooth.\n\n\n \"Sorry!\" Rat whispered.\n\n\n \"Shut up and drive!\" she cried.\n\n\n \"Patti ...\" Judith called out, in pain.", "Swinging down the path towards his own rambling shack, Rat caught a\n sibilant whisper. Pausing, undecided, he heard it again.\n\n\n \"Here ... can you see me?\" A white clad arm waved in the gloom. Rat\n regarded the arm in the window. Another impatient gesture, and he\n stepped to the sill.\n\n\n \"Yes?\"—in the softest of whispers. The voices of the men in droning\n conversation drifted in. \"What you want?\"\n\n\n Nothing but silence for a few hanging seconds, and then: \"Can you pilot\n that ship?\" Her voice was shaky.\n\n\n He didn't answer, stared at her confused. He felt her fear as clearly\n as he detected it in her words.\n\n\n \"Well,\ncan\nyou?\" she demanded.\n\n\n \"Damn yes!\" he stated simply. \"It now necessary?\"", "\"Blankets,\" he instructed. \"Wrap in blankets. Cold—hot too. Wrap\n good!\" And he was gone again. Gray blinked away the illusion he\n disappeared upwards.\n\n\n She ran over to the girl. \"Judith, if you want to back down, now is the\n time. He'll be back in a moment.\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Judith moaned. \"No!\" Gray smiled in the darkness and began\n wrapping the blankets around her. A light tapping at the window\n announced the return of Rat. The nurse pushed open the window wide, saw\n him out there with arms upstretched.\n\n\n \"Grit your teeth and hold on! Here we go.\" She picked up the blanketed\n girl in both arms and walked to the window. Rat took the girl easily as\n she was swung out, the blackness hid them both. But he appeared again\n instantly.", "Roberds shook his head. \"He didn't take part in it. But Rat was\n attached to a very important office at the time, the outpost watch.\n And when Mad Barry Sansan and his gang of thugs swooped down on the\n Ganymedean colony, there was no warning. Our friend Rat was AWOL.\n\n\n \"As to who he is ... well, just one of those freaks from up around\n Centauria somewhere. He's been hanging around all the fields and dumps\n on Mars a long time, finally landed up here.\"\n\n\n \"But,\" protested Miss Gray, \"I don't understand? I always thought that\n leaving one's post under such circumstances meant execution.\"\n\n\n The Chief Consul nodded. \"It does, usually. But this was a freak case.\n It would take hours to explain. However, I'll just sum it up in one\n word: politics. Politics, with which Rat had no connection saved him.\"", "Almost in answer, a moan issued from a small side room. The men in the\n office froze as Nurse Gray ran across the room. She disappeared through\n the narrow door.\n\n\n \"Peterson,\" the field manager ordered, \"come over here and help me\n throw this rat out....\" He went for Rat. Peterson swung up out of his\n chair with balled fist. The outlander backed rapidly.\n\n\n \"No need, no need, no need!\" he said quickly. \"I go.\" Still backing, he\n blindly kicked at the door and stepped into the night.\nWhen the door slammed shut Roberds locked it. Peterson slumped in the\n chair.\n\n\n \"Do you mean that, Chief? About taking the ship yourself?\"", "\"He has a good point there, Rat,\" she spoke up. \"What about this\n half-way line?\"\n\n\n He turned to her with a weary ghost of the old smile on his face. \"We\n passed line. Three days ago, maybe.\" A shrug of shoulders.\n\n\n \"Passed!\" Gray and Gladney exclaimed in unison.\n\n\n \"You catch on quick,\" Rat nodded. \"This six day, don't you know?\"\n\n\n Gladney sank back, exhausted. The nurse crept over to the pilot.\n \"Getting your figures mixed, aren't you?\"\n\n\n Rat shook his head and said nothing.\n\n\n \"But Roberds said eight days, and he—\"", "\"Fan. With chair. Everything all right. I apologized.\" Rat finished up\n and was walking back to the lock. They heard a slight rustling of wings\n as he padded away.\n\n\n He was back instantly, duplicating his feat of a short time ago.\n Cursing shouts were slung on the night air, and the deadly spang of\n bullets bounced on the hull! Some entered the lock. The Centaurian\n snapped it shut. Chunks of lead continued to pound the ship. Rat leaped\n for the pilot's chair, heavily, a wing drooping.\n\n\n \"You've been hurt!\" Gray cried. A small panel light outlined his\n features. She tried to struggle up.\n\n\n \"Lie still! We go. Boss get wise.\" With lightning fingers he flicked\n several switches on the panel, turned to her. \"Hold belly. Zoom!\"\n\n\n Gray folded her hands across her stomach and closed her eyes.", "No, not quite. A wispy something was hanging just out of sight in\n the corner of the eye; the water tap was now moulded\nupward\n, beads\n glistening on its handle. The wispy thing caught her attention again\n and she looked up.\n\n\n Two people, tightly wrapped and bound in hammocks, were staring down at\n her, amazed, swinging on their stomachs. Craning further, she saw Rat.\n He was hanging upside down in the chair, grinning at her in reverse.\n\n\n \"Flip-flop,\" he laconically explained.\n\n\n \"For cripes sakes, Jehosaphat!\" Gladney groaned. \"Turn me over on my\n back! Do something!\" Gray stood on tiptoes and just could pivot the\n hammocks on their rope-axis.", "\"Who was that ... man? The one you put out?\" Gray asked.\n\n\n \"We call him Rat,\" Roberds said.\n\n\n She didn't ask why. She said: \"Why couldn't he pilot the ship, I mean?\n What is his record?\"\n\n\n Peterson opened his mouth.\n\n\n \"Shut up, Peterson!\" the Chief snapped. \"We don't talk about his record\n around here, Miss Gray. It's not a pretty thing to tell.\"\n\n\n \"Stow it, Chief,\" said Peterson. \"Miss Gray is no pantywaist.\" He\n turned to the nurse. \"Ever hear of the Sansan massacre?\"\n\n\n Patti Gray paled. \"Yes,\" she whispered. \"Was Rat in that?\"", "Gladney sat up. He had heard the conversation between the two. \"You're\n right, Rat. No one would have believed you then, and no one will now.\n You've been safe enough on Mars, but the police will nab you as soon as\n you get out of the ship.\"\n\n\n \"They can't!\" cried Patti Gray. \"They can't hurt him after what he's\n done now.\"\n\n\n The Centaurian grinned in a cynical way.\n\n\n \"Police not get me, Gladney. Gladney's memory damn punk, I think. Earth\n pretty nice place, maybe. But not for Rat.\"\n\n\n Gladney stared at him for minutes. Then: \"Say, I get it ... you're—\"\n\n\n \"Shut up!\" Rat cut him off sharply. \"You talk too much.\" He cast a\n glance at Nurse Gray and then threw a meaning look at Gladney.", "\"So I'm a combination nurse, governess, guard and what have you. Or\n will be until we get back. After this, I'll probably be looking for\n work.\" She shivered.\n\n\n \"Cold?\" he inquired concernedly.\n\n\n \"On the contrary, I'm too warm.\" She started to remove the blanket. Rat\n threw up a hand to stop her.\n\n\n \"Leave on! Hot out here.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm too hot now. I want to take it off!\"\n\n\n \"No. Leave on. Wool blanket. Keep in body heat, yes. Keep out cold,\n yes. Keep in, keep out, likewise. See?\"\n\n\n Gray stared at him. \"I never thought of it that way before. Why of\n course! If it protects from one temperature, it will protect from\n another. Isn't it silly of me not to know that?\" Heat pressing on her\n face accented the fact.", "The girl shook her head, more in sympathy than condemnation.\n\n\n \"Are you expecting the others in soon?\" she asked. \"It wouldn't be\n right to leave Peterson.\"\n\n\n \"They will be in, in a day or two. Peterson will beat it over to Base\n station for repairs, and to notify Earth we're coming. He'll be all\n right.\"\n\n\n Abruptly she stood up. \"Goodnight gentlemen. Call me if I'm needed.\"\n\n\n Roberds nodded acknowledgement. The door to the side room closed behind\n her. Peterson hauled his chair over to the desk. He sniffed the air.\n\n\n \"Damned rat!\" he whispered harshly. \"They ought to make a law forcing\n him to wear dark glasses!\"\n\n\n Roberds smiled wearily. \"His eyes do get a man, don't they?\"" ] ]
test	51122	[ "What were Eric's primary motivations at the beginning of the passage?", "What traits best describe Thomas the Trap-Smasher?", "What is the relationship between Thomas the Trap-Smasher and Eric the Only?", "Who do you think would most enjoy reading this story?", "Which of the following best summarizes the story?", "What is the relationship between Thomas the Trap-Smasher and Franklin the Father of Many Thieves?", "Why might one not be interested in reading this story?", "How do the men and women interact in this universe?", "What is the setting of this story? Do humans or any other normal animals that we have in real life exist in this universe?" ]	[ [ "Succeed at the ritual and find a mate", "Succeed at the ritual and change his name from \"Eric the Only\" to something else", "Find a mate and become the chief", "Become the General and explore beyond his home" ], [ "Scared and swift", "Bold but inconspicuous", "Calm and pleasant", "Independent and careful" ], [ "Thomas is Eric's father", "Thomas is Eric's grandfather", "They are brothers", "Thomas is Eric's uncle" ], [ "An adult who likes science fiction", "A teenager in their coming of age years", "An adult who likes medieval-themed stories", "A child who likes stories of adventure" ], [ "A boy learns the traditions and history of his culture.", "A boy meets the love of his life for the first time.", "A boy learns about his family and more about his culture.", "A boy explores beyond his home for the first time." ], [ "They have a strained relationship", "They are good friends", "They are brothers", "They are partners" ], [ "There is a lot of gore", "There is a lot of murder", "There is a lot of nudity", "There is a lot of suspense" ], [ "Men and women take on different tasks but evenly share the power", "Men hold all the power", "Women hold all the power", "Men and women evenly split the same tasks and evenly split the power" ], [ "In the same universe as our own, there are animals we know but there are no humans in the story", "In the same universe as our own, there are humans but there are no animals we know", "In a completely different universe, though there are many animal-like creatures", "In a completely different universe, there are not any humans nor animals" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"", "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"", "The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.", "\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.", "The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"", "As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.", "Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.", "\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"", "The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior." ], [ "Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"", "\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"", "As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.", "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate." ], [ "Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.", "The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"", "\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"", "\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.", "As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.", "\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.", "\"Eric. When I asked you how we've been hitting back at the Monsters,\n you told me what we\nought\nto do. We haven't been\ndoing\na\n single thing to bother them. We don't know how to reconstruct\n the Ancestor-science, we don't have the tools or weapons or\n knowhow—whatever\nthat\nis—but they wouldn't do us a bit of good even\n if we had them. Because they failed once. They failed completely and\n at their best. There's just no point in trying to put them together\n again.\"\n\n\n And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered,\n why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was\n involved here, bloodshed and death.\n\n\n \"Uncle Thomas,\" he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite\n his efforts to keep it whole and steady, \"how long have you been an\n Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?\"", "As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"", "\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.", "The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "\"You lousy little throwback!\" Roy the Runner yelled. He leaped away\n from the rest of the band and into a crouch facing Eric, his spear\n tense in one hand. \"You're asking for a hole in the belly! My woman's\n had two litters off me, two big litters. What would you have given her,\n you dirty singleton?\"" ], [ "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"", "He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:", "The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "\"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.", "\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold." ], [ "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.", "The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.", "\"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"", "\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.", "The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"" ], [ "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "\"Because this is more than just an initiation ceremony. It could be the\n beginning of a new life for all of us.\"\n\n\n Eric frowned. What could be more than an initiation ceremony and his\n attainment of full thieving manhood?\n\n\n \"There are things going on in Mankind, these days,\" Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher continued in a strange, urgent voice. \"Big things. And\n you're going to be a part of them. This Theft of yours—if you handle\n it right, if you do what I tell you, it's likely to blow the lid off\n everything the chief has been sitting on.\"", "Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.", "\"In the name of our ancestors,\" he said, \"and the science with which\n they ruled the Earth, I declare this council opened. May it end as one\n more step in the regaining of their science. Who asked for a council?\"\n\n\n \"I did.\" Thomas the Trap-Smasher moved out of his band and stood before\n the chief.\n\n\n Franklin nodded, and went on with the next, formal question:\n\n\n \"And your reason?\"\n\n\n \"As a band leader, I call attention to a candidate for manhood. A\n member of my band, a spear-carrier for the required time, and an\n accepted apprentice in the Male Society. My nephew, Eric the Only.\"", "The Trap-Smasher sighed and thought for a moment. Then he pulled the\n spear from his back sling and took Eric's arm. He drew the youth along\n the burrow until they stood alone in the very center of it. He looked\n carefully at the exits at either end, making certain that they were\n completely alone before giving his reply in an unusually low, guarded\n voice.\n\n\n \"We'd never be able to prove anything like that. If you don't want to\n be Eric the Only, if you want to be Eric the something-else, well then,\n it's up to you. You have to make a good Theft. That's what you should\n be thinking about all the time now—your Theft. Eric, which category\n are you going to announce?\"\n\n\n He hadn't thought about it very much. \"The usual one I guess. The one\n that's picked for most initiations. First category.\"", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "\"You can,\" his uncle told him heartily. \"It's been set up for you. It\n will be like walking through a dug burrow, Eric. All you have to face\n through is the council. You'll have to be steady there, no matter what.\n You tell the chief that you're undertaking the third category.\"\n\n\n \"But why the third?\" Eric asked. \"Why does it have to be Monster\n souvenirs?\"\n\n\n \"Because that's what we need. And you stick to it, no matter what\n pressure they put on you. Remember, an initiate has the right to decide\n what he's going to steal. A man's first Theft is his own affair.\"\n\n\n \"But, listen, uncle—\"\n\n\n There was a whistle from the end of the burrow. Thomas the Trap-Smasher\n nodded in the direction of the signal.", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.", "\"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"", "\"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"", "\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold." ], [ "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "\"Eric, Eric, forget about it, boy. He was all of those things and more.\n Your father was famous. Eric the Storeroom-Stormer, we called him,\n Eric the Laugher at Locks, Eric the Roistering Robber of all Mankind.\n He taught me everything I know. But he only married once. And if any\n other woman ever played around with him, she's been careful to keep it\n a secret. Now dress up those spears. You've let them get all sloppy.\n Butts together, that's the way, points up and even with each other.\"\nDutifully, Eric rearranged the bundle of armament that was his\n responsibility. He turned to his uncle again, now examining the\n knapsacks and canteens that would be carried on the expedition.", "But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.", "\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control.", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "The older man brought his lips together, looking dissatisfied. \"First\n category.\nFood.\nWell....\"\n\n\n Eric felt he understood. \"You mean, for someone like me—an Only,\n who's really got to make a name for himself—I ought to announce\n like a real warrior? I should say I'm going to steal in the second\n category—Articles Useful to Mankind. Is that what my father would have\n done?\"\n\n\n \"Do you know what your father would have done?\"\n\n\n \"No. What?\" Eric demanded eagerly.\n\n\n \"He'd have elected the third category. That's what I'd be announcing\n these days, if I were going through an initiation ceremony. That's what\n I want you to announce.\"\n\n\n \"Third category? Monster souvenirs? But no one's elected the third\n category in I don't know how many auld lang synes. Why should I do it?\"", "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "\"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"", "Thomas examined his face and seemed satisfied. \"The kind you're going\n after,\" he said. \"If you are your father's son. If you're man enough to\n continue the work he started. Are you?\"\n\n\n Eric started to nod, then found himself shrugging weakly, and finally\n just hung his head. He didn't know what to say. His uncle—well, his\n uncle was his model and his leader, and he was strong and wise and\n crafty. His father—naturally, he wanted to emulate his father and\n continue whatever work he had started. But this was his initiation\n ceremony, after all, and there would be enough danger merely in proving\n his manhood. For his initiation ceremony to take on a task that had\n destroyed his father, the greatest thief the tribe had ever known, and\n a heretical, blasphemous task at that....\n\n\n \"I'll try. I don't know if I can.\"", "The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"", "\"Isn't it possible—I mean, it is possible, isn't it—that my father\n had some children by another woman? You told me he was one of the best\n thieves we ever had.\"\n\n\n The captain of the band turned to study him, folding his arms across\n his chest so that biceps swelled into greatness and power. They\n glinted in the light of the tiny lantern bound to his forehead, the\n glow lantern that only fully accredited warriors might wear. After a\n while, the older man shook his head and said, very gently:", "He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.", "\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper." ], [ "He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "He could relax. The physical test was over. There would be another one,\n much later, after he had completed his theft successfully; but that\n would be exclusively by men as part of his proud initiation ceremony.\n Under the circumstances, he knew he would be able to go through it\n almost gaily.\n\n\n Meanwhile, the women's physical test was over. That was the important\n thing for now. In sheer reaction, his body gushed forth sweat which\n slid over the bloody cracks in his skin and stung viciously. He felt\n the water pouring down his back and forced himself not to go limp,\n prodded his mind into alertness.\n\n\n \"Did that hurt?\" he was being asked by Rita, the old crone of a\n Record-Keeper. There was a solicitous smile on her forty-year-old face,\n but he knew it was a fake. A woman as old as that no longer felt sorry\n for anybody. She had too many aches and pains and things generally\n wrong with her to worry about other people's troubles.", "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "There was a rattling moment, the barest second, when the chief's eyes\n locked with those of the band leader. With all that was on Eric's mind\n at the moment, he noticed it. Then the chief looked away and pointed to\n the women on the other side of the burrow.\n\n\n \"He is accepted as a candidate by the men. Now the women must ask for\n proof, for only a woman's proof bestows full manhood.\"\n\n\n The first part was over. And it hadn't been too bad. Eric turned\n to face the advancing leaders of the Female Society, Ottilie, the\n Chieftain's First Wife, in the center. Now came the part that scared\n him. The women's part.", "As was customary at such a moment, his uncle and sponsor left him when\n the women came forward. Thomas the Trap-Smasher led his band to the\n warriors grouped about the Throne Mound. There, with their colleagues,\n they folded their arms across their chests and turned to watch. A man\n can only give proof of his manhood while he is alone; his friends\n cannot support him once the women approach.\n\n\n It was not going to be easy, Eric realized. He had hoped that at least\n one of his uncle's wives would be among the three examiners: they were\n both kindly people who liked him and had talked to him much about\n the mysteries of women's work. But he had drawn a trio of hard-faced\n females who apparently intended to take him over the full course before\n they passed him.", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "\"I will steal for Mankind whatever it needs. I will defend Mankind\n against all outsiders. I will increase the possessions and knowledge of\n the Female Society so that the Female Society can increase the power\n and well-being of Mankind.\"\n\n\n \"And all this you swear to do?\"\n\n\n \"And all this I swear to do.\"\n\n\n The Chief turned to Eric's uncle. \"As his sponsor, do you support his\n oath and swear that he is to be trusted?\"\n\n\n With just the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice, Thomas the\n Trap-Smasher replied: \"Yes. I support his oath and swear that he is to\n be trusted.\"", "But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her\n daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered\n by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would\n be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an\n initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too\n young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.", "The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.", "The pin sank into his chest for a little distance, paused, came out.\n It probed here, probed there; finally it found a nerve in his upper\n arm. There, guided by the knowledge of the Sickness-Healer, it bit and\n clawed at the delicate area until Eric felt he would grind his teeth\n to powder in the effort not to cry out. His clenched fists twisted\n agonizingly at the ends of his arms in a paroxysm of protest, but he\n kept his body still. He didn't cry out; he didn't move away; he didn't\n raise a hand to protect himself.\n\n\n Sarah the Sickness-Healer stepped back and considered him. \"There\n is no man here yet,\" she said grudgingly. \"But perhaps there is the\n beginnings of one.\"", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.", "\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time\n and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet\n the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper,\n who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a\n lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full\n womanhood and recognized professional status.\nEric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before;\n especially in the last few weeks, as the time for his Theft approached.\n He knew that if he were successful—and he\nhad\nto be successful:\n don't dare think of anything but success!—she would look with favor on\n advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore,\n according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky. She was probably having a\n hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.\n\n\n Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed.", "As his name was sung out, Eric shook himself. Half on his own volition\n and half in response to the pushes he received from the other warriors,\n he stumbled up to his uncle and faced the chief. This, the most\n important moment of his life, was proving almost too much for him. So\n many people in one place, accredited and famous warriors, knowledgeable\n and attractive women, the chief himself, all this after the shattering\n revelations from his uncle—he was finding it hard to think clearly.\n And it was vital to think clearly. His responses to the next few\n questions had to be exactly right.\nThe chief was asking the first: \"Eric the Only, do you apply for full\n manhood?\"\n\n\n Eric breathed hard and nodded. \"I do.\"\n\n\n \"As a full man, what will be your value to Mankind?\"", "\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.", "On the little hillock known as the Royal Mound, lolled Franklin the\n Father of Many Thieves, Chieftain of all Mankind. He alone of the\n cluster of warriors displayed heaviness of belly and flabbiness of\n arm—for he alone had the privilege of a sedentary life. Beside the\n sternly muscled band leaders who formed his immediate background, he\n looked almost womanly; and yet one of his many titles was simply The\n Man.", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else.", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer opened the proceedings. She circled him\n belligerently, hands on hips, her great breasts rolling to and fro like\n a pair of swollen pendulums, her eyes glittering with scorn.\n\n\n \"Eric the Only,\" she intoned, and then paused to grin, as if it were a\n name impossible to believe, \"Eric the Singleton, Eric the one and only\n child of either his mother or his father. Your parents almost didn't\n have enough between them to make a solitary child. Is there enough in\n you to make a man?\"\nThere was a snigger of appreciation from the children in the distance,\n and it was echoed by a few growling laughs from the vicinity of the\n Throne Mound. Eric felt his face and neck go red. He would have fought\n any man to the death for remarks like these. Any man at all. But who\n could lift his hand to a woman and be allowed to live? Besides, one of\n the main purposes of this exhibition was to investigate his powers of\n self-control." ], [ "\"The council's beginning, boy. We'll talk later, on expedition. Now\n remember this: stealing from the third category is your own idea, and\n all your own idea. Forget everything else we've talked about. If you\n hit any trouble with the chief, I'll be there. I'm your sponsor, after\n all.\"\n\n\n He threw an arm about his confused nephew and walked to the end of the\n burrow where the other members of the band waited.\nII\n\n\n The tribe had gathered in its central and largest burrow under the\n great, hanging glow lamps that might be used in this place alone.\n Except for the few sentinels on duty in the outlying corridors, all of\n Mankind was here. It was an awesome sight to behold.", "Eric the Only stared at his uncle. That wasn't the next question in the\n catechism. He must have heard incorrectly. His uncle couldn't have made\n a mistake in such a basic ritual.\n\n\n \"\nWe will do that\n,\" he went on in the second reply, his voice sliding\n into the singsong of childhood lessons, \"\nby regaining the science and\n knowhow of our fore-fathers. Man was once Lord of all Creation: his\n science and knowhow made him supreme. Science and knowhow is what we\n need to hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Now, Eric,\" his uncle asked gently. \"Please tell me this. What in hell\n is knowhow?\"\n\n\n That was way off. They were a full corridor's length from the normal\n progression of the catechism now.", "The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled\n over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society occupied the outermost\n four of these interconnected corridors and patrolled it with their\n full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage\n and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of\n any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful\n initiates who served them.\n\n\n Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a\n student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But\n tomorrow, tomorrow....\n\n\n This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for\n Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was\n clever, he would return—off might go the loose loin cloths of boyhood\n to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.", "Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still,\n Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one\n her age. Good-looking too. And, above all, she didn't turn away from\n him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.\n\n\n \"Look at Eric!\" he heard someone call out behind him. \"He's already\n searching for a mate. Hey, Eric! You've not even wearing straps yet.\n First comes the stealing.\nThen\ncomes the mating.\"\n\n\n Eric spun around, bits of fantasy still stuck to his lips.\n\n\n The group of young men lounging against the wall of his band's burrow\n were tossing laughter back and forth between them. They were all\n adults: they had all made their Theft. Socially, they were still his\n superiors. His only recourse was cold dignity.\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he began. \"There is no mating until—\"", "\"You punish with the haft of the spear. And anyway, this is my band and\n I do the punishing around here. Now move on out, all of you, and get\n ready for the council. I'll attend to the boy myself.\"\n\n\n They went off obediently without looking back. The Trap-Smasher's band\n was famous for its discipline throughout the length and breadth of\n Mankind. A proud thing to be a member of it. But to be called a boy in\n front of the others! A boy, when he was full-grown and ready to begin\n stealing!\n\n\n Although, come to think of it, he'd rather be called a boy than a\n singleton. A boy eventually became a man, but a singleton stayed a\n singleton forever. He put the problem to his uncle who was at the\n niche, inspecting the band's reserve pile of spears.", "He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the\n Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked,\n for as long as he liked, to approach them even—\n\n\n He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still\n carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a\n women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were\n preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell\n had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or\n it would not be fit to eat. It might even be dangerous. Mankind was\n indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well\n understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.\nAnd such women—such splendid creatures!", "\"Shut up, you damn fool, or you'll finish us both! Of course your\n parents were decent people. How do you think they were killed? Your\n mother was with your father out in Monster territory. Have you ever\n heard of a woman going along with her husband on a Theft? And taking\n her baby with her? Do you think it was an ordinary robbery of the\n Monsters? They were Alien-science people, serving their faith as best\n they could. They died for it.\"\n\n\n Eric looked into his uncle's eyes over the hand that covered the lower\n half of his face.\nAlien-science people ... serving their faith ... do\n you think it was an ordinary robbery ... they died for it!\nHe had never realized before how odd it was that his parents had gone\n to Monster territory together, a man taking his wife and the woman\n taking her baby!\n\n\n As he relaxed, his uncle removed the gagging hand. \"What kind of Theft\n was it that my parents died in?\"", "\"Suppose there had been another woman. My father could have had two,\n three, even four litters by different women. Extra-large litters too.\n If we could prove something like that, I wouldn't be a singleton any\n more. I would not be Eric the Only.\"", "\"The\nchief\n?\" Eric felt confused. He was walking up a strange burrow\n now without a glow lamp. \"What's the chief got to do with my Theft?\"\nHis uncle examined both ends of the corridor again. \"Eric, what's the\n most important thing we, or you, or anyone, can do? What is our life\n all about? What are we here for?\"\n\n\n \"That's easy,\" Eric chuckled. \"That's the easiest question there is. A\n child could answer it:\n\n\n \"\nHit back at the Monsters\n,\" he quoted. \"\nDrive them from the planet,\n if we can. Regain Earth for Mankind, if we can. But above all, hit back\n at the Monsters. Make them suffer as they've made us suffer. Make them\n know we're still here, we're still fighting. Hit back at the Monsters.\n\"\n\n\n \"Hit back at the Monsters. Right. Now how have we been doing that?\"", "\"Stop it!\" his uncle ordered. \"Don't give me any of that garbage!\nThe\n suddenness of the attack, the treachery of the Monsters\n—does it sound\n like an explanation to you? Honestly? If our ancestors were really\n Lords of Creation and had such great weapons, would the Monsters have\n been able to conquer them? I've led my band on dozens of raids, and I\n know the value of a surprise attack; but believe me, boy, it's only\n good for a flash charge and a quick getaway if you're facing a superior\n force. You can knock somebody down when he doesn't expect it. But if he\n really has more than you, he won't\nstay\ndown. Right?\"\n\n\n \"I—I guess so. I wouldn't know.\"", "\"She's had two litters, but not off you,\" Eric the Only spat, holding\n his spear out in the guard position. \"If you're the father, then the\n chief's blonde hair is contagious—like measles.\"\nRoy bellowed and jabbed his spear forward. Eric parried it and lunged\n in his turn. He missed as his opponent leaped to one side. They\n circled each other, cursing and insulting, eyes only for the point of\n each other's spears. The other young men had scrambled a distance down\n the burrow to get out of their way.\nA powerful arm suddenly clamped Eric's waist from behind and lifted\n him off his feet. He was kicked hard, so that he stumbled a half-dozen\n steps and fell. On his feet in a moment, the spear still in his hand,\n he whirled, ready to deal with this new opponent. He was mad enough to\n fight all Mankind.\n\n\n But not Thomas the Trap-Smasher. No, not that mad.", "\"A little,\" he said. \"Not much.\"\n\n\n \"The Monsters will hurt you much more if they catch you stealing from\n them, do you know that? They will hurt you much more than we ever\n could.\"\n\n\n \"I know. But the stealing is more important than the risk I'm taking.\n The stealing is the most important thing a man can do.\"", "All the tension drained out of him as he recognized the captain of his\n band. He couldn't fight Thomas. His uncle. And the greatest of all men.\n Guiltily, he walked to the niche in the wall where the band's weapons\n were stacked and slid his uncle's spear into its appointed place.\n\n\n \"What the hell's the matter with you, Roy?\" Thomas was asking behind\n him. \"Fighting a duel with an initiate? Where's your band spirit?\n That's all we need these days, to be cut down from six effectives to\n five. Save your spear for Strangers, or—if you feel very brave—for\n Monsters. But don't show a point in our band's burrow if you know\n what's good for you, hear me?\"\n\n\n \"I wasn't fighting a duel,\" the Runner mumbled, sheathing his own\n spear. \"The kid got above himself. I was punishing him.\"", "\"Well, I know. I know from plenty of battle experience. The thing to\n remember is that once our ancestors were knocked down, they stayed\n down. That means their science and knowhow were not so much in the\n first place. And\nthat\nmeans—\" here he turned his head and looked\n directly into Eric's eyes—\"\nthat\nmeans the science of our ancestors\n wasn't worth one good damn against the Monsters, and it wouldn't be\n worth one good damn to us!\"\n\n\n Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.\nHis uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he'd\n finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes\n glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a\n fierce whisper.", "\"Until never for some people,\" one of the young men broke in. He\n rattled his spear in his hand, carelessly, proudly. \"After you steal,\n you still have to convince a woman that you're a man. And some men\n have to do an awful lot of convincing. An\nawful\nlot, Eric-O.\"\n\n\n The ball of laughter bounced back and forth again, heavier than before.\n Eric the Only felt his face turn bright red. How dare they remind him\n of his birth? On this day of all days? Here he was about to prepare\n himself to go forth and Steal for Mankind....\n\n\n He dropped the sharpening stone into his pouch and slid his right\n hand back along his uncle's spear. \"At least,\" he said, slowly and\n definitely, \"at least, my woman will stay convinced, Roy the Runner.\n She won't be always open to offers from every other man in the tribe.\"", "Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge\n of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of\n hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the\n largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters\n she had had, two of them of maximum size.\n\n\n Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around\n under the glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for\n she only knew what and recognizing it when she found it she only knew\n how. A man could really strut with such a mate.", "Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He\n felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but\n both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His\n tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the\n light spear-sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move\n instantaneously in any direction.\n\n\n He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead\n lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared\n with him. No one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.", "Yes, unquestionably The Man of Mankind was Franklin the Father of Many\n Thieves. You could tell it from the hushed, respectful attitudes of the\n subordinate warriors who stood at a distance from the mound. You could\n tell it from the rippling interest of the women as they stood on the\n other side of the great burrow, drawn up in the ranks of the Female\n Society. You could tell it from the nervousness and scorn with which\n the women were watched by their leader, Ottilie, the Chieftain's First\n Wife. And finally, you could tell it from the faces of the children,\n standing in a distant, disorganized bunch. A clear majority of their\n faces bore an unmistakable resemblance to Franklin's.\n\n\n Franklin clapped his hands, three evenly spaced, flesh-heavy wallops.", "\"How long? Since I got to know your father. He was in another band;\n naturally we hadn't seen much of each other before he married my\n sister. I'd heard about him, though: everyone in the Male Society\n had—he was a great thief. But once he became my brother-in-law,\n I learned a lot from him. I learned about locks, about the latest\n traps—and I learned about Alien-Science. He'd been an Alien-Science\n man for years. He converted your mother, and he converted me.\"\n\n\n Eric the Only backed away. \"No!\" he called out wildly. \"Not my father\n and mother! They were decent people—when they were killed a service\n was held in their name—they went to add to the science of our\n ancestors—\"\nHis uncle jammed a powerful hand over his mouth.", "\"I think so,\" he managed to say after a long pause. \"And I'm willing to\n prove it.\"\n\n\n \"Prove it, then!\" the woman snarled. Her right hand, holding a long,\n sharp-pointed pin, shot to his chest like a flung spear. Eric made his\n muscles rigid and tried to send his mind away. That, the men had told\n him, was what you had to do at this moment: it was not you they were\n hurting, not you at all. You, your mind, your knowledge of self, were\n in another part of the burrow entirely, watching these painful things\n being done to someone else." ] ]
test	20058	[ "What is the purpose of this article?", "How would you best describe Scottie Pippen's gameplay, based on the article alone?", "How would you best describe Michael Jordan's gameplay, based on the article alone?", "What were two reasons that this night of the game was particularly interesting?", "If Michael Jordan hadn't scored as many points, what would have happened?", "What do we know for a fact the the writers in the stands were NOT considering doing?", "Why does the author think cloning a certain player might not render the results people would hope?", "Who do you think overall had the most fun at this game?" ]	[ [ "To describe Scottie Pippen's great gameplay during one game.", "To describe Scottie Pippen's great gameplay during three games.", "To describe Michael Jordan's great gameplay during two games.", "To describe Michael Jordan's great gameplay during one game." ], [ "Mostly he's playing a mental game", "He's known to fly under the radar", "Mostly he's playing a physical game", "He's a very consistent point scorer" ], [ "He's still young, so he's mostly playing a physical game with some mental math as well", "Mostly he's playing a mental game", "Mostly he's playing a physical game", "He's known to fly under the radar" ], [ "President Bush was in attendance and it was a terrible game for the Bullets", "The Queen of England was in attendance and it was a close game for the Bullets", "President Clinton was in attendance and it was a close game for the Bullets", "President Clinton was in attendance and it was a game where the Bullets dominated" ], [ "The sports writers wouldn't ask for as many quotes from Michael", "They still definitely wouldn't have lost the game", "The Bullets probably would've tied the game", "The sports writers would have written about it ad nauseam" ], [ "Adding quotes in the article from the famous guest in attendance", "Writing about the 4th quarter in particular", "Writing about the crowdedness of the stadium", "Adding lines in their article about the famous guest in attendance" ], [ "Cloning is a fairly safe technology, but it doesn't mean the player's clone will be as mentally gifted as the player", "Cloning is still a dangerous technology, it's a funny suggestion but obviously people would need to get that player's consent first and he's unlikely to give it", "Cloning is a fairly safe technology, but it doesn't mean the player's clone will be as physically gifted as the player", "Cloning is still an unstable technology, it's a funny suggestion but it's a dumb one" ], [ "Scottie Pippen", "The fans", "The stadium employees who got extra tips", "The referees" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup." ], [ "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup." ], [ "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade." ], [ "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)" ], [ "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade." ], [ "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :" ], [ "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup." ], [ "The Gamer \n\n The USAir Arena sits on the edge of the Beltway, old and dim, not much more than a big gymnasium. The Washington Bullets play here, often quite badly. They haven't made the playoffs in eight years. They were supposed to be better this year but have found ways to enforce the tradition of mediocrity. The arena is usually sold out--technically--but with plenty of empty seats, the signature of a town full of lawyers and big shots who aren't sure they want to be sports fans. \n\n But on Friday, Feb. 21, everything was different. A strange and powerful gravitational force surrounded that stale and unloved arena that night. People swarmed the access road outside, begging for tickets. The mayor of Washington showed up, and the coach of the Redskins, and then, to snarl traffic once and for all, the president of the United States came rolling up in his motorcade.", "One of the young Bullets, Jaren Jackson, tried to smother Jordan and prevent him from getting the ball. Jordan knew what to do: Cheat a little. With his left hand Jordan almost imperceptibly held Jackson--this showed up on the television replay--and then dashed past him toward the hoop, taking a pass and launching himself for a two-handed dunk, hanging on the rim an extra second to make sure everyone knew who was in charge. \n\n The next time down the court Jordan hit a wide-open three-point shot. The Bullets kept assigning different players to cover him, but Jordan seemed to be emitting some kind of paralysis beam. Even Jordan's teammates were rooted in place. The game plan was, \"Pass it to Jordan.\" \n\n Jordan hit an impossible 15-foot turnaround jumper. \n\n Jordan hit foul shots. \n\n Jordan hit another three-pointer.", "Clinton took his seat with little fanfare. No one played \"Hail to the Chief.\" The crowd applauded politely. The real action was over in the corner, outside the locker room of the Chicago Bulls. Fans were straining at the railings of the stands. Eyes were riveted on the locker room's exit. No one dared look away. The great one was about to emerge. When he finally appeared, people did not clap--they shouted, screamed, as guards told them to back off. \n\n \"Michael! Michael!\" \n\n Michael Jordan didn't look up. His head was bowed as he jogged toward the court. Everywhere he goes, people shout his name. He has mastered the art of not noticing them.", "Jordan got free on a fast break. He streaked down the right side of the court, took a pass, veered toward the bucket, and went airborne. The tongue emerged. When the tongue comes out, fans stand up to watch. Jordan, flying, wore a face of absolute manic rage. The dunk was apocalyptic. It was the kind of dunk you wouldn't want a small child to see. It was as though Jordan was funneling all his frustration into a single thermonuclear jam. The fans of both teams roared. The Bullets called a timeout, knowing they'd have no chance if Jordan caught fire. \n\n A minute later Jordan hit a pull-up jumper. Then he hit another.", "Like that politician sitting in the stands, Jordan is compulsively competitive. When you apply the lessons of their successes to your life, you get caught short, because the rest of us don't want it that badly. Jordan has to win at everything, at cards, at tennis, at golf (he has lost hundreds of thousands gambling at that game). After the death of his father, Jordan took up the doomed mission of becoming a professional baseball player. \"He had balls the size of an elephant to fail in public in another sport,\" my colleague Tony Kornheiser said before the Bulls game. Bob Greene reports that Jordan--the greatest basketball player of all time--was motivated by a sports fantasy: that he'd be batting for the White Sox in his first professional baseball game, and would hit a home run, round the bases and, never stopping running, just head straight from home plate to the tunnel leading out of the stadium, disappearing in front of the awed crowd.", "As the USAir Arena emptied out, the sportswriters gathered outside the Bulls' locker room. The president of the United States suddenly appeared a short distance away, heading toward his limo. He saw the press and, for a moment, seemed to be coming toward us. Then he stopped, and just stared. One could imagine that he felt a little hurt when he realized that we didn't want to talk to him. No one even shouted a question. He boarded the limo and left. \n\n We went into the locker room, and soon Jordan emerged, already dressed in a perfectly pressed olive suit, his tie knotted tight at the stiff collar of a white shirt. Jordan always dresses this way in public. A professional. \n\n \"I totally hadn't found my rhythm the first three quarters,\" Jordan said. \"When I found it, things started to click.\"", "Seconds after tipoff, Jordan launched a turnaround jumper, his new signature shot, hitting nothing but net. That proved to be the anomaly for the next three quarters of the game. Jordan missed a shot, and then he missed four more shots, and he threw the ball out of bounds, and he got slapped with two fouls, and by the end of the first quarter he had stunk up the joint. He had five measly points while his sidekick, Scottie Pippen, had scorched the Bullets for 17. \n\n The sportswriters had a potential story line: Jordan might not be the high scorer on his team for the third consecutive game, something that hasn't happened in years. Was Jordan slipping? Were we seeing it tonight? The sportswriters were tapping on their laptops. In a night game, you have to write as the game progresses. It might be too soon to write the end-of-an-era story, but one could hint at it, start practicing the inevitable eulogy.", "Jordan kept struggling. At one point, he'd taken 14 shots and hit only four. By the end of the third quarter, he'd cobbled together 18 sloppy points to Pippen's authoritative 28. The Bulls were winning by 11 points, but the Bullets were hanging tough. Jordan had been outplayed by their Calbert Cheaney, a streaky player. \n\n Then the fourth quarter began. The fourth quarter is Jordan Time.", "Jordan juked right, shook his man, dashed right past 7-foot-7 Gheorghe Muresan, and burgled the backboard for an easy layup.", "Jordan is smoother than everyone else--his movements, his skin, the top of his shaved head. He looks polished. Next to Jordan, the other Bulls are big slabs of meat with protruding limbs. Luc Longley: a human ham hock. Dennis Rodman: all knuckles and knees and elbows and tattoos and nose rings and yellow hair. For Rodman, every night's a full moon.", "Jordan is 34 years old, borderline geriatric, and he still leads the league in scoring, racking up nearly 31 points a game, while the next-highest scorer averages only about 26. How does Jordan do it? He's got that Babe Ruth stuff. The god force. We just have to watch and wonder. \n\n For the national anthem Jordan rocked from one leg to the other, still staring at the floor in front of him, while nearby the president lustily sang--or at least moved his mouth dramatically so that even fans across the arena could see him singing.", "Jordan hit six shots in a row, missed one, then hit again, at which point he was laughing. He knew what everyone else in the arena was thinking: Jordan had done it again! Impossible! A 34-year-old geezer! The paralysis beam still works. Statisticians insist there is no such thing as a \"hot hand\" in basketball, that accurate shots distribute themselves in random patterns, that just the fact that a player has made several shots in a row does not increase the likelihood that he will make the next one. So we are to believe that Jordan's feat this night--his ability to seize a game and absolutely dominate it in the fourth quarter when everything is on the line--is a fluke. What the statisticians don't realize is that some things in life aren't logical, and that the Jordan phenomenon is one of them. He scored 18 points in the fourth quarter, 36 for the game, making him the high scorer. The Bulls won 103-99.", "\"There's no way Michael was going to let the Bulls lose in front of the president,\" Johnny Red Kerr, a Hall of Famer and former Bulls coach, said outside the locker room.", "Sweat popped out on his head in the close-up glare of television lights. Reporters pressed him up against the little wire cage that passes for a locker. He obliged every question, then stepped outside to sign a few autographs. \n\n His agent, David Falk, said his client would play as long as he meets his own standards. He'd decide year by year. He's a free agent after this season and if the Bulls want him back they'll have to pay the big money. This year Falk got Jordan $30 million. Next year? Falk wouldn't say what it would take. How would one ever calculate such a thing? Some things are beyond money, beyond numbers. How much would you pay the amber fields, the purple mountains? \n\n Someone asked Jordan if he'd stick around town the next day to watch his alma mater, North Carolina, play Maryland. It was a huge game in college basketball. \n\n He shook his head.", "\"I got a job to do.\" \n\n Jordan drives to the hoop in Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Championship Series against the Los Angeles Lakers (30 seconds; video only) :", "On the radio the other day, sportswriter Frank Deford called Jordan \"our Lindbergh.\" (Was Lindbergh really that good? What was his percentage from three-point range?) This night at the USAir Arena, the sportswriters kept looking at Jordan and saying, \"He's Babe Ruth.\" Like Ruth, Jordan so exceeds the norm as to be an anomaly. Ruth didn't just hit more home runs than anyone else. He hit a lot more home runs than anyone else. How did he do it? OK, he was strong, he used a big, heavy bat, and he had an elegant uppercut swing. But the formula for \"greatest-ever\" is always mysterious. You can't reduce it to any obvious variables. You just say a god walked among us.", "There has been talk in recent days about human cloning, and you repeatedly hear people mention the idea of cloning Michael Jordan. The New York Times cited the idea of a Jordan clone in its lead editorial. Such talk robs Jordan of his due. It subtly suggests that he is just a \"natural athlete\" who merely has to walk onto the court and let his DNA take over. The fact is, Jordan's greatest gift is in his head. He dominates the game at 34 even though he can no longer out-quick and out-jump and out-dunk his opponents. When he came into the league he was strictly a slasher, relying on speed and a 42-inch vertical leap. He wasn't considered a top-flight shooter. Now he has this deadly turnaround jumper and routinely hits three-pointers. What do you call someone who changes his game, his style, his tactics, and still comes out on top? A genius. (Come to think of it, didn't Babe Ruth start out as a pitcher?)" ] ]
test	20047	[ "Why does the author agree with the New York Senator's position?", "Why doesn't the author believe giving teenagers contraceptives would incentivize irresponsible sexual activity?", "How do some critics compare the Norplant option suggested by the Inquirer to China?", "Why did some readers accuse the Inquirer article of advocating genocide?", "What are the essential reasons the author believes Norplant is the right brand for testing this option?", "What is the author's view on the idea that using Norplant may lead to an increase in AIDS?", "Would the Norplant option fail because of an abundance of people who wish to have children?", "How does the author respond to claims that Norplant is not a healthy option?", "In what way do critics claim the Norplant option is sexist?" ]	[ [ "He believes there is no hope for people who are born into the cycle of poverty and are unemployable for various reasons.", "He believes jobs programs will not be well-financed, and this will dissuade people from having children because they will not want to work.", "He doesn't think that many women will take advantage of the job training programs because they prefer to remain in the welfare system.", "He believes programs that create jobs and prepare people for the workforce will ultimately help people grow independent from welfare." ], [ "Because of existing laws prohibiting various kinds of sexual activities, specifically for teenagers.", "The Norplant option would require parental consent, so the teenagers would have to reveal their sexual history to their parents.", "The prominence of abstinence-only education would de-incentivize teenagers from engaging in promiscuity.", "Teenagers are going to find a way to have sex, whether they are provided contraceptives or not." ], [ "They suggest giving money to people on welfare to not have children is the same as forcing people to not have children at all.", "One of the requirements of the program would be to have only one child, which is very similar to China's one-child policy.", "There would be a reduction in welfare benefits if a recipient neglected to choose the Norplant option.", "The Norplant option would force some mothers into coerced abortions, such as the ones prevalent in China." ], [ "The Inquirer article appeared to be strongly in favor of abortion, which many of its readers felt was strongly akin to genocide at the time.", "The Inquirer article advocated for sterilization of women as part of its welfare proposal--a tactic used by many genocidal programs.", "Norplant would be specifically marketed towards black America, and therefore it would play a role in reducing the black population.", "The original article mentioned that many black youths in America are impoverished, so the suggestion that mothers on welfare stop having babies seemed like attempting to control black population numbers." ], [ "Norplant is an affordable option, and the expenses could be easily offset by the taxpayers.", "The contraceptive has been proven to prevent all unwanted pregnancies and has a proven track record of eliminating individuals' reliance on the welfare system.", "Norplant is a trusted name in the healthcare community as well as the American public.", "It is easily reversible if necessary and is an extremely effective and simple form of contraceptive." ], [ "He does not agree with this idea and cites a recent study that shows it had no bearing on people's decision to use contraceptives. ", "He does not believe that the use of Norplant and the spread of AIDS are related in any conceivable way.", "He believes it is a possibility, and therefore the public must be educated on the importance of using condoms to prevent the spread of disease.", "He acknowledges the fear is very real and cites the statistic that Norplant is 19 times more effective than the birth control pill in preventing pregnancy." ], [ "No, it would not. It would fail because it overwhelmingly lacks public support.", "No, it would not. The option has the potential to lower the number of abortions as well as provide much-needed financial support.", "No, it would not. It would succeed because it would still allow people to have abortions and receive an increase in the welfare they receive.", "Yes, it would. Studies have shown that the vast majority of mothers on welfare also wish to raise families. " ], [ "He reports that people said the same thing about silicone breast implants, and those people were proven wrong.", "He acknowledges that there are inherent defects in the current product and that continued testing and development is important prior to implementation of the program.", "Every mode of birth control has health risks, so transparency is important. Still, the FDA has stated Norplant works and is safe to use.", "He says the criticism is largely driven by litigious-minded individuals who want to use Norplant to make money through legal claims." ], [ "The Norplant option essentially forces women on welfare to rely on birth control, which removes their option for reproductive choice.", "Women receive the majority of welfare assistance already, and the Norplant option would keep women reliant upon welfare.", "Norplant is made only for women and girls, and men do not have any options beyond condoms and vasectomies.", "Men do not have to rely on such an option in order to receive their welfare checks." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof." ], [ "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more." ], [ "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ], [ "Plaintiffs' tort lawyers have nearly killed off Norplant, scaring away many women and doctors, by a torrent of personal-injury suits against its manufacturer. The lawyers include many of the same folks who created a tidal wave of litigation based on the apparently bogus claim about the dangers of silicone breast implants. But the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly found Norplant to be safe and effective. More than a million women have used it with only minor side effects, such as changing menstrual bleeding patterns, reported. \n\n There have been complaints by a small percentage of Norplant users of severe pain or scarring from having it removed. But the apparent reason was inadequate training of physicians in the (usually quick and painless) removal procedure--an easily remedied problem--and not any inherent defect in the product. \n\n I t is sexist to seek to thrust contraception only upon women.", "The Norplant Option \n\n Now that Congress and President Clinton have opted to use the threat of utter destitution to dissuade poor teen-agers and women from having children on the public dole, it's time to revive a more humane, and perhaps more effective, proposal with the same objective. \n\n This idea surfaced briefly and spectacularly in 1990, when the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested in an editorial that perhaps some welfare mothers should be \"offered an increased benefit\" if they would agree to practice effective birth control--specifically, to use the then-new Norplant contraceptive, which prevents pregnancy for five years after being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.", "Why Norplant? Because it requires no ongoing effort or supervision to be effective, and it can be discontinued only after some (rather small) effort. As such, Norplant is the only contraceptive the government could pay people to use with any hope of affecting those who aren't strongly motivated to either become pregnant or avoid pregnancy. \n\n How much good the Norplant option would do is debatable. But the arguments that it would do harm seem unpersuasive. Here's a quick review of possible objections, left and right: \n\n B ribing poor women and girls to implant Norplant would coerce them into not having children, thus violating their rights to reproductive choice, like the one-child-per-family policy and coerced abortions in China.", "This is pernicious nonsense, no matter how many people say it. The original Inquirer editorial unwittingly invited such smears by linking its Norplant proposal to race--specifically, to a report that nearly half the nation's black children are living in poverty. But nobody is proposing that race be a factor in any program promoting Norplant to welfare recipients, most of whom are white. Nobody is proposing to sterilize women or forbid them from having children. And while a disproportionate percentage of welfare mothers and children are black, black America, like white America, can only benefit from any program that rewards people for avoiding pregnancy unless and until they are old enough and self-supporting enough to provide decently for children. \n\n G irls and women on Norplant may be at greater risk of contracting and spreading AIDS, because they will be less likely to demand that their sex partners use condoms.", "A 1994 study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine found that Norplant had no effect on recipients' decisions whether to use condoms or visit doctors--and was 19 times as effective as the pill in preventing pregnancy. Any Norplant incentive program should include vigorous counseling about the need to use condoms against disease. But even now, how many women and girls are so much more afraid of pregnancy than of death that they use condoms solely to avoid the former, and would stop once on Norplant? Not many, I suspect. \n\n N orplant itself may be unhealthy. \n\n The possibility of serious long-term health damage from any relatively new contraceptive like Norplant must be taken seriously, and the risks should, of course, be fully disclosed to women considering using it. But no contraceptive is risk-free. And the available evidence indicates that the risks inherent in pregnancy and childbirth--and in abortion--are at least as great as the risks inherent in Norplant.", "A parental-consent requirement would answer this objection. I would not advocate such a requirement, however, because of the overwhelming evidence that many parents have little or no constructive communication with their children about such matters. I hope that my own two daughters (now 12 and nine years old) would consult with me and my wife before getting Norplant or becoming sexually active. But if they end up deciding to go their own ways, I'd rather that they have unrestricted access to Norplant than that they risk pregnancy.", "In its groveling 1990 editorial apology, the Inquirer said: \"Our critics countered that to dangle cash or some other benefit in front of a desperately poor woman is tantamount to coercion. They're right.\" No, they were wrong, and the Inquirer was right in its initial Norplant editorial, when it noted that women would be free to \"change their minds at any point and become fertile again.\" \n\n \"Many people,\" David Boldt, then-editor of the Inquirer's editorial page, noted in a subsequent commentary, \"saw the editorial as part of an ongoing white conspiracy to carry out genocide of blacks in America.\"", "Sexism has nothing to do with it. First, almost all welfare checks are written to women--not to men, who don't get pregnant. Second, the only forms of contraception now available for men are condoms and vasectomies. It would hardly make sense to hand out $1,000 payments to men for taking home a bunch of condoms, or to try to police their use. And a vasectomy--unlike a Norplant implant-- cannot always be reversed. \n\n Giving teen-agers contraceptives encourages promiscuity, and bribing them to use Norplant will encourage it even more.", "Norplant is no panacea for poverty; nothing is. The question is whether a Norplant incentive program might do some good. There's only one way to find out: Give it a try. If it fails, the cost--in terms of numbers of teen-agers and women taking the $1,000 offer--will be tiny. And it just might help.", "Would a Norplant program be thwarted by the fact that many poor teen-agers actually want to get pregnant and have a child? I don't think so. First, there are about 3 million unwanted pregnancies in the United States every year, half of which end in abortion. Many of these involve teen-agers and women who are (or will be) on welfare. Norplant could stop almost all these. Second, the allure of pregnancy for many other poor teen-agers may be so slight, or so fleeting, or so fraught with ambivalence, that a $1,000 Norplant incentive would have plenty of takers. \n\n And even if such a program only delayed pregnancies a few years, that would be a very good thing. Most 15-year-olds would be better mothers, and have a better chance of making something of their own lives, if they waited five or seven years before having babies.", "The weight of the evidence suggests that teen-agers' decisions whether or not to engage in sexual activity don't have much to do with whether the government gives them contraceptives. Many have unprotected sex, and almost all can get contraceptives if they want them. As I have suggested, one possible restriction (although not one I would favor) on any Norplant incentive program would be to limit eligibility to teen-agers who have already been pregnant or, at least, sexually active. Norplant counselors could also stress the benefits of abstinence, while presenting the contraceptive as a backup safeguard. \n\n T een-agers should learn about sex and contraception from their parents, not the government.", "In a small effort to reopen discussion of this option, here's a specific proposal: States should experiment with programs in which all qualifying teen-agers and women would be offered lump-sum $1,000 cash payments--on top of any other benefits they receive--to have Norplant (or another long-term contraceptive) implanted at government expense. They would be free to have it removed whenever they chose, but would be rewarded with additional payments (of, say, $30) for each month in which they kept it. \n\n The category of qualifying teen-agers and women could include all recipients of welfare or other public assistance (including daughters of recipients) who are competent to give informed consent to the implant procedure. Or the program could be restricted in various ways in order to blunt possible objections. For example, you could require parental consent. Or, eligibility could be restricted to those who have already been pregnant, or at least sexually active; to those over age 13, or under age 21; or some combination thereof.", "To the contrary, a government offer of money is not coercion--and not even remotely comparable to what goes on in China. Existing benefits would not be reduced for anyone declining Norplant. This means that nobody who really wanted a child would be prevented from having one. To be sure, the government would be trying to influence reproductive choices. But the same is true of existing policies promoting free contraception, and of laws like the Hyde Amendment, which denies Medicaid funding for abortions--not to mention the still extant statutes making it a crime to commit statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor), fornication (premarital sex), and adultery.", "An uproar followed. The editorial writers--who had insensitively suggested a desire to reduce births of poor black babies in particular--were savaged by many Inquirer staffers and others as racist advocates of eugenics, even of \"genocide.\" They also caught it from some abortion-rights zealots, who are suspicious of any government efforts to influence reproductive choices, and from conservatives, who think the only proper way to discourage teen pregnancy is to preach abstinence. The newspaper abjectly apologized for a \"misguided and wrongheaded editorial opinion.\" And ever since, the whole subject has been taboo. \n\n But it's still a good idea, for poor girls and women themselves, and for the rest of us. Millions of babies are being born to poor teen-agers so lacking in elementary skills, work habits, and self-discipline that they are unlikely to be either responsible parents or self-supporting providers. Many of these babies grow up in squalor and themselves become dependent denizens of the welfare culture.", "The only realistic hope for breaking the bleak cycle of teen pregnancy and welfare dependency is to find ways to persuade poor teen-agers not to have babies--at least, not until they are old enough, and capable enough, and self-supporting enough to provide a decent home life. But nobody--nobody--has any great ideas for realizing this hope, short of reverting to the cruelest, let-'em-starve brand of social Darwinism. \n\n Thoughtful progressives like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., have properly stressed the need to push welfare mothers into jobs and job-training programs. This makes sense because some of these women will rise to the occasion, learn the work ethic, and become self-supporting. And others may be dissuaded from having children by the prospect of being required to work. But (as Moynihan acknowledges) many welfare mothers are so crippled by their own early childhood environments as to be essentially unemployable, no matter how well-financed and well-run the jobs programs and related counseling, training, and child-care programs.", "And under the harsh new welfare reform, the jobs programs will not be well financed. It appears that millions of welfare mothers and children will simply be cut off--unable to get or hold jobs, and left to beg from relatives and strangers, to steal what they can, even to sleep on the streets, depending on how much Calcutta-style misery the taxpayers are willing to tolerate. \n\n Given the stark ugliness of trying to end the welfare culture by spreading homelessness and hunger, it's especially striking that one pretty good, pretty humane idea has been virtually ignored in the welfare debate of the past year." ] ]
test	50774	[ "Why are the people in the opening scene hunting and shooting animals?", "What is one of the problems of space travel that colonists are very careful about these days?", "How does the humanoid that the hunting party encounters surprise them?", "The ship's crew is worried that Pat may carry unfamiliar diseases, but what other contagion does he seem to possess?", "What might have been the outcome of the encounter with Pat if the hunting party had killed him?", "Why do all the current residents of Alexandria look alike?", "Once they encountered Pat and got introduced and talked a little, what did the medical party think would happen on Minos?", "Which hamsters lived? ", "Why did Pat eat so much during his first meal in the spaceship dining room?", "What detail about life as a colonist on Minos requires a permanent commitment?" ]	[ [ "They are shooting specimens for the sake of scientific discovery, to classify their taxonomy and study them.", "The food stores on their space ship are critically low, and they must have food to have hope of surviving long enough to start a colony here.", "Terrans have hundreds of years of tradition of shooting animals for the pleasure and challenge of it, so these colonists also have those cultural habits.", "They are gathering specimens to test for pathogens on a planet that may have potential for starting a colony." ], [ "Colonists have learned not to assume that they can depend on their radios and other technology, because many planetary - star system interactions can interrupt processes that Terrans take for granted.", "Terrans no longer assume that all the members of their colony will be able to get along and cooperate over the long term, even if they can manage it during space travel. Therefore, they try to make their groups very homogeneous.", "Terran colonists on other worlds know that they cannot count on being able to interbreed with any humanoid species they encounter - and if they do, genetic monstrosities can result.", "The more like Earth a planet appears to be, the more likely it will harbor deadly diseases that Terrans can catch, and that they have no resistance to." ], [ "It startles them by breaking into a dance that looks a lot like the way honeybees dance to let their hivemates know which way to go to the flowers with lots of pollen.", "It speaks English, looks absolutely human, sports a three-day growth of beard and is quite attractive to the one woman in the party.", "It startles them by not behaving aggressively after being shot at by them. Perhaps it does not recognize their weapons as a danger.", "The scientists are astonished at this evidence for parallel evolution - they are sure it is not actually a human because humans have never visited Minos before." ], [ "All of the people that Pat is familiar with look just like him, which results in a certain, natural distrust of anyone who looks different, and his arrival herals the beginning of mistrustful behavior among the colonists.", "Pat has an air of negativity that is catching. He grouses about everything, and soon everyone on the ship is also displaying signs of dissatisfaction about trivial matters.", "Pat has been genetically modified to be able to photosynthesize food directly from the light of Minos' sun. He tells the colonists that this modification, while not a disease, is contagious from person to person.", "He is a girl magnet. Every girl on the ship, including June, is either swooning over him or trying to resist swooning." ], [ "Since Pat was wearing a full body energy shield, they couldn't have hurt him no matter what they tried to do.", "It wouldn't matter a bit. After all, they could just pretend that they never saw him, and the Alexandrians had nothing to do with him being in the vicinity of the ship.", "Since they would have violated their oaths as doctors, the doctors might have taken off their space suits and exposed the colonists to the potential pathogens on the planet as compensation to the Alexandrians.", "Relations with the people of Alexandria might have gotten off to a very bad start, leading the Alexandrians to turn hostile to the colonists." ], [ "One particular colonial family had natural immunity to the disease that killed the rest of the colonists, so over time, the group of familial traits that went with that appearance were concentrated in the population.", "The colonists mastered advanced gene technologies while trying to solve the problem of food supply, and they just all liked that red hair and coppery skin, so they all modified themselves to that appearance - it was just a fad at the time.", "One of the early rulers of the colony in Alexandria gained tyrannical power over the colonists. He then became mentally unbalanced and used his power to kill everyone in the town that didn't look like him.", "These colonists all came from one town in Ireland and they were all related to begin with, so it was natural that they all looked alike. With no new sources of genetic diversity, things just stayed that way." ], [ "The medical party thought there would be no real problems, but the captain of the spaceship realized they would have to wipe out the present Alexandrians to be truly safe.", "The medical party was disappointed because the existence of the supposed \"melting sickness\" meant they could not colonize Minos.", "They assumed that there would be no problems with the colonists settling Minos alongside friendlies, once they finished concocting treatments for any foreign diseases.", "They assumed that the environment was safe, and they would be able to go back and report to the captain that everything was fine, and everyone could emerge from the spaceship without suits and get started building their new colony right away." ], [ "All the hamsters that were injected with a trial vaccine against the melting sickness survived.", "The hamsters that lived were either controls or had Pat's blood injected but without any immune system suppressants", "All of the hamsters died, it just took a little longer for the ones that did not receive the immune system suppressant.", "The hamsters that lived were the controls, who received none of Pat's blood." ], [ "He wanted to prolong his social visit with the colonists, and the only way to do that seemed to be to just keep eating.", "Alexandria lived under very primitive conditions. It was a struggle to get food, and people ate anytime food was presented to them.", "He had been trying to bulk up because Alexandrian girls didn't like scrawny men.", "He was eating simply for enjoyment of the taste." ], [ "Once they decide to stay, the colonists will disassemble the spaceship for materials to build land transport vehicles and factories....and they will no longer have a way off the planet.", "Being exposed to the melting sickness and other Minos pathogens makes life there a permanent commitment. They would not be allowed to land elsewhere because of the potential for contagion.", "Minos is smaller than Earth, and has much less gravity. Once the people decide to stay on Minos, their bones and muscles will weaken, and they will not be able to leave the planet without severe medical consequencs.", "None of the food plants or animals on Minos are compatible with the human digestive system, many of them being mirror image compounds of the earth version. A genetic treatment permanently changes digestive system to be able to use the foodstuffs on Minos. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.", "This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.", "The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.", "\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.", "June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.", "There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.", "He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked." ], [ "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"", "\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"", "\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"", "In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.", "\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.", "\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.", "Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"", "Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"", "\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.", "\"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"", "\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"" ], [ "This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.", "A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"", "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.", "\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.", "There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"", "\"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"", "June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness." ], [ "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.", "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "\"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "\"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.", "All legal spaceships were built for safety. No chance was taken of\n allowing a suspected carrier to bring an infection on board with him.\nJune stepped from the last shower stall into the locker room, zipped\n off her spacesuit with a sigh of relief, and contemplated herself in a\n wall mirror. Red hair, dark blue eyes, tall....\n\n\n \"I've got a good figure,\" she said thoughtfully.\n\n\n Max turned at the door. \"Why this sudden interest in your looks?\" he\n asked suspiciously. \"Do we stand here and admire you, or do we finally\n get something to eat?\"\n\n\n \"Wait a minute.\" She went to a wall phone and dialed it carefully,\n using a combination from the ship's directory. \"How're you doing, Pat?\"\n\n\n The phone picked up a hissing of water or spray. There was a startled\n chuckle. \"Voices, too! Hello, June. How do you tell a machine to go\n jump in the lake?\"", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.", "June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.", "\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming." ], [ "June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.", "There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.", "Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.", "A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.", "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.", "The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes." ], [ "June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"", "\"Plague,\" Pat Mead said thoughtfully. \"We had one here. It came two\n years after the colony arrived and killed everyone except the Mead\n families. They were immune. I guess we look alike because we're all\n related, and that's why I grew up thinking that it is the only way\n people can look.\"\nPlague.\n\"What was the disease?\" Hal Barton asked.\n\n\n \"Pretty gruesome, according to my father. They called it the melting\n sickness. The doctors died too soon to find out what it was or what to\n do about it.\"\n\n\n \"You should have trained for more doctors, or sent to civilization for\n some.\" A trace of impatience was in George Barton's voice.", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.", "The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.", "\"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—\"\nShe listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the\n explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to\n Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and\n hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells\n have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,\n hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n\n\n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.\n He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand\n generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien\n indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the\n cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n\n\n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution\n in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where\n they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he\n had taken them from.\"", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful,\n humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller\n than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood\n breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung\n a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.\n\n\n They lowered their guns.\n\n\n \"It needs a shave,\" Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he\n reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be\n heard. \"Something we could do for you, Mac?\"\n\n\n The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest\n sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of\n evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be\n wearing a three day growth of red stubble.", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "\"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "\"Maybe some will look like dragons. Don't get eaten by a dragon,\n June,\" came Max's voice quietly into her earphones. \"Not while I still\n love you.\" He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and\n touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely\n visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a\n greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.\nThey walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the space ship\nExplorer\ntowered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of\n the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and\n clouds, and they longed to be outside.", "Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name\n is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and\n George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n\n\n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n \"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos\n before.\"\n\n\n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June\n could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded\n steel.\n\n\n \"What—what is the population of Minos?\" she asked." ], [ "Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name\n is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and\n George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n\n\n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n \"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos\n before.\"\n\n\n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June\n could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded\n steel.\n\n\n \"What—what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.", "\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.", "The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.", "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.", "She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily." ], [ "Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.", "The doctors went to Reno Ulrich's table and walked with him to the\n hangar, explaining. He was to carry the proposal to Alexandria, mingle\n with the people, be persuasive and wait for them to vote before\n returning. He was to give himself shots of cureall every two hours on\n the hour or run the risk of disease.\nReno was pleased. He had dabbled in sociology before retraining as a\n mechanic for the expedition. \"This gives me a chance to study their\n mores.\" He winked wickedly. \"I may not be back for several nights.\"\n They watched through the viewplate as he took off, and then went over\n to the laboratory for a look at the hamsters.", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.", "\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"", "But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death,\n for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be\n like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to\n be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies\n had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships\n which had touched on some plague planet.\n\n\n The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight\n spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.\n\n\n The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the\n alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the\n copper and purple shadows.\n\n\n They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker\n browns. Reflex action swung June's gun into line, and behind her\n someone's gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole\n in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.", "Hal Barton switched to a narrow radio beam, explained rapidly and\n pointed in the direction of Alexandria. Reno's plane lifted and flew\n away over the odd-colored forest.\n\n\n \"The plane will drop a note on your town, telling them you got\n through to us,\" Hal Barton told Pat, who was sitting up watching Max\n dexterously put the blood and spinal fluids into the right bottles\n without exposing them to air.\n\n\n \"We won't be free to contact your people until we know if they still\n carry melting sickness,\" Max added. \"You might be immune so it doesn't\n show on you, but still carry enough germs—if that's what caused it—to\n wipe out a planet.\"\n\n\n \"If you do carry melting sickness,\" said Hal Barton, \"we won't be able\n to mingle with your people until we've cleared them of the disease.\"\n\n\n \"Starting with me?\" Pat asked.", "A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had\n been fired.\n\n\n \"Got anything?\" asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her\n voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the\n forest.\n\n\n \"Took a shot at something,\" explained George Barton's cheerful voice\n in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton\n standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. \"It looked\n like a duck.\"\n\n\n \"This isn't Central Park,\" said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into\n sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the\n bronze and red forest. \"They won't all look like ducks,\" he said\n soberly.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "She waited in the doorway to the laboratory and made no move to join\n them, merely acknowledged the two with a nod and a smile and a casual\n lift of the hand. They nodded and smiled back.\n\n\n \"Hello, June,\" said Pat and continued telling his tale, but as they\n passed he lightly touched her arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, pioneer!\" she said mockingly and softly to his passing profile,\n and knew that he had heard.", "In the\nExplorer\n, stored carefully in sealed tanks and containers,\n was the ultimate, multi-purpose cureall. It was a solution of enzymes\n so like the key catalysts of the human cell nucleus that it caused\n chemical derangement and disintegration in any non-human cell. Nothing\n could live in contact with it but human cells; any alien intruder to\n the body would die. Nucleocat Cureall was its trade name.\n\n\n But the cureall alone was not enough for complete safety. Plagues had\n been known to slay too rapidly and universally to be checked by human\n treatment. Doctors are not reliable; they die. Therefore spaceways and\n interplanetary health law demanded that ship equipment for guarding\n against disease be totally mechanical in operation, rapid and efficient.", "\"We can find no micro-organisms,\" George Barton said. \"None at all.\n Nothing in the body that should not be there. Leucosis and anemia.\n Fever only for the ones that fought it off.\" He handed Max some\n temperature charts and graphs of blood counts.\n\n\n June wandered out into the hall. Pediatrics and obstetrics were her\n field; she left the cellular research to Max, and just helped him with\n laboratory routine. The strange mood followed her out into the hall,\n then abruptly lightened.\n\n\n Coming toward her, busily telling a tale of adventure to the gorgeous\n Shelia Davenport, was a tall, red-headed, magnificently handsome man.\n It was his handsomeness which made Pat such a pleasure to look upon\n and talk with, she guiltily told herself, and it was his tremendous\n vitality.... It was like meeting a movie hero in the flesh, or a hero\n out of the pages of a book—Deer-slayer, John Clayton, Lord Greystoke.", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead." ], [ "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "\"Oh, I'm not complaining,\" Pat said negligently. He cocked his head to\n the music, and tried to locate its source.\n\n\n \"That's big of you,\" said Max with gentle irony.\n\n\n They fell to, Pat beginning the first meal he had had in more than a\n day.\n\n\n Most of the other diners finished when they were halfway through,\n and began walking over, diffidently at first, then in another wave\n of smiling faces, handshakes, and introductions. Pat was asked about\n crops, about farming methods, about rainfall and floods, about farm\n animals and plant breeding, about the compatibility of imported Earth\n seeds with local ground, about mines and strata.", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "There was no need to protect him. He leaned back in his chair and\n drawled answers with the lazy ease of a panther; where he could think\n of no statistic, he would fill the gap with an anecdote. It developed\n that he enjoyed spinning campfire yarns and especially being the center\n of interest.\n\n\n Between bouts of questions, he ate with undiminished and glowing relish.\n\n\n June noticed that the female specialists were prolonging the questions\n more than they needed, clustering around the table laughing at his\n jokes, until presently Pat was almost surrounded by pretty faces,\n eager questions, and chiming laughs. Shelia the beautiful laughed most\n chimingly of all.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"Are you hungry?\"\n\n\n \"No food since yesterday.\"\n\n\n \"We'll have a banquet ready for you when you get out,\" she told Pat and\n hung up, smiling. Pat Mead's voice had a vitality and enjoyment which\n made shipboard talk sound like sad artificial gaiety in contrast.\n\n\n They looked into the nearby small laboratory where twelve squealing\n hamsters were protestingly submitting to a small injection each of\n Pat's blood. In most of them the injection was followed by one of\n antihistaminics and adaptives. Otherwise the hamster defense system\n would treat all non-hamster cells as enemies, even the harmless human\n blood cells, and fight back against them violently.\n\n\n One hamster, the twelfth, was given an extra large dose of adaptive,\n so that if there were a disease, he would not fight it or the human\n cells, and thus succumb more rapidly.\n\n\n \"How ya doing, George?\" Max asked.", "June nudged Max, and Max shrugged indifferently. It wasn't anything a\n man would pay attention to, perhaps. But June watched Pat for a moment\n more, then glanced uneasily back to Max. He was eating and listening\n to Pat's answers and did not feel her gaze. For some reason Max looked\n almost shrunken to her. He was shorter than she had realized; she had\n forgotten that he was only the same height as herself. She was dimly\n aware of the clear lilting chatter of female voices increasing at Pat's\n end of the table.\n\n\n \"That guy's a menace,\" Max said, and laughed to himself, cutting\n another slice of hydroponic mushroom steak. \"What's eating you?\" he\n added, glancing aside at her when he noticed her sudden stillness.", "Three were alive and healthy, munching lettuce. One was the control;\n the other two had been given shots of Pat's blood from before he\n entered the ship, but with no additional treatment. Apparently a\n hamster could fight off melting sickness easily if left alone. Three\n were still feverish and ruffled, with a low red blood count, but\n recovering. The three dead ones had been given strong shots of adaptive\n and counter histamine, so their bodies had not fought back against the\n attack.\n\n\n June glanced at the dead animals hastily and looked away again.\n They lay twisted with a strange semi-fluid limpness, as if ready to\n dissolve. The last hamster, which had been given the heaviest dose\n of adaptive, had apparently lost all its hair before death. It was\n hairless and pink, like a still-born baby.", "Somewhere near them, in a series of stalls which led around and\n around like a rabbit maze, Pat was being herded from stall to stall\n by peremptory mechanical voices, directed to soap and shower, ordered\n to insert his arm into a slot which took a sample of his blood, given\n solutions to drink, bathed in germicidal ultraviolet, shaken by sonic\n blasts, breathing air thick with sprays of germicidal mists, being\n directed to put his arms into other slots where they were anesthesized\n and injected with various immunizing solutions.\n\n\n Finally, he would be put in a room of high temperature and extreme\n dryness, and instructed to sit for half an hour while more fluids were\n dripped into his veins through long thin tubes.", "\"Right!\" She turned and ran down the ramp like a small girl going to a\n fire. Max grinned at June and she grinned back. After a year and a half\n of isolation in space, everyone was hungry for the sight of new faces,\n the sound of unfamiliar voices.\nThey climbed the last two turns to the cafeteria, and entered to a rich\n subdued blend of soft music and quiet conversations. The cafeteria\n was a section of the old dining room, left when the rest of the ship\n had been converted to living and working quarters, and it still had\n the original finely grained wood of the ceiling and walls, the sound\n absorbency, the soft music spools and the intimate small light at each\n table where people leisurely ate and talked.\n\n\n They stood in line at the hot foods counter, and behind her June\n could hear a girl's voice talking excitedly through the murmur of\n conversation.", "Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear.", "Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "\"Starting with you,\" Max told him ruefully, \"as soon as you step on\n board.\"\n\n\n \"More needles?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, and a few little extras thrown in.\"\n\n\n \"Rough?\"\n\n\n \"It isn't easy.\"\n\n\n A few minutes later, standing in the stalls for spacesuit\n decontamination, being buffeted by jets of hot disinfectant, bathed in\n glares of sterilizing ultraviolet radiation, June remembered that and\n compared Pat Mead's treatment to theirs.", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "\"Lie down,\" Max told him, \"and hold still. We need two spinal fluid\n samples from the back, a body cavity one in front, and another from the\n arm.\"\n\n\n Pat lay down obediently. Max knelt, and, as he spoke, expertly swabbed\n and inserted needles with the smooth speed that had made him a fine\n nerve surgeon on Earth.\n\n\n High above them the scout helioplane came out of an opening in the ship\n and angled off toward the west, its buzz diminishing. Then, suddenly,\n it veered and headed back, and Reno Unrich's voice came tinnily from\n their earphones:\n\n\n \"What's that you've got? Hey, what are you docs doing down there?\" He\n banked again and came to a stop, hovering fifty feet away. June could\n see his startled face looking through the glass at Pat.", "\"—new man, honest! I saw him through the viewplate when they came in.\n He's down in the medical department. A real frontiersman.\"\n\n\n The line drew abreast of the counters, and she and Max chose three\n heaping trays, starting with hydroponic mushroom steak, raised in\n the growing trays of water and chemicals; sharp salad bowl with rose\n tomatoes and aromatic peppers; tank-grown fish with special sauce; four\n different desserts, and assorted beverages.\n\n\n Presently they had three tottering trays successfully maneuvered to a\n table. Brant St. Clair came over. \"I beg your pardon, Max, but they are\n saying something about Reno carrying messages to a colony of savages,\n for the medical department. Will he be back soon, do you know?\"\n\n\n Max smiled up at him, his square face affectionate. Everyone liked the\n shy Canadian. \"He's back already. We just saw him come in.\"", "\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it." ], [ "Patrick Mead took another look at their four faces and began to grin.\n \"Like me, I guess. But I hadn't thought of it before. I did not think\n that people could have different colored hair or that noses could fit\n so many ways onto faces. I was judging by my own appearance, but I\n suppose any fool can walk on his hands and say the world is upside\n down!\" He laughed and sobered. \"But then why wear spacesuits? The air\n is breathable.\"\n\n\n \"For safety,\" June told him. \"We can't take any chances on plague.\"\n\n\n Pat Mead was wearing nothing but a loin cloth and his weapons, and the\n wind ruffled his hair. He looked comfortable, and they longed to take\n off the stuffy spacesuits and feel the wind against their own skins.\n Minos was like home, like Earth.... But they were strangers.", "\"Sooner than you think,\" Max told her. \"We've discovered a castaway\n colony on the planet. They've done our tests for us by just living\n here. If there's anything here to catch, they've caught it.\"\n\n\n \"People on Minos?\" Bess's handsome ruddy face grew alive with\n excitement.\n\n\n \"One of them is down in the medical department,\" June said. \"He'll be\n out in twenty minutes.\"\n\n\n \"May I go see him?\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Max. \"Show him the way to the dining hall when he gets\n out. Tell him we sent you.\"", "Pat leaned back and smiled, sipping a glass of hydroponic burgundy.\n \"Wonderful stuff. You'll have to show us how to make it.\"\n\n\n Len turned back to him. \"You people live off the country, right? You\n hunt and bring in steaks and eat them, right? Well, say I have one of\n those steaks right here and I want to eat it, what happens?\"\n\"Go ahead and eat it. It just wouldn't digest. You'd stay hungry.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" Len was aggrieved.\n\n\n \"Chemical differences in the basic protoplasm of Minos. Different\n amino linkages, left-handed instead of right-handed molecules in the\n carbohydrates, things like that. Nothing will be digestible here until\n you are adapted chemically by a little test-tube evolution. Till then\n you'd starve to death on a full stomach.\"", "\"Nothing,\" she said hastily, but she did not turn back to watching Pat\n Mead. She felt disloyal. Pat was only a superb animal. Max was the man\n she loved. Or—was he? Of course he was, she told herself angrily.\n They had gone colonizing together because they wanted to spend their\n lives together; she had never thought of marrying any other man. Yet\n the sense of dissatisfaction persisted, and along with it a feeling of\n guilt.\n\n\n Len Marlow, the protein tank-culture technician responsible for the\n mushroom steaks, had wormed his way into the group and asked Pat a\n question. Now he was saying, \"I don't dig you, Pat. It sounds like\n you're putting the people into the tanks instead of the vegetables!\" He\n glanced at them, looking puzzled. \"See if you two can make anything of\n this. It sounds medical to me.\"", "\"Uh-\nuh\n!\" Len backed away. \"It sounds like a medical problem to me.\n Human cell control—right up your alley.\"\n\n\n \"It is a one-way street,\" Pat warned. \"Once it is done, you won't be\n able to digest ship food. I'll get no good from this protein. I ate it\n just for the taste.\"\n\n\n Hal Barton appeared quietly beside the table. \"Three of the twelve test\n hamsters have died,\" he reported, and turned to Pat. \"Your people carry\n the germs of melting sickness, as you call it. The dead hamsters were\n injected with blood taken from you before you were de-infected. We\n can't settle here unless we de-infect everybody on Minos. Would they\n object?\"\n\n\n \"We wouldn't want to give you folks germs,\" Pat smiled. \"Anything for\n safety. But there'll have to be a vote on it first.\"", "\"It was a yacht,\" Max said, still looking up, \"second hand, an old-time\n beauty without a sign of wear. Synthetic diamond-studded control board\n and murals on the walls. It doesn't have the new speed drives, but it\n brought us thirty-six light years in one and a half subjective years.\n Plenty good enough.\"\n\n\n The tall tanned man looked faintly wistful, and June realized that\n he had never had access to a full library, never seen a movie, never\n experienced luxury. He had been born and raised on Minos.\n\"May I go aboard?\" Pat asked hopefully.\n\n\n Max unslung the specimen kit from his shoulder, laid it on the carpet\n of plants that covered the ground and began to open it.", "Everyone wanted him to eat at their table, everyone was a specialist\n and wanted data about Minos. They all wanted anecdotes about hunting\n wild animals with a bow and arrow.\n\n\n \"He needs to be rescued,\" Max said. \"He won't have a chance to eat.\"\n\n\n June and Max got up firmly, edged through the crowd, captured Pat and\n escorted him back to their table. June found herself pleased to be\n claiming the hero of the hour.\nPat sat in the simple, subtly designed chair and leaned back almost\n voluptuously, testing the way it gave and fitted itself to him. He\n ran his eyes over the bright tableware and heaped plates. He looked\n around at the rich grained walls and soft lights at each table. He said\n nothing, just looking and feeling and experiencing.\n\n\n \"When we build our town and leave the ship,\" June explained, \"we\n will turn all the staterooms back into the lounges and ballrooms and\n cocktail bars that used to be inside.\"", "Max was eyeing the bronze red-headed figure with something approaching\n awe. \"Do you think all the Meads look like that?\" he said to June on\n the intercom. \"I wouldn't mind being a Mead myself!\"\nTheir job had been made easy by the coming of Pat. They went back to\n the ship laughing, exchanging anecdotes with him. There was nothing\n now to keep Minos from being the home they wanted, except the melting\n sickness, and, forewarned against it, they could take precautions.\n\n\n The polished silver and black column of the\nExplorer\nseemed to rise\n higher and higher over the trees as they neared it. Then its symmetry\n blurred all sense of specific size as they stepped out from among the\n trees and stood on the edge of the meadow, looking up.\n\n\n \"Nice!\" said Pat. \"Beautiful!\" The admiration in his voice was warming.", "Still panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. \"Welcome to\n Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.\"\n\n\n \"English?\" gasped June.\n\n\n \"We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to\n you.... It's three hundred miles.... We saw your scout plane pass\n twice, but we couldn't attract its attention.\"\nJune looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the\n tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles\n of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already\n settled! \"We didn't know there was a colony here,\" she said. \"It is not\n on the map.\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid of that,\" the tall bronze man answered soberly. \"We\n have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.\"", "\"Routine,\" George Barton grunted absently.\n\n\n On the way up the long spiral ramps to the dining hall, they passed a\n viewplate. It showed a long scene of mountains in the distance on the\n horizon, and between them, rising step by step as they grew farther\n away, the low rolling hills, bronze and red with patches of clear green\n where there were fields.\n\n\n Someone was looking out, standing very still, as if she had been\n there a long time—Bess St. Clair, a Canadian woman. \"It looks like\n Winnipeg,\" she told them as they paused. \"When are you doctors going to\n let us out of this blithering barberpole? Look,\" she pointed. \"See that\n patch of field on the south hillside, with the brook winding through\n it? I've staked that hillside for our house. When do we get out?\"\nReno Ulrich's tiny scout plane buzzed slowly in from the distance and\n began circling lazily.", "June laid a hand on his arm. \"No harm meant,\" she said to him over the\n intercom. \"We're just as much of a shock to him as he is to us.\"\n\n\n She addressed a question to the tall colonist on outside sound. \"What\n should a person look like, Mr. Mead?\"\n\n\n He indicated her with a smile. \"Like you.\"\n\n\n June stepped closer and stood looking up at him, considering her own\n description. She was tall and tanned, like him; had a few freckles,\n like him; and wavy red hair, like his. She ignored the brightly\n humorous blue eyes.\n\n\n \"In other words,\" she said, \"everyone on the planet looks like you and\n me?\"", "Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. \"My name\n is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and\n George Barton, Hal's brother, also M.D.\"\n\n\n \"Patrick Mead is the name,\" smiled the man, shaking hands casually.\n \"Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos\n before.\"\n\n\n The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June\n could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded\n steel.\n\n\n \"What—what is the population of Minos?\" she asked.", "\"Oh, fine.\" St. Clair beamed. \"I had an appointment with him to go out\n and confirm what looks like a nice vein of iron to the northeast. Have\n you seen Bess? Oh—there she is.\" He turned swiftly and hurried away.\n\n\n A very tall man with fiery red hair came in surrounded by an eagerly\n talking crowd of ship people. It was Pat Mead. He stood in the doorway,\n alertly scanning the dining room. Sheer vitality made him seem even\n larger than he was. Sighting June, he smiled and began to thread toward\n their table.\n\n\n \"Look!\" said someone. \"There's the colonist!\" Shelia, a pretty, jeweled\n woman, followed and caught his arm. \"Did you\nreally\nswim across a\n river to come here?\"\n\n\n Overflowing with good-will and curiosity, people approached from all\n directions. \"Did you actually walk three hundred miles? Come, eat with\n us. Let me help choose your tray.\"", "\"Tests first,\" Hal Barton said. \"We have to find out if you people\n still carry this so-called melting sickness. We'll have to de-microbe\n you and take specimens before we let you on board. Once on, you'll be\n no good as a check for what the other Meads might have.\"\n\n\n Max was taking out a rack and a stand of preservative bottles and\n hypodermics.\n\n\n \"Are you going to jab me with those?\" Pat asked with interest.\n\n\n \"You're just a specimen animal to me, bud!\" Max grinned at Pat Mead,\n and Pat grinned back. June saw that they were friends already, the\n tall pantherish colonist, and the wry, black-haired doctor. She felt a\n stab of guilt because she loved Max and yet could pity him for being\n smaller and frailer than Pat Mead.", "\"What was supposed to happen then?\" Max asked, leaning forward.\n\n\n \"I don't know exactly how it worked. He never told anybody much about\n it, and when I was a little boy he had gone loco and was wandering\n ha-ha-ing around waving a test tube. Fell down a ravine and broke his\n neck at the age of eighty.\"\n\n\n \"A character,\" Max said.\n\n\n Why was she afraid? \"It worked then?\"\n\n\n \"Yes. He tried it on all the Meads the first year. The other settlers\n didn't want to be experimented on until they saw how it worked out. It\n worked. The Meads could hunt, and plant while the other settlers were\n still eating out of hydroponics tanks.\"\n\n\n \"It worked,\" said Max to Len. \"You're a plant geneticist and a tank\n culture expert. There's a job for you.\"", "CONTAGION\nBy KATHERINE MacLEAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction October 1950.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMinos was such a lovely planet. Not a\n\n thing seemed wrong with it. Excepting the food,\n\n perhaps. And a disease that wasn't really.\nIt was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The\n forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a\n wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf\n shadows.\n\n\n The hunt party of the\nExplorer\nfiled along the narrow trail, guns\n ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries\n of strange birds.", "He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. \"Only\n one hundred and fifty.\" He smiled. \"Don't worry, this isn't a city\n planet yet. There's room for a few more people.\" He shook hands with\n the Bartons quickly. \"That is—you are people, aren't you?\" he asked\n startlingly.\n\n\n \"Why not?\" said Max with a poise that June admired.\n\n\n \"Well, you are all so—so—\" Patrick Mead's eyes roamed across the\n faces of the group. \"So varied.\"\n\n\n They could find no meaning in that, and stood puzzled.\n\n\n \"I mean,\" Patrick Mead said into the silence, \"all these—interesting\n different hair colors and face shapes and so forth—\" He made a vague\n wave with one hand as if he had run out of words or was anxious not to\n insult them.\n\n\n \"Joke?\" Max asked, bewildered.", "\"Adapted us to Minos. He took human cells—\"\nShe listened intently, trying to find a reason for fear in the\n explanation. It would have taken many human generations to adapt to\n Minos by ordinary evolution, and that only at a heavy toll of death and\n hunger which evolution exacts. There was a shorter way: Human cells\n have the ability to return to their primeval condition of independence,\n hunting, eating and reproducing alone.\n\n\n Alexander P. Mead took human cells and made them into phagocytes.\n He put them through the hard savage school of evolution—a thousand\n generations of multiplication, hardship and hunger, with the alien\n indigestible food always present, offering its reward of plenty to the\n cell that reluctantly learned to absorb it.\n\n\n \"Leucocytes can run through several thousand generations of evolution\n in six months,\" Pat Mead finished. \"When they reached to a point where\n they would absorb Minos food, he planted them back in the people he\n had taken them from.\"", "Pat Mead explained patiently, \"Our ship, with the power plant and all\n the books we needed, went off into the sky to avoid the contagion,\n and never came back. The crew must have died.\" Long years of hardship\n were indicated by that statement, a colony with electric power gone\n and machinery stilled, with key technicians dead and no way to replace\n them. June realized then the full meaning of the primitive sheath knife\n and bow.\n\n\n \"Any recurrence of melting sickness?\" asked Hal Barton.\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Any other diseases?\"\n\n\n \"Not a one.\"", "Pat's side of the table had been loaded with the dishes from two trays,\n but it was almost clear now and the dishes were stacked neatly to one\n side. He started on three desserts, thoughtfully tasting each in turn.\n\n\n \"Test-tube evolution?\" Max repeated. \"What's that? I thought you people\n had no doctors.\"\n\n\n \"It's a story.\" Pat leaned back again. \"Alexander P. Mead, the head of\n the Mead clan, was a plant geneticist, a very determined personality\n and no man to argue with. He didn't want us to go through the struggle\n of killing off all Minos plants and putting in our own, spoiling the\n face of the planet and upsetting the balance of its ecology. He decided\n that he would adapt our genes to this planet or kill us trying. He did\n it all right.'\"\n\n\n \"Did which?\" asked June, suddenly feeling a sourceless prickle of fear." ] ]
test	51167	[ "Why is Ann initially disappointed with Jeff?", "How does Snader explain the interworkings of time travel?", "In their initial conversation, what does Snader say that startles Jeff?", "How does Snader convince Jeff to agree to go with him back in time?", "Once in the room where the time travel is to begin, what does Snader speak of that should have served as a warning for Jeff to turn back?", "What is ironic about Jeff's comment, \"Fun, hey? Like Alice Through the Looking-Glass.\"", "How could the changes between Jeff and Ann tell they are no longer in their time?", "What is the one constant that Jeff notices between the two periods?", "What is the purpose of bringing Jeff to the past?", "How did Bullen know that Jeff and Ann would get arrested if they left on their own?" ]	[ [ "He does not want to talk to Snader, but she is interested in what he has to say.", "He is overmedicating.", "He refuses to take his medication.", "He lost his lease and job." ], [ "He says that it's like walking through an invisible wall. ", "He says that it is not for him to explain, and Jeff will have to ask the higher authorities to explain it.", "He says that it is too technical to explain. Basically, all Jeff needs to know is that it does, in fact, work.", "He says that it's not like a movie, never changing. Time and space are always changing." ], [ "Snader tells Jeff that if he does not agree to go with him, Ann's life is in danger.", "He calls Jeff by name.", "Snader tells Jeff that he is being hired by a corporation to give them a particular technology before anyone else can use it.", "Snader tells Jeff he is going back in time to fix a problem, and if doesn't the world could end." ], [ "He tells him he will be able to see Ann's father again.", "He tells Jeff that he is going to save the world.", "He tells Jeff that if he does not go, Ann will get hurt.", "He tells Jeff he has nothing to lose." ], [ "Snader doesn't speak anymore at all, and that was a warning in and of itself.", "Snader tells Jeff about how small changes he makes in the past can change the future.", "Snader tells Jeff that prisoners are forced to time travel rather than be executed.", "Snader tells Jeff about the mission he was brought to do and how it is very dishonest and amoral." ], [ "Alice does not have fun because she is captured by the queen and the queen of the land they ended up in is about to hold them captive, as well. ", "Alice does not have fun because the queen cuts off her head, and they are about to be in mortal danger, too.", "Alice does not have fun because a monster actually comes through the mission and tries to kill her. They will not have a fun adventure either.", "Alice didn't go through a looking-glass. She fell down a rabbit hole, and they are about to fall down one, as well." ], [ "There is no noticeable difference, and they are never convinced that they have gone to a different time.", "The changes between the two time periods are very subtle. In many ways, they would have not noticed some of them if they hadn't been trying to find a difference to see if they were in the past.", "There are no similarities between the two times.", "The way the couple dresses is futuristic in comparison to the people they see in the past." ], [ "The natural objects of the area are the same.", "There are virtually no similarities.", "Everything is the same.", "The language has remained constant." ], [ "He has knowledge of how to create a vehicle that revolutionizes the world, and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it.", "He holds the key to a cure for an impending epidemic.", "He has knowledge of how to create a cellular device, and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it.", "He has knowledge of how to create a colored television and a businessman wants that technology before anyone else can get it." ], [ "He knows that their currency will not be accepted, so they have no money to live on, and that will eventually cause them trouble with the law.", "He called the police and told them that the couple was illegally in the country,", "There were wanted posters of the couple everywhere.", "He knew that their language would give away their secret." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "\"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't\n talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and\n fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and\n yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n\n\n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like\n popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n\n\n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost\n your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young\n yet.\"\nJeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished\n he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the\n mustachioed man at the next table.", "\"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n\n\n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the\n way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your\n knowledge.\"\n\n\n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate\n permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen\n has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can\n make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you\n to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n\n\n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He\n wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange\n streets. But he put on a bold front.", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "\"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.", "As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty\n of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were.\n The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite\n Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him\n from a fork in the freeway.\n\n\n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new,\n but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift—\"\n\n\n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up\n in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center,\n ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize\n it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.", "Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.", "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"", "Butterfly 9\nBy DONALD KEITH\n\n\n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nJeff needed a job and this man had a job to\n \noffer—one where giant economy-size trouble\n \nhad labels like fakemake, bumsy and peekage!\nI\n\n\n At first, Jeff scarcely noticed the bold-looking man at the next table.\n Nor did Ann. Their minds were busy with Jeff's troubles.\n\n\n \"You're still the smartest color engineer in television,\" Ann told Jeff\n as they dallied with their food. \"You'll bounce back. Now eat your\n supper.\"", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again." ], [ "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "\"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man\n claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen\n isn't getting me out of here.\"\n\n\n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday—you've\n gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to\n understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie\n film. A film never changes. Space does—and time does. For example, if\n a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to\n find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n\n\n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil\n War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "\"If you go back to the time you call 1865—which is most easily\n done—you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or\n that war.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n\n\n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at\n Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day\n of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you\n grasp the difference between the two?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you\n speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"", "\"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work\n for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and\n stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n\n\n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen\n chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go\n on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here—Butterfly 9, ask for\n Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow\n pre-noon.\"\n\n\n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n\n\n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it.\n For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"", "He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building\n being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that\n if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought\n it for two thousand.\"\n\n\n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n \"But since we can't—\"\n\n\n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them,\n grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n\n\n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman,\n with extra gall.\n\n\n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n\n\n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n \"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five\n years. Maybe I help you.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful." ], [ "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"", "The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them." ], [ "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.", "Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building\n being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that\n if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought\n it for two thousand.\"\n\n\n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n \"But since we can't—\"\n\n\n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them,\n grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n\n\n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman,\n with extra gall.\n\n\n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n\n\n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n \"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five\n years. Maybe I help you.\"", "He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"" ], [ "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut\n after them.\n\n\n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the\n walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle\n of the ceiling and two movie screens—or were they giant television\n screens?—occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n\n\n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an\n arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word\nAnte\n, and to\n the right with the word\nPost\n.\nJeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One\n appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like\n a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left\n wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined\n corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n\n\n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it\n for?\"", "Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.", "Snader said, \"Watch me. Then look at other wall.\"\n\n\n He moved gracefully to the screen on the left wall, stepped into it and\n disappeared. It was as if he had slid into opaque water.\n\n\n Jeff and Ann blinked in mystification. Then they remembered his\n instruction to watch the other screen. They turned. After a moment, in\n the far distance down the long moving corridor, they could see a stocky\n figure. The motion of the picture brought him nearer. In a few seconds,\n he was recognizable as Snader—and as the picture brought him forward,\n he stepped down out of it and was with them again.\n\n\n \"Simple,\" Snader said. \"I rode to next station. Then crossed over. Took\n other carrier back here.\"\n\n\n \"Brother, that's the best trick I've seen in years,\" Jeff said. \"How\n did you do it? Can I do it, too?\"" ], [ "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "\"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "The key opened this room's door, too. Its spring lock snapped shut\n after them.\n\n\n The room was like a doctor's waiting room, with easy chairs along the\n walls. Its only peculiar aspects were a sign hanging from the middle\n of the ceiling and two movie screens—or were they giant television\n screens?—occupying a whole wall at either end of the room.\n\n\n The sign bore the number 701 in bright yellow on black. Beneath it, an\n arrow pointed to the screen on the left with the word\nAnte\n, and to\n the right with the word\nPost\n.\nJeff studied the big screens. On each, a picture was in motion. One\n appeared to be moving through a long corridor, lined with seats like\n a railroad club car. The picture seemed to rush at them from the left\n wall. When he turned to the right, a similar endless chair-lined\n corridor moved toward him from that direction.\n\n\n \"Somebody worked hard on this layout,\" he said to Snader. \"What's it\n for?\"", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"", "The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.", "The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"", "In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately\n he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the\n big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow\n brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\nIV\n\n\n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a\n little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n\n\n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's\n barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,\n if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n\n\n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm\n ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty\n of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were.\n The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite\n Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him\n from a fork in the freeway.\n\n\n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new,\n but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift—\"\n\n\n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up\n in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center,\n ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize\n it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high\n counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men\n whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to\n listen.\n\n\n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or\n lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n\n\n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n\n\n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in\n something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I\n do—more or less—but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong\n in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm\n so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n\n\n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation." ], [ "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.", "\"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "As the limousine swept along through the traffic, there were plenty\n of big signs for turn-offs, but none gave any hint where they were.\n The names were unfamiliar. Even the language seemed grotesque. \"Rite\n Channel for Creepers,\" he read. \"Yaw for Torrey Rushway\" flared at him\n from a fork in the freeway.\n\n\n \"This can't be the future,\" Ann said. \"This limousine is almost new,\n but it doesn't even have an automatic gear shift—\"\n\n\n She broke off as the car shot down a ramp off the freeway and pulled up\n in front of an apartment house. Just beyond was a big shopping center,\n ablaze with lights and swarming with shoppers. Jeff did not recognize\n it, in spite of his familiarity with the city.", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"" ], [ "The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.", "\"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "At the police station, Jeff put his elbows dejectedly on the high\n counter while the policeman talked to an officer in charge. Some men\n whom Jeff took for reporters got up from a table and eased over to\n listen.\n\n\n \"I don't know whether to charge them with fakemake, bumsy, peekage or\n lunate,\" the policeman said as he finished.\n\n\n His superior gave Jeff a long puzzled stare.\n\n\n Jeff sighed. \"I know it sounds impossible, but a man brought me in\n something he claimed was a time traveler. You speak the same language I\n do—more or less—but everything else is kind of unfamiliar. I belong\n in the United States, a country in North America. I can't believe I'm\n so far in the future that the United States has been forgotten.\"\n\n\n There ensued a long, confused, inconclusive interrogation.", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "When they finished, the clerk gave him a check marked 1/20. Jeff looked\n at it thoughtfully, shrugged and handed it to the cashier with two\n dollar bills.\n\n\n The man at the desk glanced at them and laughed. \"Stage money, eh?\"\n\n\n \"No, that's good money,\" Jeff assured him with a rather hollow smile.\n \"They're just new bills, that's all.\"\n\n\n The cashier picked one up and looked at it curiously. \"I'm afraid it's\n no good here,\" he said, and pushed it back.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out of Jeff's stomach. \"What kind of money do you\n want? This is all I have.\"\n\n\n The cashier's smile faded. He caught the eye of a man in uniform on one\n of the stools. The uniform was dark green, but the man acted like a\n policeman. He loomed up beside Jeff.", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "\"If you go back to the time you call 1865—which is most easily\n done—you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or\n that war.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n\n\n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at\n Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day\n of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you\n grasp the difference between the two?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you\n speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"", "In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately\n he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the\n big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow\n brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\nIV\n\n\n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a\n little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n\n\n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's\n barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,\n if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n\n\n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm\n ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"", "He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"", "\"This beanery is too noisy and hot,\" he grumbled. \"I can't eat. Can't\n talk. Can't think.\" He took a silver pillbox from his pocket and\n fumbled for a black one. Those were vitamin pills; the big red and\n yellow ones were sleeping capsules. He gulped the pill.\n\n\n Ann looked disapproving in a wifely way. \"Lately you chew pills like\n popcorn,\" she said. \"Do you really need so many?\"\n\n\n \"I need something. I'm sure losing my grip.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at him. \"Baby! How silly! Nothing happened, except you lost\n your lease. You'll build up a better company in a new spot. We're young\n yet.\"\nJeff sighed and glanced around the crowded little restaurant. He wished\n he could fly away somewhere. At that moment, he met the gaze of the\n mustachioed man at the next table.", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"" ], [ "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "\"You mean you come from the future?\"\n\n\n \"Just different time. I show you. You come with me?\"\n\n\n \"Come where?\" Jeff asked, studying Snader's mocking eyes. The man\n didn't seem a mere eccentric. He had a peculiar suggestion of humor and\n force.\n\n\n \"Come on little trip to different time,\" invited Snader. He added\n persuasively, \"Could be back here in hour.\"\n\n\n \"It would be painless, I suppose?\" Jeff gave it a touch of derision.\n\n\n \"Maybe not. That is risk you take. But look at me. I make trips every\n day. I look damaged?\"\n\n\n As a matter of fact, he did. His thick-fleshed face bore a scar and\n his nose was broad and flat, as if it had been broken. But Jeff\n politely agreed that he did not look damaged.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "\"I am general manager of Continental Radioptic Combine, owned by Mr.\n Dumont Bullen.\" He nodded toward the big man. \"Chromatics have not\n yet been developed here in connection with radioptics. They are well\n understood in your time, are they not?\"\n\n\n \"What's chromatics? Color television?\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. You are an expert in—ah—colored television, I think.\"\n\n\n Jeff nodded. \"So what?\"\n\n\n The old man beamed at him. \"You are here to work for our company. You\n will enable us to be first with chromatics in this time wave.\"\n\n\n Jeff stood up. \"Don't tell me who I'll work for.\"\nBullen slapped a big fist on the arm of his chair. \"No fog about this!\n You're bought and paid for, Elliott! You'll get a fair labor contract,\n but you do what I say!\"", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "\"If you go back to the time you call 1865—which is most easily\n done—you will find that the people there know nothing of a Lincoln or\n that war.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked blank. \"What are they doing then?\"\n\n\n The little man spread his hands. \"What are the people doing now at\n Sixth and Main? Certainly not the same things they were doing the day\n of the fire. We're talking about a dimension, not an event. Don't you\n grasp the difference between the two?\"\n\n\n \"Nope. To me, 1865 means the end of the Civil War. How else can you\n speak of a point in time except by the events that happened then?\"", "He spoke in an odd clipped way, obviously a foreigner. His shirt was\n yellow. His suit had a silky sheen. Its peculiar tailoring emphasized\n the bulges in his stubby, muscular torso.\n\n\n Ann smiled back at him. \"You talk as if you could take us back to 1952.\n Is that what you really mean?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? You think this silly. But I can show you.\"\n\n\n Jeff rose to go. \"Mister, you better get to a doctor. Ann, it's time we\n started home.\"\nAnn laid a hand on his sleeve. \"I haven't finished eating. Let's\n chat with the gent.\" She added in an undertone to Jeff, \"Must be a\n psycho—but sort of an inspired one.\"\n\n\n The man said to Ann, \"You are kind lady, I think. Good to crazy people.\n I join you.\"", "Snader showed his teeth. \"That was convict from my time. We have\n criminals, like in your time. But we do not kill. We make them work.\n Where he going? To end of line. To earliest year this time groove\n reach. About 600 A.D., your calendar. Authorities pick up when\n he get there. Put him to work.\"\n\n\n \"What kind of work?\" Jeff asked.\n\n\n \"Building the groove further back.\"\n\n\n \"Sounds like interesting work.\"\n\n\n Snader chortled and slapped him on the back. \"Maybe you see it some\n day, but forget that now. You come with me. Little trip.\"\n\n\n Jeff was perspiring. This was odder than he expected. Whatever the\n fakery, it was clever. His curiosity as a technician made him want to\n know about it. He asked Snader, \"Where do you propose to go? And how?\"", "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"", "She squeezed his arm. \"If I'm dreaming, don't wake me! I was scared a\n minute ago. But now, oh, boy!\"\n\n\n \"Likewise. But I still wonder what Snader's angle is.\" He leaned\n forward and tapped the driver on his meaty shoulder. \"You brought us\n into the future instead of the past, didn't you?\"\n\n\n It was hard to know whether Snader was sleepy or just bored, but he\n shrugged briefly to show there was no reply coming. Then he yawned.\n\n\n Jeff smiled tightly. \"I guess we'll find out in good time. Let's sit\n back and enjoy the strangest ride of our lives.\"", "\"We could if we went to our house. He lived with us then, remember?\n Would we see ourselves, six years younger? Or would—\"\n\n\n Snader took Jeff's arm and pulled him to his feet. The screen was\n moving through a room numbered 724.\n\n\n \"Soon now,\" Snader grunted happily. \"Then no more questions.\"\n\n\n He took an arm of each as he had before. When the screen was filled by\n a room with the number 725, he propelled them forward into it.\nAgain there was no sense of motion. They had simply stepped through a\n bright wall they could not feel. They found themselves in a replica of\n the room they had left at 701. On the wall, a picture of the continuous\n club-car corridor rolled toward them in a silent, endless stream.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "He groaned. \"I lose my appetite every time I think about the building\n being sold. It isn't worth the twelve grand. I wouldn't buy it for that\n if I could. What burns me is that, five years ago, I could have bought\n it for two thousand.\"\n\n\n \"If only we could go back five years.\" She shrugged fatalistically.\n \"But since we can't—\"\n\n\n The character at the next table leaned over and spoke to them,\n grinning. \"You like to get away? You wish to go back?\"\n\n\n Jeff glanced across in annoyance. The man was evidently a salesman,\n with extra gall.\n\n\n \"Not now, thanks,\" Jeff said. \"Haven't time.\"\n\n\n The man waved his thick hand at the clock, as if to abolish time.\n \"Time? That is nothing. Your little lady. She spoke of go back five\n years. Maybe I help you.\"", "\"Time travel,\" said Snader. \"You like?\"\n\n\n \"Almost as good as Disneyland. These movies represent the stream of\n time, I suppose?\"\nInstead of answering, Snader pointed to the screen. The picture showed\n a group of people chatting in a fast-moving corridor. As it hurtled\n toward them, Snader flipped his hand in a genial salute. Two people in\n the picture waved back.\n\n\n Ann gasped. \"It was just as if they saw us.\"\n\n\n \"They did,\" Snader said. \"No movie. Time travelers. In fourth\n dimension. To you, they look like flat picture. To them, we look flat.\"\n\n\n \"What's he supposed to be?\" Jeff asked as the onrushing picture showed\n them briefly a figure bound hand and foot, huddled in one of the\n chairs. He stared at them piteously for an instant before the picture\n surged past.", "\"No problem. When we read in this morning's newspapers about a man\n claiming to be a time traveler, we knew.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Now start explaining. Until I understand where I am, Bullen\n isn't getting me out of here.\"\n\n\n The lawyer smiled and sat down. \"Mr. Kersey told you yesterday—you've\n gone back six years. But you'll need some mental gymnastics to\n understand. Time is a dimension, not a stream of events like a movie\n film. A film never changes. Space does—and time does. For example, if\n a movie showed a burning house at Sixth and Main, would you expect to\n find a house burning whenever you returned to that corner?\"\n\n\n \"You mean to say that if I went back to 1865, I wouldn't find the Civil\n War was over and Lincoln had been assassinated?\"", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "He did not wait for consent, but slid into a seat at their table with\n an easy grace that was almost arrogant.\n\n\n \"You are unhappy in 1957,\" he went on. \"Discouraged. Restless. Why not\n take trip to another time?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Ann said gaily. \"How much does it cost?\"\n\n\n \"Free trial trip. Cost nothing. See whether you like. Then maybe we\n talk money.\" He handed Jeff a card made of a stiff plastic substance.\n\n\n Jeff glanced at it, then handed it to Ann with a half-smile. It read:\n4-D TRAVEL BEURO\n\n Greet Snader, Traffic Ajent\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader's bureau is different,\" Jeff said to his wife. \"He even\n spells it different.\"\n\n\n Snader chuckled. \"I come from other time. We spell otherwise.\"" ], [ "\"Why, the man thinks he owns you.\" Ann laughed shakily.\n\n\n \"You'll find my barmen know their law,\" Bullen said. \"This isn't the\n way I like to recruit. But it was only way to get a man with your\n knowledge.\"\n\n\n Kersey said politely, \"You are here illegally, with no immigrate\n permit or citizen file. Therefore you cannot get work. But Mr. Bullen\n has taken an interest in your trouble. Through his influence, you can\n make a living. We even set aside an apartment in this building for you\n to live in. You are really very luxe, do you see?\"\n\n\n Jeff's legs felt weak. These highbinders seemed brutally confident. He\n wondered how he and Ann would find their way home through the strange\n streets. But he put on a bold front.", "\"I don't believe your line about time travel and I don't plan to work\n for you,\" he said. \"My wife and I are walking out right now. Try and\n stop us, legally or any other way.\"\n\n\n Kersey's smooth old face turned hard. But, unexpectedly, Bullen\n chuckled deep in his throat. \"Good pop and bang. Like to see it. Go\n on, walk out. You hang in trouble, call up here—Butterfly 9, ask for\n Bullen. Whole exchange us. I'll meet you here about eleven tomorrow\n pre-noon.\"\n\n\n \"Don't hold your breath. Let's go, Ann.\"\n\n\n When they were on the sidewalk, Ann took a deep breath. \"We made it.\n For a minute, I thought there'd be a brawl. Why did they let us go?\"", "\"Just what you order,\" Snader said proudly. \"His name—Jeff Elliott.\n Fine sharp. Best in his circuit. He brings his lifemate, too. Ann\n Elliott.\"\n\n\n The old man rubbed his smooth hands together. \"Prime! I wish joy,\" he\n said to Ann and Jeff. \"I'm Septo Kersey. Come in. Bullen's waiting.\"\n\n\n He led them into a spacious drawing room with great windows looking out\n on the lights of the city. There was a leather chair in a corner, and\n in it sat a heavy man with a grim mouth. He made no move, but grunted\n a perfunctory \"Wish joy\" when Kersey introduced them. His cold eyes\n studied Jeff while Kersey seated them in big chairs.\n\n\n Snader did not sit down, however. \"No need for me now,\" he said, and\n moved toward the door with a mocking wave at Ann.", "In past weeks, his insomnia had grown worse and worse, so that lately\n he had begun taking stronger pills. After a longing glance at the\n big red and yellow capsules, he put the box away. Whatever tomorrow\n brought, it wouldn't find him slow and drowsy.\nIV\n\n\n He passed a wakeful night. In the early morning, he looked up to see a\n little man with a briefcase at his cell door.\n\n\n \"Wish joy, Mr. Elliott,\" the man said coolly. \"I am one of Mr. Bullen's\n barmen. You know, represent at law? He sent me to arrange your release,\n if you are ready to be reasonable.\"\n\n\n Jeff lay there and put his hands behind his head. \"I doubt if I'm\n ready. I'm comfortable here. By the way, how did you know where I was?\"", "The man behind the desk asked questions which seemed stupid to Jeff and\n got answers which probably seemed stupid to him.\n\n\n The reporters quizzed Jeff gleefully. \"Come out, what are you\n advertising?\" they kept asking. \"Who got you up to this?\"\n\n\n The police puzzled over his driver's license and the other cards in his\n wallet. They asked repeatedly about the lack of a \"Work License,\" which\n Jeff took to be some sort of union card. Evidently there was grave\n doubt that he had any legal right to be in the country.\n\n\n In the end, Jeff and Ann were locked in separate cells for the night.\n Jeff groaned and pounded the bars as he thought of his wife, imprisoned\n and alone in a smelly jail. After hours of pacing the cell, he lay down\n in the cot and reached automatically for his silver pillbox. Then he\n hesitated.", "Bullen nodded. \"You get the rest of your pay when Elliott proves out.\"\n\n\n \"Here, wait a minute!\" Jeff called. But Snader was gone.\n\n\n \"Sit still,\" Bullen growled to Jeff. \"You understand radioptics?\"\n\n\n The blood went to Jeff's head. \"My business is television, if that's\n what you mean. What's this about?\"\n\n\n \"Tell him, Kersey,\" the big man said, and stared out the window.\n\n\n Kersey began, \"You understand, I think, that you have come back in\n time. About six years back.\"\n\n\n \"That's a matter of opinion, but go on.\"", "\"Get in,\" Snader said curtly.\n\n\n Jeff decided to go along with the hoax or whatever it was. He could\n see no serious risk. He helped Ann into the back seat and sat beside\n her. Snader slammed the door and slid into the driver's seat. He\n started the engine with a roar and they rocketed away from the curb,\n narrowly missing another car.\n\n\n Jeff yelled, \"Easy, man! Look where you're going!\"\n\n\n Snader guffawed. \"Tonight, you look where you are going.\"\n\n\n Ann clung to Jeff. \"Did you notice the house we came out of?\"\n\n\n \"What about it?\"\n\n\n \"It looked as though they were afraid people might try to break in.\n There were bars at the windows.\"", "The fellow seemed to be watching him and Ann. Something in his\n confident gaze made Jeff uneasy. Had they met before?\n\n\n Ann whispered, \"So you noticed him, too. Maybe he's following us. I\n think I saw him on the parking lot where we left the car.\"\n\n\n Jeff shrugged his big shoulders. \"If he's following us, he's nuts.\n We've got no secrets and no money.\"\n\n\n \"It must be my maddening beauty,\" said Ann.\n\n\n \"I'll kick him cross-eyed if he starts anything,\" Jeff said. \"I'm just\n in the mood.\"\n\n\n Ann giggled. \"Honey, what big veins you have! Forget him. Let's talk\n about the engineering lab you're going to start. And let's eat.\"", "Snader bounded out, pulled open the rear door and jerked his head in a\n commanding gesture. But Jeff did not get out. He told Snader, \"Let's\n have some answers before we go any further.\"\n\n\n Snader gave him a hard grin. \"You hear everything upstairs.\"\n\n\n The building appeared harmless enough. Jeff looked thoughtfully at Ann.\n\n\n She said, \"It's just an apartment house. We've come this far. Might as\n well go in and see what's there.\"\n\n\n Snader led them in, up to the sixth floor in an elevator and along a\n corridor with heavy carpets and soft gold lights. He knocked on a door.\nA tall, silver-haired, important-looking man opened it and greeted them\n heartily.\n\n\n \"Solid man, Greet!\" he exclaimed. \"You're a real scratcher! And is this\n our sharp?\" He gave Jeff a friendly but appraising look.", "Before he could ask, Ann popped another question. \"Mr. Snader, you\n heard us talking. You know we're in trouble because Jeff missed a good\n chance five years ago. Do you claim people can really go back into the\n past and correct mistakes they've made?\"\n\n\n \"They can go back. What they do when arrive? Depends on them.\"\n\n\n \"Don't you wish it were true?\" she sighed to Jeff.\n\n\n \"You afraid to believe,\" said Snader, a glimmer of amusement in his\n restless eyes. \"Why not try? What you lose? Come on, look at station.\n Very near here.\"\n\n\n Ann jumped up. \"It might be fun, Jeff. Let's see what he means, if\n anything.\"\n\n\n Jeff's pulse quickened. He too felt a sort of midsummer night's\n madness—a yearning to forget his troubles. \"Okay, just for kicks. But\n we go in my car.\"", "Snader unlocked the front door with a key which he drew from a fine\n metal chain around his neck. He swept open the front door with a\n flourish and beamed at them, but Ann drew back.\n\n\n \"'Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,'\" she murmured to\n Jeff. \"This could be a gambling hell. Or a dope den.\"\n\n\n \"No matter what kind of clip joint, it can't clip us much,\" he said.\n \"There's only four bucks in my wallet. My guess is it's a 'temple' for\n some daffy religious sect.\"\n\n\n They went in. A fat man smiled at them from a desk in the hall. Snader\n said, \"Meet Peter Powers. Local agent of our bureau.\"\n\n\n The man didn't get up, but nodded comfortably and waved them toward the\n next room, after a glance at Snader's key.", "\"Baby, don't be scared. This is an adventure. Let's have fun.\" He\n pressed her hand soothingly and pulled her toward a lunch counter.\n\n\n If the haberdasher's sign was jive, the restaurant spoke the same\n jargon. The signs on the wall and the bill of fare were baffling. Jeff\n pondered the list of beef shingles, scorchers, smack sticks and fruit\n chills, until he noticed that a couple at the counter were eating what\n clearly were hamburgers—though the \"buns\" looked more like tortillas.\n\n\n Jeff jerked his thumb at them and told the waitress, \"Two, please.\"\n\n\n When the sandwiches arrived, they were ordinary enough. He and Ann ate\n in silence. A feeling of foreboding hung over them.", "\"No telling. Maybe they're harmless lunatics—or practical jokers.\" He\n looked over his shoulder as they walked down the street, but there was\n no sign of pursuit. \"It's a long time since supper.\"\nHer hand was cold in his and her face was white. To take her mind off\n their problem, he ambled toward the lighted shop windows.\n\n\n \"Look at that sign,\" he said, pointing to a poster over a display of\n neckties. \"'Sleek neck-sashes, only a Dick and a dollop!' How do they\n expect to sell stuff with that crazy lingo?\"\n\n\n \"It's jive talk. They must cater to the high-school crowd.\" Ann\n glanced nervously at the strolling people around them. \"Jeff, where\n are we? This isn't any part of the city I've ever seen. It doesn't\n even look much like America.\" Her voice rose. \"The way the women are\n dressed—it's not old-fashioned, just different.\"", "\"The same room,\" Ann said in disappointment. \"They just changed the\n number. We haven't been anywhere.\"\nSnader was fishing under his shirt for the key. He gave Ann a glance\n that was almost a leer. Then he carefully unlocked the door.\n\n\n In the hall, a motherly old lady bustled up, but Snader brushed past\n her. \"Official,\" he said, showing her the key. \"No lodging.\"\n\n\n He unlocked the front door without another word and carefully shut it\n behind them as Jeff and Ann followed him out of the house.\n\n\n \"Hey, where's my car?\" Jeff demanded, looking up and down the street.\n\n\n The whole street looked different. Where he had parked his roadster,\n there was now a long black limousine.\n\n\n \"Your car is in future,\" Snader said briskly. \"Where it belong. Get\n in.\" He opened the door of the limousine.", "Ann was clutching Jeff's arm. He patted her hand. \"Fun, hey? Like Alice\n through the looking-glass.\"\n\n\n \"You really think we're going back in time?\" she whispered.\n\n\n \"Hardly! But we're seeing a million-dollar trick. I can't even begin to\n figure it out yet.\"\n\n\n Another lighted room grew out of the tunnel on the screen, and when\n they had flickered through it, another and then another.\n\n\n \"Mr. Snader,\" Ann said unsteadily, \"how long—how many years back are\n you taking us?\"\n\n\n Snader was humming to himself. \"Six years. Station 725 fine place to\n stop.\"\n\n\n For a little while, Jeff let himself think it might be true. \"Six years\n ago, your dad was alive,\" he mused to Ann. \"If this should somehow be\n real, we could see him again.\"", "Snader moved ahead to the cashier's stand. Jeff watched the weasel-like\n grace of his short, broad body.\n\n\n \"This is no ordinary oddball,\" Jeff told Ann. \"He's tricky. He's got\n some gimmick.\"\n\n\n \"First I just played him along, to see how loony he was,\" Ann said.\n \"Now I wonder who's kidding whom.\" She concluded thoughtfully, \"He's\n kind of handsome, in a tough way.\"\nII\n\n\n Snader's \"station\" proved to be a middle-sized, middle-cost home in a\n good neighborhood. Lights glowed in the windows. Jeff could hear the\n whisper of traffic on a boulevard a few blocks away. Through the warm\n dusk, he could dimly see the mountains on the horizon. All was peaceful.", "Ann was enjoying this. \"Tell me more, Mr. Snader. How does your time\n travel work?\"\n\n\n \"Cannot explain. Same if you are asked how subway train works. Too\n complicated.\" He flashed his white teeth. \"You think time travel not\n possible. Just like television not possible to your grandfather.\"\n\n\n Ann said, \"Why invite us? We're not rich enough for expensive trips.\"\n\n\n \"Invite many people,\" Snader said quickly. \"Not expensive. You know\n Missing Persons lists, from police? Dozens people disappear. They go\n with me to other time. Many stay.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure,\" Jeff said. \"But how do you select the ones to invite?\"\n\n\n \"Find ones like you, Mr. Elliott. Ones who want change, escape.\"\nJeff was slightly startled. How did this fellow know his name was\n Elliott?", "Jeff felt a little flame of excitement licking inside him. Something\n was happening, he felt. Something exciting and dangerous.\n\n\n \"Snader,\" he said, \"if you're kidnaping us, you made a mistake. Nobody\n on Earth will pay ransom for us.\"\n\n\n Snader seemed amused. \"You are foolish fellow. Silly talk about ransom.\n You in different time now.\"\n\n\n \"When does this gag stop?\" Jeff demanded irritably. \"You haven't fooled\n us. We're still in 1957.\"\n\n\n \"You are? Look around.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked at the street again. He secretly admitted to himself\n that these were different trees and houses than he remembered. Even\n the telephone poles and street lights seemed peculiar, vaguely\n foreign-looking. It must be an elaborate practical joke. Snader had\n probably ushered them into one house, then through a tunnel and out\n another house.", "\"I show you.\" Grinning like a wildcat, Snader linked his arms with Ann\n and Jeff, and walked them toward the screen. \"Now,\" he said. \"Step in.\"\nJeff submitted to Snader's pressure and stepped cautiously into the\n screen. Amazingly, he felt no resistance at all, no sense of change or\n motion. It was like stepping through a fog-bank into another room.\n\n\n In fact, that was what they seemed to have done. They were in the\n chair-lined corridor. As Snader turned them around and seated them,\n they faced another moving picture screen. It seemed to rush through a\n dark tunnel toward a lighted square in the far distance.\n\n\n The square grew on the screen. Soon they saw it was another room like\n the waiting room they had left, except that the number hanging from the\n ceiling was 702. They seemed to glide through it. Then they were in the\n dark tunnel again.", "\"Lots of houses are built that way, honey. Let's see, where are we?\" He\n glanced at house numbers. \"This is the 800 block. Remember that. And\n the street—\" He peered up at a sign as they whirled around a corner.\n \"The street is Green Thru-Way. I never heard of a street like that.\"\nIII\n\n\n They were headed back toward what should have been the boulevard. The\n car zoomed through a cloverleaf turn and up onto a broad freeway. Jeff\n knew for certain there was no freeway there in 1957—nor in any earlier\n year. But on the horizon, he could see the familiar dark bulk of the\n mountains. The whole line of moonlit ridges was the same as always.\n\n\n \"Ann,\" he said slowly, \"I think this is for real. Somehow I guess we\n escaped from 1957. We've been transported in time.\"" ] ]
test	20036	[ "The tone of this piece suggests the writer feels", "The writer seems to feel that Africana", "The writer feels Gates is THE pioneer of works on black America", "Regarding the amount of time it took to compile this work, the writer of this piece", "By discussing the works of Du Bois in the introduction", "The writer is adamant that Gates and his contributors", "The writer's tone seems to be", "The writer believes Africana was produced", "In comparison to Du Bois, the writer believes Gates", "The writer believes that" ]	[ [ "Africana is a work that is to be studied and revered by not just the black community but the world at large.", "Africana is an invaluable study of black culture and history.", "Africana was written to placate the black community and others seeking knowledge of black history, but it does not offer an earnest depth to it, evident by the short amount of time taken to produce it.", "the authors should be regarded as pioneers in black studies." ], [ "is the book the black community has been waiting for.", "is directly aligned with DuBois's vision.", "was written to \"cash in\" on the need for anthological work on black history while giving Middle America an opportunity to \"understand\" the plight of the black people.", "is not historically accurate." ], [ "because he cares more for relating black history than financial gain.", "because he has dedicated his life to informing the American public on black history.", "because he is knowledgeable and a powerful man", "every field of study must have one, and it would seem Gates has been appointed as such." ], [ "believes it is a marvel and Gates himself should be studied for this triumph.", "thinks it was done in just the right amount of time.", "thinks it took Gates far too long to produce such an insignificant piece.", "almost mocks Gates, as if it was thrown together." ], [ "Gates alienates his reader.", "Gates pays homage to him.", "attempts to lend credence to his work.", "Gates negates his own work." ], [ "have written a polished, complete history.", "do not offer a complete history.", "should be studied themselves for producing such a powerful history.", "should be heralded as the pioneers that they are." ], [ "angry.", "joyful.", "almost sarcastic.", "sincere." ], [ "to fulfill a need to educate the world about the history of black culture, and it does it well.", "to satisfy a need to provide middle America with a history of black culture.", "for no valid reason.", "to show that black historians were more than capable of recording the history of their culture." ], [ "is on the same level as Du Bois.", "is has taken his cue and is following on the same path.", "is not of the same ilk.", "is better at his craft than Du Bois." ], [ "Gates work is selfless though this contribution", "Gates wants to thank Du Bois for all he did for him through his works.", "Gates is self-serving.", "Gates writes this anthology to educate and inform, nothing else." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "(politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about \"struggle\" and \"resistance.\"", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the", "thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or", "a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "book is the product of both a strong movement toward the intellectualization of black experience among an elite and the anti-intellectualization of black experience by the public at large (earnest and respectful of black experience as it has now generally become)", "and objects, more \"education\" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important" ], [ "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "white and black, feel bad if they don't know something about the history and culture of African-descended people, in much the same way they feel bad, inadequate, if they don't know something about opera or a bit about Impressionist painting", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "(In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the" ], [ "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is", "of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order.", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both", "reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience", "(In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies" ], [ "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "field marshals to have hustled together this army of academics and to have gotten the work from them on time or nearly so. They deserve much credit for this. Most academics would have felt lucky to have finished this enterprise in", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order.", "ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "10 years.", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both" ], [ "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "But the history of the publication of this book is only incompletely told by the editors. After 1970, when black studies was established on the white college campus, a number of reference books", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order.", "(In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies" ], [ "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order.", "black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "(politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think", "ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book." ], [ "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "(politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think", "ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the", "alas, a Toni Morrison novel or one does not own a Wynton Marsalis album. (The truly knowing coves own albums by Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, no less, and do reports for their book clubs on the blues.) What", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "and those who cater to the public's access to intellectual material by rounding off the rough edges and making it thoroughly anti-intellectual by designing and evoking certain emotional markers about \"struggle\" and \"resistance.\"", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the" ], [ "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "black and white, being produced since 1970, more scholarship being produced. This book was also made possible by the rise of professionalism among African-Americans since the 1960s and the rise of a black middle class that has demanded more artifacts", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "a current-events or social-studies class.) Moreover, blacks cannot be left out of Women's History Month or Veteran's Day or, for the truly daring, Gay Appreciation Month. So, a book like Africana is bound to get a great deal of", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "(In some more Afrocentric black homes, it may replace the Britannica entirely, that Eurocentric collection of lies, although Britannica has become as multicultural as everyone else these days.) Those of us who have labored in the field of black studies", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and" ], [ "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "marketplace. But I would think that most black-studies scholars are only partly heartened by this; for this rather triumphalist book (and Gates is important in black studies, in part, for the promotion of a triumphalist view of black history and", "of it, but that is another issue for another type of review. It is amazing that Gates has done this volume so successfully and so quickly, that he has flooded the market with first-rate black reference books in such short order.", "Now, Gates and Appiah published a multicultural dictionary about a year ago, and Gates and Nellie McKay published the Norton Anthology of African American Literature shortly before that. With Africana , where", "black studies, that define the field and its major players. Building a canon is very important to Gates, and it is, without question, an important pedagogical pursuit. A field must have order and it must have pioneers and heroes. It is", "by Du Bois' dream in any respect but by the rise of multiculturalism and black studies as intellectual industries in the United States after 1970. The increasing professionalization of black studies made this book possible, more scholars in the field, both", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "It is good to know that, partly through the energetic offices of Henry Louis Gates, black studies can, as it were, pay its way these days and not be dependent for its existence on", "reasons for the existence of black studies, but all clearly anti-intellectual. In other words, the forces that brought this book into existence had little enough to do with Du Bois--although evoking him is of critical importance to the book's audience", "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "also a power pursuit. He who defines the field controls it, in a manner of speaking. Some are jealous that Gates wants this sort of power. Others find it unseemly. I think Gates is wasting his considerable talents in the pursuit", "black culture--globally speaking--which is why he is hated by Afrocentrists who take a somewhat different view of the long-term meaning of \"the coming of the white man\") is nothing less than the middlebrow arrival of black studies in American culture.", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach." ], [ "that this book was published as an act of philanthropy, as something that ought to be done. (It is so tiresome as a black person to be the recipient of charity all the time, to be the object of the moral", "think critically and against the grain of their own beliefs or psychological needs or neurotic fantasy projections. Thought-clichés confirm one's stupidity and one's laziness. With all the goodwill in the world, a book like Africana cannot help but produce", "her ideological stripe. Such a book as Africana simply washes the practitioners in the field in a sea of ambivalence, with a sense of lost faith, as we all stand before it a bit as Matthew Arnold stood before Dover Beach.", "ever reading what they are copying. Adults, with far too much deference for the printed word, tend to consult such a book in much the way they consult the dictionary or the Bible (or in the way baseball fanatics consult the", "(politically incorrectly such as the present author or very much politically correctly like a good many very good scholars) are heartened by this commercial venture. Indeed, it would be disheartening, as well as entirely untrue, if one were to think", "someone said so in some reference book like Africana . Thought-clichés are like narcotics; people love them because they relieve them of the very thing they do not wish to do in any case, that is, think, think hard, and", "thought-clichés; it is, indeed, why most people will consult such a work, to find them and be comforted by them. No intellectual or scholar can, therefore, be fully at ease with a work of this sort, no matter his or", "Gates and Appiah, rather sentimentally and opportunistically, see themselves as the descendants of Du Bois, whose unfilled dream was to produce such a book, Gates seems to have cornered the market on black reference books that shape the canon of", "It took him and Appiah only four years to produce Africana . Even with modern technology, that is an astonishing feat, so astonishing that some will dismiss the book (I have heard some comments of this sort even before the book", "as a kind of typology about the struggle of black people to gain self-knowledge, a story that black people never tire of reciting, even today with a plethora of black bookshops and publishers grinding out books on black subjects or with", "field has arrived to such an extent that a publisher thinks that it can make money, significant money, publishing such a work. Assignments in black studies have filtered down to the high-school, junior-high, and even elementary-school level (and remember the", "I shall begin my next entry with a discussion of a set of entries in Africana , those dealing with aspects of Philadelphia, my hometown, and a response to David Nicholson's impressions of the book.", "But I suppose it is something of a triumph, which the publication of this book is meant to acknowledge, that black studies has achieved middlebrow status in the United States, that bourgeois people, both", "This book comes with a triumphant blaring of publishers' trumpets, and one supposes that it is a signal sort of triumph for black studies or Africana studies (take your pick of names). The", "a kind of political and cultural moralism on the part of whites and a kind of fetishlike piety on the part of blacks. It can be, alas, a business of an entirely good sort or needful sort, justifying itself in the", "was published) as some half-baked enterprise. That would be a mistake, for this is an incredibly polished work. This is a beautiful book, one of the most striking reference works I have ever seen. Gates and Appiah must be quite the", "That Du Bois--who exists in the field of black studies these days as rather the black equivalent of Einstein (theorist), Dr. Johnson (wordsmith), Emerson (humanist), and Kant (moral philosopher), separately and together, as it were--is evoked by the editors in their introduction provides this volume with a pedigree that I suppose they thought it needed, making Gates and Appiah our intellectual knights who have given us the Holy Grail. (The editors called the quest for producing a black encyclopedia \"a Holy Grail.\" More triumphalist history!) The introduction offers a good and useful account of Du Bois' attempt to produce an Africana encyclopedia, the professional jealousy he encountered, the racism that sometimes thwarted his efforts. It should be read by all who purchase the book.", "official record books): as the final arbiter, as that which settles all arguments. Why, for goodness' sake, would anyone actually read a book like this? Knowledge, in the instance of the definitive reference book, becomes entombed and sanctified, very much", "about the black experience were published and continue to be published. The editors make no attempt to place their book within that particular context, a more accurate historical context for understanding the appearance of this book, as it was made possible not", "and objects, more \"education\" about its experience (more institutionalization of it, in other words, and more orthodoxy about its significance), that are all meant to reinforce its sense of identity, its psychological well-being, its sense of race mission, all important" ] ]
test	32890	[ "Why did the people suddenly desert their homes?", "What resource are the humans and Kumajis fighting over?", "What was Tobias’ intention for going to the Kumajis’ encampment?", "Why does Steve lie about Tobias’ intentions?", "What is the setting?", "How is Steve different from the other characters?", "What is a good description of Steve's childhood?", "Why does Steve return to his childhood home?", "What is a theme of the story?", "Why is the old Kumaji man included in the beginning of the story?" ]	[ [ "The well dried out. ", "They finished building a spacecraft big enough for everyone to leave. ", "The Kumajis invaded the town. ", "The water in the well was poisoned. " ], [ "Water", "Clean air ", "Food", "Space travel technology" ], [ "He wanted to tell the Kumajis to go south to steer them off track.", "He wanted to persuade the Kumajis to stop attacking his people.", "He wanted to trade the whereabouts of his people in exchange for his money back. ", "He wanted to steal a spacecraft from the Kumajis." ], [ "He wants to protect his reputation because he eventually did the right thing. ", "He knows that the people will turn on Mary for her father’s actions. ", "He owes Tobias for paying for his education on Earth. ", "He feels pity for Tobias because he lost his fortune. " ], [ "A city called Sirius on Mars. ", "In the middle of the desert in the Middle East on Earth. ", "Oasis City by a river on a planet called Sirius. ", "A small town in the desert on a planet called Sirius." ], [ "He knows a trick on how to find water. ", "He can communicate with the Kumaji.", "He was born on Earth. ", "He left the colony while the others stayed. " ], [ "He had a very happy childhood. ", "He faced a lot of adversity.", "His family was very powerful. ", "He grew up wealthy. " ], [ "He returns to see his parents. ", "He returns to see his aunt. ", "He returns to bring everyone to Earth. ", "He returns because he is broke. " ], [ "There is always time to do the right thing. ", "Traitors do not deserve mercy. ", "Each side to a conflict believes that they are doing the right thing. ", "You must never forget where you came from. " ], [ "To show that the humans are actually the bad ones. ", "To show that the Kumaji are untrustworthy. ", "To show that not all Kumaji are bad. ", "To show that the Kumaji want peace. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\nBy ADAM CHASE\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\nHow black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\nOnly the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now...." ], [ "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,\n so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had\n suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since\n a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions,\n almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves.", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said." ], [ "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again." ], [ "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said." ], [ "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "Hours later he spotted the caravan in the immensity of sand and\n wasteland. He brought the unicopter down quickly, with a rush of air and\n a whine of turbojets. He alighted in the sand in front of the\n slow-moving column. It was like something out of Earth's Middle\n East—and Middle Ages. They had even imported camels for their life here\n on the Sirian desert, deciding the Earth camel was a better beast of\n burden than anything the Sirius II wastelands had to offer. They walked\n beside the great-humped beasts of burden, the animals piled high with\n the swaying baggage of their belongings. They moved through the sands\n with agonizing slowness. Already, after only one day's travel, Steve\n could see that some of the people were spent and exhausted and had to\n ride on camelback. They had gone perhaps fifteen miles, with almost five\n hundred to go across searing desert, the Kumaji seeking them....", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"When did it happen?\" Steve demanded.\n\n\n \"Last night.\" It was now midafternoon. \"Three folks died,\" the Kumaji\n said in his almost perfect English, \"from the poisoning of the well. The\n well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go,\n and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses.\"\n\n\n \"Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?\" Oasis City,\n built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the\n surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground,\n was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of\n trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat....", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "Sand stirred, the tentflap lifted, and a bulky figure rushed inside.\n Steve got up, met him halfway, felt the jarring contact of their bodies.\n The pike came up dimly in the darkness, the point scraping against\n Steve's ribs as the guard lunged awkwardly. Steve's fingers sought the\n thick-muscled neck, clamped there—squeezing." ], [ "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "\"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "\"Oh, Steve! Steve! What will we do? What\ncan\nwe do?\"\n\n\n \"Find him, if it isn't too late. Come on.\"\n\n\n \"North?\"\n\n\n \"North.\"\n\n\n \"And if by some miracle we find him?\"\n\n\n Steve said nothing. The answer—capture or death—was obvious. But you\n couldn't tell that to a traitor's daughter, could you?\n\n\n As it turned out, they did not find Tobias Whiting through their own\n efforts. Half an hour after setting out from the unicopter, they were\n spotted by a roving band of Kumajis, who came streaking toward them on\n their\nthlots\n. Mary raised her atorifle, but Steve struck the barrel\n aside. \"They'd kill us,\" he said. \"We can only surrender.\"", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"" ], [ "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "\"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said." ], [ "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"So you've come back, eh? You sure picked a time, Cantwell.\"\n\n\n The refugees were still about a quarter of a mile off, coming up slowly.\n They hardly seemed to be moving at all. \"Is my aunt all right?\" Steve\n said. She was the only family he remembered.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting shook his head slowly. \"I hate to be the one to tell you\n this. Brace yourself for a shock. Your aunt was one of those who died\n from the poisoned water last night.\"", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "HOME IS WHERE YOU LEFT IT\nBy ADAM CHASE\n[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February\n 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.\n copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe chance of mass slaughter was their eternal nightmare.\nHow black is the blackest treachery? Is the most callous\n traitor entitled to mercy? Steve pondered these questions. His decision?\n That at times the villain should possibly be spoken of as a hero.\nOnly the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when\n he reached the village.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "\"Hullo!\" Steve shouted, and a man armed with an atorifle came striding\n clumsily through the sand toward him. \"Cantwell's the name,\" Steve said.\n \"I'm one of you.\"\n\n\n Bleak hostility in his face, the man approached. \"Cantwell. Yeah, I\n remember you. Colony wasn't good enough for young Steve Cantwell. Oh,\n no. Had to go off to Earth to get himself educated. What are you doing\n here now on that fancy aircraft of yours, coming to crow at our wake?\"", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "Gort turned to Steve. \"Cantwell, can he get far in that 'copter?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"Ten or fifteen miles is all. Almost out of fuel,\n Mr. Gort. You saw how I took her up for only a quick mile swing each\n day. He won't get far.\"\n\n\n \"He'll crash in the desert?\"\n\n\n \"Crash or crash-land,\" Steve said.\n\n\n Mary sobbed, and bit her lip, and was silent.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand." ], [ "Pursuit was disorganized—and unsuccessful. It was too dark for\n effective pursuit, as Steve had hoped it would be. They rode swiftly all\n night and continued riding with the dawn. They could have gone in any\n direction. The wind-driven sand would obliterate their trail.\n\n\n Two days later they reached the caravan. As they rode up, Mary said,\n \"Steve, do you have to tell them?\"\n\n\n \"We can tell them this,\" Steve said. \"Your father died a hero's death,\n sending the Kumajis off in the wrong direction.\"\n\n\n \"And not—not what he'd planned to do at first.\"\n\n\n \"No. We'll tell them that was his intention all the while. A man can\n make a mistake, can't he?\"\n\n\n \"I love you, Steve. I love you.\"", "He went to the well and hoisted up a pailful of water. The winch creaked\n as he remembered. He ladled out the water, suddenly very thirsty, and\n brought the ladle to his lips.\n\n\n He hurled the ladle away. The water was bitter. Not brackish.\n\n\n Poisoned.\n\n\n He spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost\n gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen\n and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with\n the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's\n house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the\n saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table\n was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last\n night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.", "The low sun cast the shadow of their guard against the\nthlot\nskin wall\n of their tent. He was a single man, armed with a long, pike-like weapon.\n When darkness came, if the guard were not increased....\n\n\n They were brought a pasty gruel for their supper, and ate in silence and\n distaste, ate because they needed the strength. Mary said, \"Dad, I don't\n want you to tell them anything. Dad, please. If you thought you were\n doing it for me....\"\n\n\n \"I've made up my mind,\" Tobias Whiting said.\n\n\n Mary turned to Steve, in despair. \"Steve,\" she said. \"Steve.\n Do—whatever you have to do. I—I'll understand.\"", "It was Mary, calling his name and crying.\n\n\n \"It's Dad. Dad was—hit. The pike, a wild stab. He's hit bad—\"\n\n\n Steve crawled over to them. It was very dark. He could barely make out\n Tobias Whiting's pain-contorted face.\n\n\n \"My stomach,\" Whiting said, gasping for breath. \"The pain....\"\n\n\n Steve probed with his hands, found the wound. Blood was rushing out. He\n couldn't stop it and he knew it and he thought Whiting knew it too. He\n touched Mary's hand, and held it. Mary sobbed against him, crying\n softly.\n\n\n \"You two ...\" Whiting gasped. \"You two ... Mary, Mary girl. Is—he—what\n you want?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Dad. Oh, yes!\"\n\n\n \"You can get her out of here, Cantwell?\"", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "For a long moment, Steve said nothing. The only emotion he felt was\n pity—pity for the hard life his aunt had lived, and the hard death.\n Sadness would come later, if there was to be a time for sadness.\nThe caravan reached them then. The first person Steve saw was a girl.\n She wore the shroud-like desert garment and her face—it would be a\n pretty face under other circumstances, Steve realized—was etched with\n lines of fatigue. Steve did not recognize her. \"Who is he, Dad?\" the\n girl said.\n\n\n \"Young Cantwell. Remember?\"\n\n\n So this was Mary Whiting, Steve thought. Why, she'd been a moppet ten\n years ago! How old? Ten years old maybe. The years crowded him suddenly.\n She was a woman now....", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"I think so,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Then go. Go while you can. I'll tell them—due south. The Earthmen are\n heading due south. They'll go—south. They won't find the caravan.\n You'll—all—get away. If it's—what you want, Mary.\"\n\n\n She leaned away from Steve, kissing her father. She asked Steve: \"Isn't\n there anything we can do for him?\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head. \"But he's got to live long enough to tell them, to\n deceive them.\"", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "\"Dad is. Listen to the way he's breathing—like a baby. As if—as if he\n wasn't going to betray all our people. Oh, I hate him, I hate him!\"\n\n\n Steve crawled to where the older man was sleeping. Tobias Whiting's\n voice surprised him. \"I'm not asleep. I was thinking. I—\"\n\n\n \"I'm going to kill you,\" Steve said very softly, and sprang at Whiting.\n He paused, though. It was a calculated pause, and Whiting cried out as\n Steve had hoped he would. Then his hands found the older man's throat\n and closed there—not to kill him but to keep him from crying out again.", "\"Dad! Our money, and all those deaths?\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter now. I—I had changed my mind, Mary. Truly. But now,\n now that you're a prisoner, what if I don't talk? Don't you see, they'll\n torture you. They'll make you talk. And that way—we get nothing. I\n couldn't stand to see them hurt you.\"\n\n\n \"They can do—what they think they have to do. I'll tell them nothing.\"\n\n\n \"You won't have to,\" Whiting said. \"I'll tell them when we reach the\n larger settlement. They're taking us there tomorrow, they told me.\"\n\n\n \"Then we've got to get out of here tonight,\" Steve said.", "He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing,\n parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's\n unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred\n miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius'\n second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like\n a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.\n\n\n He walked among the buildings, surprise and perhaps sadness etched on\n his gaunt, weather-beaten face. Childhood memories flooded back: the\n single well from which all the families drew their water, the mud-brick\n house, hardly different from the others and just four walls and a roof\n now, in which he'd lived with his aunt after his parents had been killed\n in a\nKumaji\nraid, the community center where he'd spent his happiest\n time as a boy.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"" ], [ "\"They're gone. All gone.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but what happened?\"\n\n\n \"The Kumaji—\"\n\n\n \"You're Kumaji.\"\n\n\n \"This is my town,\" the old man said. \"I lived with the Earthmen. Now\n they're gone.\"\n\n\n \"But you stayed here—\"", "At first there was no answer. Then a woman whose husband had died the\n day before said: \"It's no secret Whiting has plenty of money—with the\n Kumaji.\"\n\n\n None of them looked at Mary. She stood there defiantly, not saying\n anything, and Steve squeezed her hand.\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute,\" one of Whiting's friends said.\n\n\n \"Wait, nothing.\" This was Jeremy Gort, who twice had been mayor of the\n colony. \"I know how Whiting's mind works. He slaved all his life for\n that money, that's the way he'll see it. Cantwell, didn't you say the\n Kumaji were looking for us, to kill us?\"\n\n\n \"That's what I was told,\" Steve said.", "\"Tied up with a Kumaji moneylender, but thanks to what happened I'll\n never see it again.\"\n\n\n Mary winced, as if her father's words and his self-pity were painful to\n her. Then others came up and a few minutes were spent in back-pounding\n and hand-shaking as some of the men who had been boys with Steve came up\n to recognize and be recognized. Their greeting was warm, as Tobias\n Whiting's had been cool. Despite the knowledge of what lay behind all of\n them, and what still lay ahead, it was a little like homecoming.\n\n\n But Steve liked Mary Whiting's warm, friendly smile best of all. It was\n comforting and reassuring.\nThree days later, Tobias Whiting disappeared.", "\"To die,\" the old man said, without self-pity. \"I'm too old to flee, too\n old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water.\"\nSteve gave him another drink. \"You still haven't told me what happened.\"\n Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century\n Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were\n sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The\n Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life\n on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one\n oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,\n Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about", "\"We've got to stop him,\" Gort said. \"And fast. If he gets to the Kumaji,\n they'll send down a raiding party and we'll be finished. We could never\n fight them off without the protection of our village. Near as I can\n figure, there's a Kumaji base fifty miles due north of here. Whiting\n knows it too, so that's where he'll be going, I figure. Can't spare more\n than a couple of men to look for him, though, in case the Kumaji find\n us—or are led to us—and attack.\"\n\n\n Steve said, \"I should have taken something out of the 'copter every\n night, so it couldn't start. I'll go.\"\n\n\n Mary came forward boldly. \"I have to go. He's my father. If he crashed\n out there, he may be hurt. He may be—dying.\"", "\"I'm not going anyplace, young fellow.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't stay here, without any good water to drink, without—\"\n\n\n \"I'm staying,\" the old man said, still without self-pity, just\n matter-of-factly. \"The Earth folks have no room for me and I can't blame\n 'em. The Kumaji'll kill me for a renegade, I figure. I lived a good,\n long life. I've no regrets. Go after your people, young fellow. They'll\n need every extra strong right arm they can get. You got any weapons?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.\n\n\n \"Too bad. Well, good-bye and good luck.\"\n\n\n \"But you can't—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, I'm staying. I want to stay. This is my home. It's the only home\n I'll ever have. Good luck, young fellow.\"", "Slowly, Steve walked to his unicopter. It was nothing more than a small\n metal disk on which to stand, and a shaft with four turbo-blades. It\n could do sixty miles an hour at an elevation of two thousand feet.\nSteve turned the little turbo-jet engine over, then on impulse ran back\n to the old man and gave him his canteen, turning away before it could be\n refused and striding quickly back to the unicopter and getting himself\n airborne without looking at the deserted village or the old man again.\n\n\n The old man's voice called after him: \"Tell the people ... hurry ...\n Kumaji looking for them to kill ... desert wind ought to wipe out their\n trail ... but hurry....\"\n\n\n The voice faded into the faint rushing sound of the hot desert wind.\n Steve gazed down on bare sun-blasted rock, on rippled dunes, on\n hate-haze. He circled wider and wider, seeking his people.", "The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of\n the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth—too\n late for anything.\n\n\n He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring\n at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard\n scurried away.\n\n\n \"Earthman!\" a quavering voice called.\n\n\n Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,\n a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and\n sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,\n which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.\n\n\n Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost\n spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the\n canteen and said:\n\n\n \"What happened here?\"", "\"I'll live long enough,\" Whiting said, and Steve knew then that he\n would. \"Luck to—all of you. From a—very foolish—man....\"\nSteve took Mary's hand and pulled her out into the hot, dark, wind-blown\n night. He carried the dead Kumaji's pike and they slipped across the\n sand to where the\nthlots\nwere hobbled for the night. He hardly\n remembered the rest of it. There was violence and death, but necessary\n death. He killed a man with the pike, and unhobbled one of the\nthlots\n.\n The animal screamed and two more Kumajis came sleepily through the night\n to see what was the matter. With the long edge of the pike's blade he\n decapitated one of them. He slammed the shaft of the weapon across the\n other's face, probably breaking his jaw. The camp was in a turmoil. In\n the darkness he flung Mary on the\nthlot's\nbare back in front of him,\n and they glided off across the sand.", "\"All right,\" Gort went on relentlessly. \"Then this is what I figure must\n have happened. Whiting got to brooding over his lost fortune and finally\n decided he had to have it. So, he went off at night in Cantwell's\n 'copter, determined to get it. Only catch is, folks, if I know the\n Kumaji, they won't just give it to him—not by a long sight.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" someone asked.\n\n\n \"No sir. They'll trade. For our location. And if Whiting went off like\n that without even saying good-bye to his girl here, my guess is he'll\n make the trade.\" His voice reflected some bitterness.\nMary went to Gort and slapped his face. The elderly man did not even\n blink. \"Well,\" he asked her gently, \"did your pa tell you he was going?\"\n\n\n \"N-no,\" Mary said. There were tears in her eyes, but she did not cry.", "They were hobbled and led painfully across the sand. They were taken\n that way to a small Kumaji encampment, and thrust within a circular\n tent.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting was in there.\n\"Mary!\" he cried. \"My God! Mary....\"\n\n\n \"We came for you, Dad,\" she said coldly. \"To stop you. To ... to kill\n you if necessary.\"\n\n\n \"Mary....\"\n\n\n \"Oh, Dad, why did you do it? Why?\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't start all over again, could we? You have a right to live\n the sort of life I planned for you. You....\"\n\n\n \"Whiting,\" Steve said, \"did you tell them yet?\"\n\n\n \"No. No, I haven't. I have information to trade, sure. But I want to\n make sure it's going to the right people. I want to get our....\"", "\"They have to,\" the old man said. \"And they have to hurry. Men, women\n and children. The Kumaji are after them.\"\nSteve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could\n find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way\n he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists,\n trekking across a parched wilderness—to the safety of Oasis City—or\n death.\n\n\n \"Come on,\" Steve said, making up his mind. \"The unicopter can hold two\n in a pinch.\"\n\n\n \"You're going after them?\"\n\n\n \"I've got to. They're my people. I've been away too long.\"\n\n\n \"Say, you're young Cantwell, aren't you? Now I remember.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'm Steve Cantwell.\"", "Steve didn't answer her. Wasn't Whiting right now? he thought. If Steve\n silenced him, wouldn't the Kumaji torture them for the information?\n Steve could stand up to it perhaps—but he couldn't stand to see them\n hurt Mary. He'd talk if they did that....\n\n\n Then silencing Whiting wasn't the answer. But the Kumajis had one\n willing prisoner and two unwilling ones. They knew that. If the willing\n one yelled for help but the yelling was kept to a minimum so only one\n guard, the man outside, came....\nDarkness in the Kumaji encampment.\n\n\n Far off, a lone tribesman singing a chant old as the desert.\n\n\n \"Are you asleep?\" Mary asked.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said.", "Gort looked at her. \"And if he's trying to sell us out to the Kumajis?\"\n\n\n \"Then—then I'll do whatever Steve asks me to. I promise.\"\n\n\n \"That's good enough for me,\" Steve said.", "The bitterness surprised Steve. He recognized the man now as Tobias\n Whiting, who had been the Colony's most successful man when Steve was a\n boy. Except for his bitterness and for the bleak self-pity and defeat in\n his eyes, the years had been good to Tobias Whiting. He was probably in\n his mid-forties now, twenty years Steve's senior, but he was\n well-muscled, his flesh was solid, his step bold and strong. He was a\n big muscular man with a craggy, handsome face. In ten years he had\n hardly changed at all, while Steve Cantwell, the boy, had become Steve\n Cantwell the man. He had been the Colony's official trader with the\n Kumajis, and had grown rich—by colony standards—at his business. Now,\n Steve realized, all that was behind him, and he could only flee with the\n others—either back to the terribly crowded Earth or on in search of a\n new colony on some other outworld, if they could get the transportation.\n Perhaps that explained his bitterness.", "A few minutes later, armed with atorifles and their share of the food\n and water that was left, Steve and Mary set out northward across the\n sand while the caravan continued east. Fear of what they might find\n mounted.\nThe first night, they camped in the lee of low sandhills. The second\n night they found a small spring with brackish but drinkable water. On\n the third day, having covered half the distance to the Kumaji\n settlement, they began to encounter Kumaji patrols, on foot or\nthlotback\n, the six-legged desert animals running so swiftly over the\n sands and so low to the ground that they almost seemed to be gliding.\n Steve and Mary hardly spoke. Talk was unnecessary. But slowly a bond\n grew between them. Steve liked this slim silent girl who had come out\n here with him risking her life although she must have known deep in her\n heart that her father had almost certainly decided to turn traitor in\n order to regain his fortune.", "\"Steve Cantwell?\" Mary said. \"Of course I remember. Hello, Steve. I—I'm\n sorry you had to come back at a time like this. I'm sorry about your\n aunt. If there's anything I can do....\"\n\n\n Steve shook his head, then shook the hand she offered him. She was a\n slim, strong girl with a firm handshake. Her concern for him at a time\n like this was little short of amazing, especially since it was\n completely genuine.\n\n\n He appreciated it.\n\n\n Tobias Whiting said: \"Shame of it is, Cantwell, some of us could get\n along with the Kumaji. I had a pretty good business here, you know\n that.\" He looked with bitterness at the dusty file of refugees. \"But I\n never got a credit out of it. Wherever we wind up, my girl and I will be\n poor again. We could have been rich.\"\n\n\n Steve asked, \"What happened to all your profits?\"", "The caravan had been making no more than ten or fifteen miles a day.\n Their water supply was almost gone but on the fourth day they hoped to\n reach an oasis in the desert. Two of the older folks had died of\n fatigue. A third was critically ill and there was little that could be\n done for him. The food supply was running short, but they could always\n slaughter their camels for food and make their way to Oasis City, still\n four hundred and some miles away, with nothing but the clothes on their\n backs.\n\n\n And then, during the fourth night, Tobias Whiting disappeared, taking\n Steve's unicopter. A sentry had heard the low muffled whine of the\n turbojets during the night and had seen the small craft take off, but\n had assumed Steve had taken it up for some reason. Each day Steve had\n done so, reconnoitering for signs of the Kumaji.\n\n\n \"But why?\" someone asked. \"Why?\"", "The guard writhed. His feet drummed the sand. With one hand he stabbed\n out wildly with the unwieldy pike. There was a cry from Mary and the\n guard managed a low squawking noise. Outside, the rest of the camp\n seemed undisturbed. There was death in Steve's strong tightening\n fingers. There had to be death there. Death for the Kumaji guard—or\n death for the fleeing Earthmen, who had lost one colony and must seek\n another.\nThey fell together on the sand, the guard still struggling. Steve\n couldn't release his throat to grab the pike. The guard stabbed out\n awkwardly, blindly with it, kicking up sand. Then Tobias Whiting moaned,\n but Steve hardly heard him.\n\n\n When the guard's legs stopped drumming, Steve released him. The man was\n either dead or so close to death that he would be out for hours. Steve\n had never killed a man before, had never in violence and with intent to\n kill attacked a man....\n\n\n \"Steve!\"", "On the fourth day, they spotted the unicopter from a long way off and\n made their way toward it. It had come much further than Steve had\n expected. With sinking heart he realized that Tobias Whiting, if he\n escaped the crash-landing without injury, must surely have reached the\n Kumaji encampment by now.\n\n\n \"It doesn't seem badly damaged,\" Mary said.\n\n\n The platform had buckled slightly, the 'copter was tilted over, one of\n the rotors twisted, its end buried in sand. Tobias Whiting wasn't there.\n\n\n \"No,\" Steve said. \"It's hardly damaged at all. Your father got out of it\n all right.\"\n\n\n \"To go—to them?\"\n\n\n \"I think so, Mary. I don't want to pass judgment until we're sure. I'm\n sorry.\"" ] ]
train	61007	[ "Why does Eppel indicate an orange light when scanning the planet?", "Why does the crew later refer to Ha-Adamah as Adam? ", "Why does Adam refuse to play checkers? ", "How does the \"Old Serpent\" know that the crew is returning with settlers?", "What ultimately makes the priest disbelieve what they've seen, despite his faith?", "What is likely to happen to the crew when they return to the planet? " ]	[ [ "It wants the crew to make their own judgement, because it doesn't know what to make of it.", "It senses Ha-Adamah's perception. ", "It senses the \"Old Serpent's\" perception. ", "It senses that an omnipotent being. " ], [ "He responds to Adam, and they decide it's his true name", "Ha-Adamah is Adam's Hebrew origination.", "The planet feels so much like the Garden of Eden, that they begin to believe he is Adam", "They want to test Adam and see if he accepts it as his name. " ], [ "He does not want to humiliate the priest by beating him. ", "The priest is too eager to go up against him, and he doesn't want to disappoint. ", "He has no reason to play. He is omniscient and would win without contest. ", "He is scared of losing and giving away his true identity. " ], [ "He understands people, and that they'll want to have their way with the planet. ", "Like Adam, he has extraordinary perception and can predict it happening. ", "It has happened before. He knows that people cannot resist the temptation and takes advantage of it. ", "The crew made it clear they would return. " ], [ "He senses the \"unusual mind\" of Adam, and it made him uneasy. ", "He is too faithful to risk trusting what they've seen.", "Someone like Adam would not be afraid of playing checkers, or being personable. ", "The illusion is too perfect, and it feels inauthentic to him. " ], [ "They'll fall victim like those before them, and have their supplies stolen. ", "They'll return, still believing it's the Garden of Eden. ", "They'll learn the truth about the Old Serpent and Adam, and leave. ", "They'll carry through with their settlement plans and cash in. " ] ]	[ 1, 2, 4, 3, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"", "And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.", "The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"", "\"Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of\n the world to make sure we've missed nothing,\" said Stark.\n\n\n There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of\n analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was\n designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might\n be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the\n designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results.\n\n\n The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator\n had refused to read\nPositive\nwhen turned on the inventor himself,\n bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had\n extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He\n told the machine so heatedly.", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"", "\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.", "\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.", "The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that\n Glaser did\nnot\nhave extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary\n perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a\ndifference\n, the\n machine insisted.\n\n\n It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built\n others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners\n of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply.", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"" ], [ "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.", "It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:", "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.", "\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"", "Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"", "\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"", "\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:", "\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.", "The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"" ], [ "Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"", "\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"", "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.", "It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"", "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:", "\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"", "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"", "The machine replied, with such warmth that its relays chattered, that\n Glaser did\nnot\nhave extraordinary perception; he had only ordinary\n perception to an extraordinary degree. There is a\ndifference\n, the\n machine insisted.\n\n\n It was for this reason that Glaser used that model no more, but built\n others more amenable. And it was for this reason also that the owners\n of Little Probe had acquired the original machine so cheaply.", "\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.", "Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"Let's lock on this one and finish the scan. Then we can do the rest of\n the world to make sure we've missed nothing,\" said Stark.\n\n\n There was one more test to run, one very tricky and difficult of\n analysis, that with the Extraordinary Perception Locator. This was\n designed simply to locate a source of superior thought. But this might\n be so varied or so unfamiliar that often both the machine and the\n designer of it were puzzled as to how to read the results.\n\n\n The E. P. Locator had been designed by Glaser. But when the Locator\n had refused to read\nPositive\nwhen turned on the inventor himself,\n bad blood developed between machine and man. Glaser knew that he had\n extraordinary perception. He was a much honored man in his field. He\n told the machine so heatedly.", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"" ], [ "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:", "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.", "\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:", "It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"", "\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"", "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"", "The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"", "Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"", "\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"" ], [ "\"It is only the unbelieving who believe so easily in obvious frauds.\n Theologically unsound, dramaturgically weak, philologically impossible,\n zoologically rigged, salted conspicuously with gold and shot through\n with anachronisms. And moreover he was afraid to play me at checkers.\"\n\n\n \"What?\"\n\n\n \"If I have a preternatural intellect I wouldn't be afraid of a game of\n checkers with anyone. Yet there was an unusual mind there somewhere; it\n was just that he chose not to make our acquaintance personally.\"\n\n\n \"They looked at the priest thoughtfully.\n\n\n \"But it was Paradise in one way,\" said Steiner at last.\n\n\n \"How?\"\n\n\n \"All the time we were there the woman did not speak.\"", "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "Then Stark cut in once more: \"There must be some one question you could\n ask him, Father. Some way to settle it. I am becoming nearly convinced.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is a question that will settle it. Adam, old man, how about\n a game of checkers?\"\n\n\n \"This is hardly the time for clowning,\" said Stark.\n\n\n \"I'm not clowning, Captain. How about it, Adam? I'll give you choice of\n colors and first move.\"\n\n\n \"No. It would be no contest. I have a preternatural intellect.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I beat a barber who was champion of Germantown. And I beat the\n champion of Morgan County, Tennessee, which is the hottest checker\n center on Earth. I've played against, and beaten, machines. But I\n never played a preternatural mind. Let's just set up the board, Adam,\n and have a go at it.\"", "The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"", "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:", "It was the pomegranate tree, and he was warning Langweilig away from it.\n\n\n \"Once more, Father,\" said Stark, \"you should be the authority; but does\n not the idea that it was the apple that was forbidden go back only to a\n medieval painting?\"\n\n\n \"It does. The name of the fruit is not mentioned in Genesis. In Hebrew\n exegesis, however, the pomegranate is usually indicated.\"\n\n\n \"I thought so. Question the man further, Father. This is too\n incredible.\"\n\n\n \"It is a little odd. Adam, old man, how long have you been here?\"\n\n\n \"Forever less six days is the answer that has been given to me. I never\n did understand the answer, however.\"\n\n\n \"And have you gotten no older in all that time?\"", "\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "\"I do not understand what 'older' is. I am as I have been from the\n beginning.\"\n\n\n \"And do you think that you will ever die?\"\n\n\n \"To die I do not understand. I am taught that it is a property of\n fallen nature to die, and that does not pertain to me or mine.\"\n\n\n \"And are you completely happy here?\"\n\n\n \"Perfectly happy according to my preternatural state. But I am taught\n that it might be possible to lose that happiness, and then to seek it\n vainly through all the ages. I am taught that sickness and ageing and\n even death could come if this happiness were ever lost. I am taught\n that on at least one other unfortunate world it has actually been lost.\"\n\n\n \"Do you consider yourself a knowledgeable man?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, since I am the only man, and knowledge is natural to man. But I\n am further blessed. I have a preternatural intellect.\"", "\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"", "\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"", "And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.", "Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"" ], [ "\"A crowd would laugh if told of it,\" said Stark, \"but not many would\n laugh if they had actually seen the place, or them. I am not a gullible\n man, but I am convinced of this: that this is a pristine and pure world\n and that ours and all the others we have visited are fallen worlds.\n Here are the prototypes of our first parents before their fall. They\n are garbed in light and innocence, and they have the happiness that\n we have been seeking for centuries. It would be a crime if anyone\n disturbed that happiness.\"\n\n\n \"I too am convinced,\" said Steiner. \"It is Paradise itself, where the\n lion lies down with the lamb, and where the serpent has not prevailed.\n It would be the darkest of crimes if we or others should play the part\n of the serpent, and intrude and spoil.\"", "\"No. It would be no contest. I would not like to humble you.\"\nThey were there for three days. They were delighted with the place.\n It was a world with everything, and it seemed to have only two\n inhabitants. They went everywhere except into the big cave.\n\n\n \"What is there, Adam?\" asked Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"The great serpent lives there. I would not disturb him. He has long\n been cranky because plans he had for us did not materialize. But we\n are taught that should ever evil come to us, which it cannot if we\n persevere, it will come by him.\"\n\n\n They learned no more of the real nature of the sphere in their time\n there. Yet all but one of them were convinced of the reality when they\n left. And they talked of it as they took off.", "The captain was a little puzzled by this, but he went on doggedly:\n \"Ha-Adamah, what do you think that we are? Are we not people?\"\n\n\n \"You are not anything till I name you. But I will name you and then\n you can be. You are named Captain. He is named Priest. He is named\n Engineer. He is named Flunky.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks a lot,\" said Steiner.\n\n\n \"But are we not people?\" persisted Captain Stark.\n\n\n \"No. We are the people. There are no people but two. How could there be\n other people?\"\n\n\n \"And the damnest thing about it,\" muttered Langweilig, \"is, how are you\n going to prove him wrong? But it does give you a small feeling.\"\n\n\n \"Can we have something to eat?\" asked the Captain.", "Finally it signaled the result, the most exasperating result it ever\n produces: the single orange light. It was the equivalent of the shrug\n of the shoulders in a man. They called it the \"You tell\nme\nlight.\"\n\n\n So among the intelligences there was at least one that might be\n extraordinary, though possibly in a crackpot way. It is good to be\n forewarned.\n\"Scan the remainder of the world, Steiner,\" said Stark, \"and the rest\n of us will get some sleep. If you find no other spot then we will go\n down on that one the next time it is in position under us, in about\n twelve hours.\"\n\n\n \"You don't want to visit any of the other areas first? Somewhere away\n from the thoughtful creature?\"\n\n\n \"No. The rest of the world may be dangerous. There must be a reason\n that thought is in one spot only. If we find no others then we will go\n down boldly and visit this.\"", "\"This is still a perfect come-on here. There is something in human\n nature that cannot resist the idea of a Perfect Paradise. Folks will\n whoop and holler to their neighbors to come in droves to spoil and mar\n it. It isn't greed or the desire for new land so much—though that is\n strong too. Mainly it is the feverish passion to befoul and poison what\n is unspoiled. Fortunately I am sagacious enough to take advantage of\n this trait. And when you start to farm a new world on a shoestring you\n have to acquire your equipment as you can.\"\n\n\n He looked proudly around at the great cave with its mountains and tiers\n of materials, heavy machinery of all sorts, titanic crates of foodstuff\n space-sealed; wheeled, tracked, propped, vaned and jetted vehicles; and\n power packs to run a world.\n\n\n He looked at the three dozen space ships stripped and stacked, and at\n the rather large pile of bone-meal in one corner.", "\"It'll take them fourteen days to get back with the settlers. We'll\n have time to overhaul the blasters. We haven't had any well-equipped\n settlers for six weeks. It used to be we'd hardly have time to strip\n and slaughter and stow before there was another batch to take care of.\"\n\n\n \"I think you'd better write me some new lines,\" said Adam. \"I feel like\n a goof saying those same ones to each bunch.\"\n\n\n \"You are a goof, and therefore perfect for the part. I was in show\n business long enough to know never to change a line too soon. I did\n change Adam and Eve to Ha-Adamah and Hawwah, and the apple to the\n pomegranate. People aren't becoming any smarter—but they are becoming\n better researched, and they insist on authenticity.", "\"Flecked with gold, and possibly with something else,\" said Stark. \"A\n very promising site.\"\n\n\n \"And everything grows here,\" added Steiner. \"Those are Earth-fruits and\n I never saw finer. I've tasted the grapes and plums and pears. The figs\n and dates are superb, the quince is as flavorsome as a quince can be,\n the cherries are excellent. And I never did taste such oranges. But I\n haven't yet tried the—\" and he stopped.\n\n\n \"If you're thinking what I'm afraid to think,\" said Gilbert, \"then it\n will be the test at least: whether we're having a pleasant dream or\n whether this is reality. Go ahead and eat one.\"\n\n\n \"I won't be the first to eat one. You eat.\"\n\n\n \"Ask him first. You ask him.\"", "So they all, except Steiner, went off to their bunks then: Stark, the\n Captain; Gregory Gilbert, the executive officer; Wolfgang Langweilig,\n the engineer; Casper Craig, super-cargo, tycoon and 51% owner of the\n Little Probe, and F. R. Briton, S.J., a Jesuit priest who was linguist\n and checker champion of the craft.\n\n\n Dawn did not come to the moon-town. The Little Probe hovered stationary\n in the light and the moon-town came up under the dawn. Then the Probe\n went down to visit whatever was there.\n\n\n \"There's no town,\" said Steiner. \"Not a building. Yet we're on the\n track of the minds. There's nothing but a meadow and some boscage, a\n sort of fountain or pool, and four streams coming out of it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep on towards the minds,\" said Stark. \"They're our target.\"", "\"Amazing quality of longevity seemingly inherent in the locale. Climate\n ideal. Daylight or half-light. All twenty-one hours from Planet\n Delphina and from Sol. Pure water for all industrial purposes. Scenic\n and storied. Zoning and pre-settlement restrictions to insure congenial\n neighbors. A completely planned globular settlement in a near arm of\n our own galaxy. Low taxes and liberal credit. Financing our specialty—\"\n\n\n \"And you had better have an armed escort when you return,\" said Father\n Briton.\n\n\n \"Why in cosmos would we want an armed escort?\"\n\n\n \"It's as phony as a seven-credit note!\"\n\n\n \"You, a man of the cloth doubt it? And us ready skeptics convinced by\n our senses? Why do you doubt?\"", "\"Pick from the trees,\" said Ha-Adamah, \"and then it may be that you\n will want to sleep on the grass. Being not of human nature (which does\n not need sleep or rest), it may be that you require respite. But you\n are free to enjoy the garden and its fruits.\"\n\n\n \"We will,\" said Captain Stark.\n\n\n They wandered about the place, but they were uneasy. There were the\n animals. The lion and lioness were enough to make one cautious, though\n they offered no harm. The two bears had a puzzling look, as though they\n wanted either to frolic with you or to mangle you.\n\n\n \"If there are only two people here,\" said Casper Craig, \"then it may be\n that the rest of the world is not dangerous at all. It looked fertile\n wherever we scanned it, though not so fertile as this central bit. And\n those rocks would bear examining.\"", "\"Not a building, not two sticks or stones placed together. That looks\n like an Earth-type sheep there. And that looks like an Earth-lion,\n I'm almost afraid to say. And those two ... why, they could well be\n Earth-people. But with a difference. Where is that bright light coming\n from?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but they're right in the middle of it. Land here. We'll\n go to meet them at once. Timidity has never been an efficacious tool\n with us.\"\n\n\n Well, they were people. And one could only wish that all people were\n like them. There was a man and a woman, and they were clothed either\n in very bright garments or in no garments at all, but only in a very\n bright light.\n\n\n \"Talk to them, Father Briton,\" said Stark. \"You are the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"Howdy,\" said the priest.", "The chordata discerner read\nPositive\nover most of the surface. There\n was spinal fluid on that orb, rivers of it. So again they omitted\n several tests and went to the cognition scanner. Would it show Thought\n on the body?\n\n\n Naturally they did not get results at once, nor did they expect to; it\n required a fine adjustment. But they were disappointed that they found\n nothing for several hours as they hovered high over the rotation. Then\n it came—clearly and definitely, but from quite a small location only.\n\n\n \"Limited,\" said Steiner, \"as though within a pale. As though there were\n but one city, if that is its form. Shall we follow the rest of the\n surface to find another, or concentrate on this? It'll be twelve hours\n before it's back in our ken if we let it go now.\"", "\"I have only one tongue; but it is given to us to be understood by all;\n by the eagle, by the squirrel, by the ass, by the English.\"\n\n\n \"We happen to be bloody Yankees, but we use a borrowed tongue. You\n wouldn't have a drink on you for a tubful of thirsty travellers, would\n you?\"\n\n\n \"The fountain.\"\n\n\n \"Ah—I see.\"\nBut the crew all drank of the fountain to be sociable. It was water,\n but water that excelled, cool and with all its original bubbles like\n the first water ever made.\n\n\n \"What do you make of them?\" asked Stark.\n\n\n \"Human,\" said Steiner. \"It may even be that they are a little more than\n human. I don't understand that light that surrounds them. And they seem\n to be clothed, as it were, in dignity.\"", "\"I am probably the most skeptical man in the world,\" said Casper Craig\n the tycoon, \"but I do believe my eyes. I have been there and seen it.\n It is indeed an unspoiled Paradise; and it would be a crime calling to\n the wide heavens for vengeance for anyone to smirch in any way that\n perfection.\n\n\n \"So much for that. Now to business. Gilbert, take a gram: Ninety\n Million Square Miles of Pristine Paradise for Sale or Lease. Farming,\n Ranching, exceptional opportunities for Horticulture. Gold, Silver,\n Iron, Earth-Type Fauna. Terms. Special Rates for Large Settlement\n Parties. Write, Gram, or call in person at any of our planetary offices\n as listed below. Ask for Brochure—Eden Acres Unlimited.\"\nDown in the great cave that Old Serpent, a two-legged one among whose\n names were \"Snake-Oil Sam,\" spoke to his underlings:", "\"Ha-Adamah, is it allowed to eat the apples?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly. Eat. It is the finest fruit in the garden.\"\n\"Well, the analogy breaks down there,\" said Stark. \"I was almost\n beginning to believe in the thing. But if it isn't that, then what.\n Father Briton, you are the linguist, but in Hebrew does not Ha-Adamah\n and Hawwah mean—?\"\n\n\n \"Of course they do. You know that as well as I.\"\n\n\n \"I was never a believer. But would it be possible for the exact same\n proposition to maintain here as on Earth?\"\n\n\n \"All things are possible.\"\n\n\n And it was then that Ha-Adamah, the shining man, gave a wild cry: \"No,\n no. Do not approach it. It is not allowed to eat of that one!\"", "And there was no denying that the Extraordinary Perception Locator (or\n Eppel) was a contrary machine. On Earth it had read\nPositive\non a\n number of crack-pots, including Waxey Sax, a jazz tootler who could not\n even read music. But it had also read\nPositive\non ninety per cent of\n the acknowledged superior minds of the Earth. In space it had been a\n sound guide to the unusual intelligences encountered. Yet on Suzuki-Mi\n it had read\nPositive\non a two-inch-long worm, only one of them out of\n billions. For the countless identical worms no trace of anything at all\n was shown by the test.\n\n\n So it was with mixed expectations that Steiner locked onto the area\n and got a flick. He then narrowed to a smaller area (apparently one\n individual, though this could not be certain) and got very definite\n action. Eppel was busy. The machine had a touch of the ham in it, and\n assumed an air of importance when it ran these tests.", "\"And very little else,\" said Father Briton, \"though that light trick\n does serve a purpose. But I'm not sure they'd pass in Philadelphia.\"\n\n\n \"Talk to them again,\" said Stark. \"You're the linguist.\"\n\n\n \"That isn't necessary here, Captain. Talk to them yourself.\"\n\n\n \"Are there any other people here?\" Stark asked the man.\n\n\n \"The two of us. Man and woman.\"\n\n\n \"But are there any others?\"\n\n\n \"How would there be any others? What other kind of people could there\n be than man and woman?\"\n\n\n \"But is there more than one man or woman?\"\n\n\n \"How could there be more than one of anything?\"", "IT WAS A DULL, ROUTINE LITTLE\n\n WORLD. IT DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A\n\n CITY. EVERYTHING IT HAD WAS\nIN THE GARDEN\nBY R. A. LAFFERTY\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe protozoic recorder chirped like a bird. Not only would there be\n life traces on that little moon, but it would be a lively place. So\n they skipped several steps in the procedure.", "\"We will have to have another lion,\" said Eve. \"Bowser is getting old,\n and Marie-Yvette abuses him and gnaws his toes. And we do have to have\n a big-maned lion to lie down with the lamb.\"\n\n\n \"I know it, Eve. The lion is a very important prop. Maybe one of the\n crackpot settlers will bring a new lion.\"\n\n\n \"And can't you mix another kind of shining paint? This itches. It's\n hell.\"\n\n\n \"I'm working on it.\"\nCasper Craig was still dictating the gram:", "He may or may not have been understood, but the two of them smiled at\n him, so he went on.\n\n\n \"Father Briton from Philadelphia,\" he said, \"on detached service. And\n you, my good man, what is your handle, your monicker, your tag?\"\n\n\n \"Ha-Adamah,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"And your daughter, or niece?\"\n\n\n It may be that the shining man frowned momentarily at this; but the\n woman smiled, proving that she was human.\n\n\n \"The woman is named Hawwah,\" said the man. \"The sheep is named sheep,\n the lion is named lion, the horse is named horse and the hoolock is\n named hoolock.\"\n\n\n \"I understand. It is possible that this could go on and on. How is it\n that you use the English tongue?\"" ] ]
train	61139	[ "How does Retief feel about his current job?", "How does Miss Meuhl feel about her job?", "Why did Retief want to talk to the drunk?", "What was on exhibit in the Groacian parade?", "Why did the Groacians hide the ship?", "Why was Retief still upset after seeing the ship?", "What was Retief's ultimate mistake?" ]	[ [ "Unnecessarily busy and frustrated", "Happy with most, but annoyed with Miss Meuhl", "Stressed about the workload", "Confused about his duties with the position" ], [ "She enjoys training Retief to the new culture.", "She wishes to be back on her home planet. ", "She enjoys doing her job the way the Groacians like it.", "She wishes the Groacians weren't so uptight." ], [ "He wanted someone to talk to on this foreign planet.", "He wanted to know why the drunk was mad at him.", "He wanted to know what happened nine years ago.", "He didn't like how the drunk had treated him." ], [ "Groacian government officials", "people they had taken as prisoners", "animals from all over the galaxy", "people visiting from Earth" ], [ "To overthrow the government.", "They wanted to hide the Terrestrials as long as they could.", "They were afraid to admit they knew where it was.", "They wanted to keep it for further research." ], [ "He found something at the ship he wasn't expecting.", "The Groacians wouldn't show him inside of the ship.", "There was a much larger ship still unaccounted for.", "He's upset about the deceased Terrestrials he found." ], [ "Asking too many questions", "Trusting Miss Meuhl to do what he said", "Making the Groacians show him the ship", "Breaking into the Foreign Ministry" ] ]	[ 1, 3, 3, 2, 3, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"", "\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"", "\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.", "\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.", "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.", "\"That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say,\n in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less\n suited to diplomatic work.\"\nThe screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed.\n \"Mr. Retief,\" the face on the screen said, \"I am Counsellor Pardy,\n DSO-1, Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a\n report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you\n administratively, vice Miss Yolanda Meuhl, DAO-9. Pending the findings\n of a Board of Inquiry, you will—\"\n\n\n Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant\n look faded from Miss Meuhl's face.\n\n\n \"Why, what is the meaning—\"", "Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"", "\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.", "\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.", "Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"" ], [ "\"You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for\n the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know\n what happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed\n him out—for the moment.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. \"Your fantasies are getting the\n better of you,\" she gasped. \"In danger, indeed! Disposing of me! I've\n never heard anything so ridiculous.\"\n\n\n \"Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and\n water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the\n supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in\n touch with you via hand-phone.\"\n\n\n \"What are you planning to do?\"", "\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"", "\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"This is absolutely the end!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"Thank heaven I've\n already—\"\n\n\n \"Get that sender going, woman!\" Retief snapped. \"This is important.\"\n\n\n \"I've already done so, Mr. Retief!\" Miss Meuhl said harshly. \"I've been\n waiting for you to come back here....\" She turned to the communicator,\n flipped levers. The screen snapped aglow, and a wavering long-distance\n image appeared.\n\n\n \"He's here now,\" Miss Meuhl said to the screen. She looked at Retief\n triumphantly.\n\n\n \"That's good,\" Retief said. \"I don't think the Groaci can knock us off\n the air, but—\"", "\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"", "\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"If I'd listened any longer, I might have heard something I couldn't\n ignore. I can't afford that, at this moment. Listen, Miss Meuhl,\"\n Retief went on earnestly, \"I've found the missing cruiser.\"\n\n\n \"You heard him relieve you!\"\n\n\n \"I heard him say he was\ngoing\nto, Miss Meuhl. But until I've heard\n and acknowledged a verbal order, it has no force. If I'm wrong, he'll\n get my resignation. If I'm right, that suspension would be embarrassing\n all around.\"\n\n\n \"You're defying lawful authority! I'm in charge here now.\" Miss Meuhl\n stepped to the local communicator.\n\n\n \"I'm going to report this terrible thing to the Groaci at once, and\n offer my profound—\"", "\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"", "\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"", "\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\"", "\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"", "\"That had no bearing on the matter of your wild behavior! I must say,\n in all my years in the Corps, I've never encountered a personality less\n suited to diplomatic work.\"\nThe screen crackled, the ten-second transmission lag having elapsed.\n \"Mr. Retief,\" the face on the screen said, \"I am Counsellor Pardy,\n DSO-1, Deputy Under-secretary for the region. I have received a\n report on your conduct which makes it mandatory for me to relieve you\n administratively, vice Miss Yolanda Meuhl, DAO-9. Pending the findings\n of a Board of Inquiry, you will—\"\n\n\n Retief reached out and snapped off the communicator. The triumphant\n look faded from Miss Meuhl's face.\n\n\n \"Why, what is the meaning—\"" ], [ "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"To speak intelligibly, malodorous outworlder,\" the drunk said. The\n barkeep whispered something, and two customers came up to the drunk,\n took his arms and helped him to the door.\n\n\n \"To get a cage!\" the drunk shrilled. \"To keep the animals in their own\n stinking place.\"\n\n\n \"I've changed my mind,\" Retief said to the bartender. \"To be grateful\n as hell, but to have to hurry off now.\" He followed the drunk out the\n door. The other Groaci released him, hurried back inside. Retief looked\n at the weaving alien.\n\n\n \"To begone, freak,\" the Groacian whispered.\n\n\n \"To be pals,\" Retief said. \"To be kind to dumb animals.\"\n\n\n \"To have you hauled away to a stockyard, ill-odored foreign livestock.\"", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from\n the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in\n mid-motion, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot.\n\n\n \"To enjoy a cooling drink,\" Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at\n the edge of the pit. \"To sample a true Groacian beverage.\"\n\n\n \"To not enjoy my poor offerings,\" the Groacian mumbled. \"A pain in the\n digestive sacs; to express regret.\"\n\n\n \"To not worry,\" Retief said, irritated. \"To pour it out and let me\n decide whether I like it.\"\n\n\n \"To be grappled in by peace-keepers for poisoning of—foreigners.\" The\n barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers,\n eyes elsewhere, were drifting away.", "\"To get the lead out,\" Retief said, placing a thick gold-piece in the\n dish provided. \"To shake a tentacle.\"\n\n\n \"The procuring of a cage,\" a thin voice called from the sidelines. \"The\n displaying of a freak.\"\nRetief turned. A tall Groacian vibrated his mandibles in a gesture\n of contempt. From his bluish throat coloration, it was apparent the\n creature was drunk.\n\n\n \"To choke in your upper sac,\" the bartender hissed, extending his eyes\n toward the drunk. \"To keep silent, litter-mate of drones.\"\n\n\n \"To swallow your own poison, dispenser of vileness,\" the drunk\n whispered. \"To find a proper cage for this zoo-piece.\" He wavered\n toward Retief. \"To show this one in the streets, like all freaks.\"\n\n\n \"Seen a lot of freaks like me, have you?\" Retief asked, interestedly.", "\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"", "\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.", "\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"", "\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"", "\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.", "\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"", "\"OK, Skinny, I know when I'm licked,\" Retief said in Terran. \"To keep\n your nose clean.\"\n\n\n Outside, Retief stood for a moment looking across at the deeply carved\n windowless stucco facades lining the street, then started off in the\n direction of the Terrestrial Consulate General. The few Groacians on\n the street eyed him furtively, veered to avoid him as he passed. Flimsy\n high-wheeled ground cars puffed silently along the resilient pavement.\n The air was clean and cool.\n\n\n At the office, Miss Meuhl would be waiting with another list of\n complaints.\n\n\n Retief studied the carving over the open doorways along the street.\n An elaborate one picked out in pinkish paint seemed to indicate the\n Groacian equivalent of a bar. Retief went in.", "\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.", "\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"" ], [ "\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"", "\"Enough!\" Fith's mandibles quivered in distress. \"I can talk no more of\n this matter—\"\n\n\n \"You'll talk to me, or there'll be a task force here in five days to do\n the talking,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"You can't!\" Miss Meuhl gasped.\n\n\n Retief turned a steady look on Miss Meuhl. She closed her mouth. The\n Groaci sat down.\n\n\n \"Answer me this one,\" Retief said, looking at Shluh. \"A few years\n back—about nine, I think—there was a little parade held here. Some\n curious looking creatures were captured. After being securely caged,\n they were exhibited to the gentle Groaci public. Hauled through the\n streets. Very educational, no doubt. A highly cultural show.\n\n\n \"Funny thing about these animals. They wore clothes. They seemed to\n communicate with each other. Altogether it was a very amusing exhibit.", "\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.", "Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.", "A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from\n the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in\n mid-motion, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot.\n\n\n \"To enjoy a cooling drink,\" Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at\n the edge of the pit. \"To sample a true Groacian beverage.\"\n\n\n \"To not enjoy my poor offerings,\" the Groacian mumbled. \"A pain in the\n digestive sacs; to express regret.\"\n\n\n \"To not worry,\" Retief said, irritated. \"To pour it out and let me\n decide whether I like it.\"\n\n\n \"To be grappled in by peace-keepers for poisoning of—foreigners.\" The\n barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers,\n eyes elsewhere, were drifting away.", "Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.", "\"To get the lead out,\" Retief said, placing a thick gold-piece in the\n dish provided. \"To shake a tentacle.\"\n\n\n \"The procuring of a cage,\" a thin voice called from the sidelines. \"The\n displaying of a freak.\"\nRetief turned. A tall Groacian vibrated his mandibles in a gesture\n of contempt. From his bluish throat coloration, it was apparent the\n creature was drunk.\n\n\n \"To choke in your upper sac,\" the bartender hissed, extending his eyes\n toward the drunk. \"To keep silent, litter-mate of drones.\"\n\n\n \"To swallow your own poison, dispenser of vileness,\" the drunk\n whispered. \"To find a proper cage for this zoo-piece.\" He wavered\n toward Retief. \"To show this one in the streets, like all freaks.\"\n\n\n \"Seen a lot of freaks like me, have you?\" Retief asked, interestedly.", "THE MADMAN FROM EARTH\nBY KEITH LAUMER\nYou don't have to be crazy to be an earth\n\n diplomat—but on Groac it sure helps!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI\n\n\n \"The Consul for the Terrestrial States,\" Retief said, \"presents his\n compliments, et cetera, to the Ministry of Culture of the Groacian\n Autonomy, and with reference to the Ministry's invitation to attend a\n recital of interpretive grimacing, has the honor to express regret that\n he will be unable—\"", "The door burst inward. A crowd of crested Groaci pressed into the room,\n pushed Miss Meuhl back, aimed scatter guns at Retief. Police Chief\n Shluh pushed forward.\n\n\n \"Attempt no violence, Terrestrial,\" he said. \"I cannot promise to\n restrain my men.\"\n\n\n \"You're violating Terrestrial territory, Shluh,\" Retief said steadily.\n \"I suggest you move back out the same way you came in.\"\n\n\n \"I invited them here,\" Miss Meuhl spoke up. \"They are here at my\n express wish.\"\n\n\n \"Are they? Are you sure you meant to go this far, Miss Meuhl? A squad\n of armed Groaci in the consulate?\"\n\n\n \"You are the consul, Miss Yolanda Meuhl,\" Shluh said. \"Would it not be\n best if we removed this deranged person to a place of safety?\"", "\"You can't turn this invitation down,\" Administrative Assistant Meuhl\n said flatly. \"I'll make that 'accepts with pleasure'.\"\n\n\n Retief exhaled a plume of cigar smoke.\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" he said, \"in the past couple of weeks I've sat through\n six light-concerts, four attempts at chamber music, and god knows how\n many assorted folk-art festivals. I've been tied up every off-duty\n hour since I got here—\"\n\n\n \"You can't offend the Groaci,\" Miss Meuhl said sharply. \"Consul Whaffle\n would never have been so rude.\"\n\n\n \"Whaffle left here three months ago,\" Retief said, \"leaving me in\n charge.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" Miss Meuhl said, snapping off the dictyper. \"I'm sure I don't\n know what excuse I can give the Minister.\"", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"OK, Skinny, I know when I'm licked,\" Retief said in Terran. \"To keep\n your nose clean.\"\n\n\n Outside, Retief stood for a moment looking across at the deeply carved\n windowless stucco facades lining the street, then started off in the\n direction of the Terrestrial Consulate General. The few Groacians on\n the street eyed him furtively, veered to avoid him as he passed. Flimsy\n high-wheeled ground cars puffed silently along the resilient pavement.\n The air was clean and cool.\n\n\n At the office, Miss Meuhl would be waiting with another list of\n complaints.\n\n\n Retief studied the carving over the open doorways along the street.\n An elaborate one picked out in pinkish paint seemed to indicate the\n Groacian equivalent of a bar. Retief went in.", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "Retief eyed Fith. \"Don't try it,\" he said. \"You'll just get yourself in\n deeper.\"\n\n\n Fith clacked his mandibles angrily, eye stalks canted aggressively\n toward the Terrestrial.\n\n\n \"Out of deference to your diplomatic status, Terrestrial, I shall\n ignore your insulting remarks,\" Fith said in his reedy voice. \"Let us\n now return to the city.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at the four policemen. \"I see your point,\" he said.\n\n\n Fith followed him into the car, sat rigidly at the far end of the seat.\n\n\n \"I advise you to remain very close to your consulate,\" Fith said. \"I\n advise you to dismiss these fancies from your mind, and to enjoy the\n cultural aspects of life at Groac. Especially, I should not venture out\n of the city, or appear overly curious about matters of concern only to\n the Groacian government.\"", "\"To speak intelligibly, malodorous outworlder,\" the drunk said. The\n barkeep whispered something, and two customers came up to the drunk,\n took his arms and helped him to the door.\n\n\n \"To get a cage!\" the drunk shrilled. \"To keep the animals in their own\n stinking place.\"\n\n\n \"I've changed my mind,\" Retief said to the bartender. \"To be grateful\n as hell, but to have to hurry off now.\" He followed the drunk out the\n door. The other Groaci released him, hurried back inside. Retief looked\n at the weaving alien.\n\n\n \"To begone, freak,\" the Groacian whispered.\n\n\n \"To be pals,\" Retief said. \"To be kind to dumb animals.\"\n\n\n \"To have you hauled away to a stockyard, ill-odored foreign livestock.\"", "\"Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac\n and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny\n answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left.\n Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were\n innocent.\"\n\n\n \"IF!\" Miss Meuhl burst out.\n\n\n \"If, indeed!\" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. \"I must protest\n your—\"\n\"Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't\n think your story will be good enough.\"\n\n\n \"It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—\"\n\n\n \"Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory.\"\n\n\n \"Then you admit—\"\n\n\n \"It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to\n it.\"" ], [ "\"The Groaci are a very sensitive race. They don't welcome outworlders\n raking up things. They've been gracious enough to let us live down\n the fact that Terrestrials subjected them to deep humiliation on one\n occasion.\"\n\n\n \"You mean when they came looking for the cruiser?\"\n\n\n \"I, for one, am ashamed of the high-handed tactics that were employed,\n grilling these innocent people as though they were criminals. We try\n never to reopen that wound, Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n \"They never found the cruiser, did they?\"\n\n\n \"Certainly not on Groac.\"", "\"You're still determined to make an issue of that incident!\" Miss\n Meuhl snorted. \"I really can hardly blame the Groaci. They are not a\n sophisticated race; they had never before met aliens.\"\n\n\n \"You're ready to forgive a great deal, Miss Meuhl. But it's not what\n happened nine years ago I'm concerned with. It's what's happening now.\n I've told you that it was only a lifeboat the Groaci have hidden out.\n Don't you understand the implication? That vessel couldn't have come\n far. The cruiser itself must be somewhere near by. I want to know\n where!\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci don't know. They're a very cultured, gentle people. You can\n do irreparable harm to the reputation of Terrestrials if you insist—\"", "\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.", "Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.", "\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"How could you know a flotilla would show up in a few months looking\n for them, you mean? That was a shock, wasn't it? I'll bet you had a\n brisk time of it hiding the ship, and shutting everybody up. A close\n call, eh?\"\n\n\n \"We were afraid,\" Shluh said. \"We are a simple people. We feared the\n strange creatures from the alien craft. We did not kill them, but we\n felt it was as well they ... did not survive. Then, when the warships\n came, we realized our error. But we feared to speak. We purged our\n guilty leaders, concealed what had happened, and ... offered our\n friendship. We invited the opening of diplomatic relations. We made\n a blunder, it is true, a great blunder. But we have tried to make\n amends....\"\n\n\n \"Where is the ship?\"\n\n\n \"The ship?\"", "\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"", "\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"", "\"You and I are in a tight spot, Miss Meuhl. The logical next move for\n the Groaci is to dispose of both of us. We're the only ones who know\n what happened. Fith almost did the job this afternoon, but I bluffed\n him out—for the moment.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl emitted a shrill laugh. \"Your fantasies are getting the\n better of you,\" she gasped. \"In danger, indeed! Disposing of me! I've\n never heard anything so ridiculous.\"\n\n\n \"Stay in this office. Close and safe-lock the door. You've got food and\n water in the dispenser. I suggest you stock up, before they shut the\n supply down. Don't let anyone in, on any pretext whatever. I'll keep in\n touch with you via hand-phone.\"\n\n\n \"What are you planning to do?\"", "\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"", "Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"", "Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"", "\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.", "A Groacian bartender was dispensing clay pots of alcoholic drink from\n the bar-pit at the center of the room. He looked at Retief and froze in\n mid-motion, a metal tube poised over a waiting pot.\n\n\n \"To enjoy a cooling drink,\" Retief said in Groacian, squatting down at\n the edge of the pit. \"To sample a true Groacian beverage.\"\n\n\n \"To not enjoy my poor offerings,\" the Groacian mumbled. \"A pain in the\n digestive sacs; to express regret.\"\n\n\n \"To not worry,\" Retief said, irritated. \"To pour it out and let me\n decide whether I like it.\"\n\n\n \"To be grappled in by peace-keepers for poisoning of—foreigners.\" The\n barkeep looked around for support, found none. The Groaci customers,\n eyes elsewhere, were drifting away.", "\"Terrible? I understand that a Terrestrial task force stood off Groac\n and sent a delegation down to ask questions. They got some funny\n answers, and stayed on to dig around a little. After a week they left.\n Somewhat annoying to the Groaci, maybe—at the most. If they were\n innocent.\"\n\n\n \"IF!\" Miss Meuhl burst out.\n\n\n \"If, indeed!\" Fith said, his weak voice trembling. \"I must protest\n your—\"\n\"Save the protests, Fith. You have some explaining to do. And I don't\n think your story will be good enough.\"\n\n\n \"It is for you to explain! This person who was beaten—\"\n\n\n \"Not beaten. Just rapped a few times to loosen his memory.\"\n\n\n \"Then you admit—\"\n\n\n \"It worked, too. He remembered lots of things, once he put his mind to\n it.\"", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian." ], [ "Shluh came forward with a hand-lamp. The party entered the ship.\n\n\n Retief clambered up a narrow companionway, glanced around the interior\n of the control compartment. Dust was thick on the deck, the stanchions\n where acceleration couches had been mounted, the empty instrument\n panels, the litter of sheared bolts, scraps of wire and paper. A thin\n frosting of rust dulled the exposed metal where cutting torches had\n sliced away heavy shielding. There was a faint odor of stale bedding.\n\n\n \"The cargo compartment—\" Shluh began.\n\n\n \"I've seen enough,\" Retief said.\n\n\n Silently, the Groacians led the way back out through the tunnel and\n into the late afternoon sunshine. As they climbed the slope to the\n steam car, Fith came to Retief's side.", "Retief walked along the raised wooden catwalk, studying the ship. Empty\n emplacements gaped below lensless scanner eyes. Littered decking was\n visible within the half-open entry port. Near the bow the words 'IVS\n Terrific B7 New Terra' were lettered in bright chrome duralloy.\n\n\n \"How did you get it in here?\" Retief asked.\n\n\n \"It was hauled here from the landing point, some nine miles distant,\"\n Fith said, his voice thinner than ever. \"This is a natural crevasse.\n The vessel was lowered into it and roofed over.\"\n\n\n \"How did you shield it so the detectors didn't pick it up?\"\n\n\n \"All here is high-grade iron ore,\" Fith said, waving a member. \"Great\n veins of almost pure metal.\"\n\n\n Retief grunted. \"Let's go inside.\"", "\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.", "\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.", "\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.", "\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"", "\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"", "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "\"So true,\" Fith said. \"Frankly, I have had a most disturbing report,\n Mr. Consul. I shall ask Shluh to recount it.\" He nodded to the police\n chief.\n\n\n \"One hour ago,\" The Groacian said, \"a Groacian national was brought\n to hospital suffering from serious contusions. Questioning of this\n individual revealed that he had been set upon and beaten by a\n foreigner. A Terrestrial, to be precise. Investigation by my department\n indicates that the description of the culprit closely matches that of\n the Terrestrial Consul.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped audibly.\n\n\n \"Have you ever heard,\" Retief said, looking steadily at Fith, \"of a\n Terrestrial cruiser, the\nISV Terrific\n, which dropped from sight in\n this sector nine years ago?\"\n\n\n \"Really!\" Miss Meuhl exclaimed, rising. \"I wash my hands—\"", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"", "Two Groaci wearing heavy eye-shields and elaborate crest ornaments\n indicative of rank rose as Retief entered the room. Neither offered a\n courteous snap of the mandibles, Retief noted. They were mad, all right.\n\n\n \"I am Fith, of the Terrestrial Desk, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr.\n Consul,\" the taller Groacian said, in lisping Terran. \"May I present\n Shluh, of the Internal Police?\"\n\n\n \"Sit down, gentlemen,\" Retief said. They resumed their seats. Miss\n Meuhl hovered nervously, then sat on the edge of a comfortless chair.\n\n\n \"Oh, it's such a pleasure—\" she began.\n\n\n \"Never mind that,\" Retief said. \"These gentlemen didn't come here to\n sip tea today.\"", "\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.", "\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"", "\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"" ], [ "\"That's my decision,\" Retief said. \"I have a job to do and we're\n wasting time.\" He crossed the room to his desk, opened a drawer and\n took out a slim-barreled needler.\n\n\n \"This office is being watched. Not very efficiently, if I know the\n Groaci. I think I can get past them all right.\"\n\n\n \"Where are you going with ... that?\" Miss Meuhl stared at the needler.\n \"What in the world—\"\n\n\n \"The Groaci won't waste any time destroying every piece of paper in\n their files relating to this thing. I have to get what I need before\n it's too late. If I wait for an official Inquiry Commission, they'll\n find nothing but blank smiles.\"\n\n\n \"You're out of your mind!\" Miss Meuhl stood up, quivering with\n indignation. \"You're like a ... a....\"", "\"I have done my duty, Mr. Retief,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"I made a full\n report to Regional Headquarters last night, as soon as you left this\n office. Any doubts I may have had as to the rightness of that decision\n have been completely dispelled by what you've just told me.\"\n\n\n Retief looked at her levelly. \"You've been a busy girl, Miss Meuhl. Did\n you mention the six Terrestrials who were killed here?\"", "\"Don't touch that screen,\" Retief said. \"You go sit in that corner\n where I can keep an eye on you. I'm going to make a sealed tape for\n transmission to Headquarters, along with a call for an armed task\n force. Then we'll settle down to wait.\"\n\n\n Retief ignored Miss Meuhl's fury as he spoke into the recorder.\n\n\n The local communicator chimed. Miss Meuhl jumped up, staring at it.\n\n\n \"Go ahead,\" Retief said. \"Answer it.\"\n\n\n A Groacian official appeared on the screen.", "\"Indeed, I hope that this will be the end of this unfortunate affair,\"\n he said. \"Now that all has been fully and honestly shown—\"\n\n\n \"You can skip all that,\" Retief said. \"You're nine years late. The\n crew was still alive when the task force called, I imagine. You killed\n them—or let them die—rather than take the chance of admitting what\n you'd done.\"\n\n\n \"We were at fault,\" Fith said abjectly. \"Now we wish only friendship.\"\n\n\n \"The\nTerrific\nwas a heavy cruiser, about twenty thousand tons.\"\n Retief looked grimly at the slender Foreign Office official. \"Where is\n she, Fith? I won't settle for a hundred-ton lifeboat.\"\nFith erected his eye stalks so violently that one eye-shield fell off.\n\n\n \"I know nothing of ... of....\" He stopped. His throat vibrated rapidly\n as he struggled for calm.", "\"If I don't make it back here, transmit the sealed record of this\n afternoon's conversation, along with the information I've given you.\n Beam it through on a mayday priority. Then tell the Groaci what you've\n done and sit tight. I think you'll be all right. It won't be easy to\n blast in here and anyway, they won't make things worse by killing you.\n A force can be here in a week.\"\n\n\n \"I'll do nothing of the sort! The Groaci are very fond of me! You ...\n Johnny-come-lately! Roughneck! Setting out to destroy—\"\n\n\n \"Blame it on me if it will make you feel any better,\" Retief said, \"but\n don't be fool enough to trust them.\" He pulled on a cape, opened the\n door.", "In the front seat, Shluh looked straight ahead. The loosely-sprung\n vehicle bobbed and swayed along the narrow highway. Retief listened to\n the rhythmic puffing of the motor and said nothing.\nIII\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said, \"I want you to listen carefully to what I'm\n going to tell you. I have to move rapidly now, to catch the Groaci off\n guard.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,\" Miss Meuhl snapped,\n her eyes sharp behind the heavy lenses.\n\n\n \"If you'll listen, you may find out,\" Retief said. \"I have no time\n to waste, Miss Meuhl. They won't be expecting an immediate move—I\n hope—and that may give me the latitude I need.\"", "\"Never mind the excuses,\" Retief said. \"Just tell him I won't be\n there.\" He stood up.\n\n\n \"Are you leaving the office?\" Miss Meuhl adjusted her glasses. \"I have\n some important letters here for your signature.\"\n\n\n \"I don't recall dictating any letters today, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said,\n pulling on a light cape.\n\"I wrote them for you. They're just as Consul Whaffle would have wanted\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Did you write all Whaffle's letters for him, Miss Meuhl?\"\n\n\n \"Consul Whaffle was an extremely busy man,\" Miss Meuhl said stiffly.\n \"He had complete confidence in me.\"\n\n\n \"Since I'm cutting out the culture from now on,\" Retief said, \"I won't\n be so busy.\"", "\"You're making a serious mistake, Shluh,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Yes,\" Miss Meuhl said. \"You're quite right, Mr. Shluh. Please escort\n Mr. Retief to his quarters in this building—\"\n\n\n \"I don't advise you to violate my diplomatic immunity, Fith,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n \"As chief of mission,\" Miss Meuhl said quickly, \"I hereby waive\n immunity in the case of Mr. Retief.\"\n\n\n Shluh produced a hand recorder. \"Kindly repeat your statement, Madam,\n officially,\" he said. \"I wish no question to arise later.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be a fool, woman,\" Retief said. \"Don't you see what you're\n letting yourself in for? This would be a hell of a good time for you to\n figure out whose side you're on.\"", "\"I'll be back in a couple of hours,\" he said. Miss Meuhl stared after\n him silently as he closed the door.\nIt was an hour before dawn when Retief keyed the combination to the\n safe-lock and stepped into the darkened consular office. He looked\n tired.\n\n\n Miss Meuhl, dozing in a chair, awoke with a start. She looked at\n Retief, rose and snapped on a light, turned to stare.\n\n\n \"What in the world—Where have you been? What's happened to your\n clothing?\"\n\n\n \"I got a little dirty. Don't worry about it.\" Retief went to his desk,\n opened a drawer and replaced the needler.\n\n\n \"Where have you been?\" Miss Meuhl demanded. \"I stayed here—\"", "Retief stepped around him, seized his collar and yanked. The Groacian\n fell on his back. Retief stood over him. The downed native half-rose;\n Retief put a foot against his chest and pushed.\n\n\n \"To not be going anywhere for a few minutes,\" Retief said. \"To stay\n right here and have a nice long talk.\"\nII\n\n\n \"There you are!\" Miss Meuhl said, eyeing Retief over her lenses. \"There\n are two gentlemen waiting to see you. Groacian gentlemen.\"\n\n\n \"Government men, I imagine. Word travels fast.\" Retief pulled off his\n cape. \"This saves me the trouble of paying another call at the Foreign\n Ministry.\"\n\n\n \"What have you been doing? They seem very upset, I don't mind telling\n you.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure you don't. Come along. And bring an official recorder.\"", "\"To not be angry, fragrant native,\" Retief said. \"To permit me to chum\n with you.\"\n\n\n \"To flee before I take a cane to you!\"\n\n\n \"To have a drink together—\"\n\n\n \"To not endure such insolence!\" The Groacian advanced toward Retief.\n Retief backed away.\n\n\n \"To hold hands,\" Retief said. \"To be palsy-walsy—\"\n\n\n The Groacian reached for him, missed. A passer-by stepped around him,\n head down, scuttled away. Retief backed into the opening to a narrow\n crossway and offered further verbal familiarities to the drunken local,\n who followed, furious. Retief backed, rounded a corner into a narrow\n alley-like passage, deserted, silent ... except for the following\n Groacian.", "\"My government can entertain no further accusations, Mr. Consul,\"\n he said at last. \"I have been completely candid with you, I have\n overlooked your probing into matters not properly within your sphere of\n responsibility. My patience is at an end.\"\n\n\n \"Where is that ship?\" Retief rapped out. \"You never learn, do you?\n You're still convinced you can hide the whole thing and forget it. I'm\n telling you you can't.\"\n\n\n \"We return to the city now,\" Fith said. \"I can do no more.\"\n\n\n \"You can and you will, Fith,\" Retief said. \"I intend to get to the\n truth of this matter.\"\n\n\n Fith spoke to Shluh in rapid Groacian. The police chief gestured to his\n four armed constables. They moved to ring Retief in.", "\"Yes,\" Fith said weakly. \"It is true, they were Terrestrials. But there\n was no killing.\"\n\n\n \"They're alive?\"\n\n\n \"Alas, no. They ... died.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl yelped faintly.\n\n\n \"I see,\" Retief said. \"They died.\"\n\n\n \"We tried to keep them alive, of course. But we did not know what\n foods—\"\n\n\n \"Didn't take the trouble to find out, either, did you?\"\n\n\n \"They fell ill,\" Fith said. \"One by one....\"\n\n\n \"We'll deal with that question later,\" Retief said. \"Right now, I want\n more information. Where did you get them? Where did you hide the ship?\n What happened to the rest of the crew? Did they 'fall ill' before the\n big parade?\"", "\"I'm glad you did,\" Retief said. \"I hope you piled up a supply of food\n and water from the dispenser, too. We'll be holed up here for a week,\n at least.\" He jotted figures on a pad. \"Warm up the official sender. I\n have a long transmission for Regional Headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Are you going to tell me where you've been?\"\n\n\n \"I have a message to get off first, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said sharply.\n \"I've been to the Foreign Ministry,\" he added. \"I'll tell you all about\n it later.\"\n\n\n \"At this hour? There's no one there....\"\n\n\n \"Exactly.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl gasped. \"You mean you broke in? You burgled the Foreign\n Office?\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Retief said calmly. \"Now—\"", "Retief nodded. \"Thanks, Miss Meuhl,\" he said. \"I'll be back before\n you close the office.\" Miss Meuhl's face was set in lines of grim\n disapproval as he closed the door.\nThe pale-featured Groacian vibrated his throat-bladder in a distressed\n bleat.\n\n\n \"Not to enter the Archives,\" he said in his faint voice. \"The denial of\n permission. The deep regret of the Archivist.\"\n\n\n \"The importance of my task here,\" Retief said, enunciating the glottal\n dialect with difficulty. \"My interest in local history.\"\n\n\n \"The impossibility of access to outworlders. To depart quietly.\"\n\n\n \"The necessity that I enter.\"\n\n\n \"The specific instructions of the Archivist.\" The Groacian's voice rose\n to a whisper. \"To insist no longer. To give up this idea!\"", "\"What did you do with it? It was too big to just walk off and forget.\n Where is it?\"\n\n\n The two Groacians exchanged looks.\n\n\n \"We wish to show our contrition,\" Fith said. \"We will show you the\n ship.\"\n\n\n \"Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said. \"If I don't come back in a reasonable length\n of time, transmit that recording to Regional Headquarters, sealed.\" He\n stood, looked at the Groaci.\n\n\n \"Let's go,\" he said.\nRetief stooped under the heavy timbers shoring the entry to the cavern.\n He peered into the gloom at the curving flank of the space-burned hull.\n\n\n \"Any lights in here?\" he asked.\n\n\n A Groacian threw a switch. A weak bluish glow sprang up.", "\"Yolanda Meuhl,\" he said without preamble, \"for the Foreign Minister of\n the Groacian Autonomy, I herewith accredit you as Terrestrial Consul\n to Groac, in accordance with the advices transmitted to my government\n direct from the Terrestrial Headquarters. As consul, you are requested\n to make available for questioning Mr. J. Retief, former consul, in\n connection with the assault on two peace keepers and illegal entry into\n the offices of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.\"\n\n\n \"Why, why,\" Miss Meuhl stammered. \"Yes, of course. And I do want to\n express my deepest regrets—\"\nRetief rose, went to the communicator, assisted Miss Meuhl aside.", "\"Just keep that recorder going,\" Retief snapped.\n\n\n \"I'll not be a party—\"\n\n\n \"You'll do as you're told, Miss Meuhl,\" Retief said quietly. \"I'm\n telling you to make an official sealed record of this conversation.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl sat down.\n\n\n Fith puffed out his throat indignantly. \"You reopen an old wound,\n Mr. Consul. It reminds us of certain illegal treatment at Terrestrial\n hands—\"\n\n\n \"Hogwash,\" Retief said. \"That tune went over with my predecessors, but\n it hits a sour note with me.\"\n\n\n \"All our efforts,\" Miss Meuhl said, \"to live down that terrible\n episode! And you—\"", "\"Well!\" Miss Meuhl said. \"May I ask where you'll be if something comes\n up?\"\n\n\n \"I'm going over to the Foreign Office Archives.\"\n\n\n Miss Meuhl blinked behind thick lenses. \"Whatever for?\"\n\n\n Retief looked thoughtfully at Miss Meuhl. \"You've been here on Groac\n for four years, Miss Meuhl. What was behind the coup d'etat that put\n the present government in power?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I haven't pried into—\"\n\n\n \"What about that Terrestrial cruiser? The one that disappeared out this\n way about ten years back?\"\n\n\n \"Mr. Retief, those are just the sort of questions we\navoid\nwith the\n Groaci. I certainly hope you're not thinking of openly intruding—\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"", "\"Tell me, Shluh, what happened to those six Terrestrials after the\n parade was over?\"\nFith made a choked noise and spoke rapidly to Shluh in Groacian. Shluh\n retracted his eyes, shrank down in his chair. Miss Meuhl opened her\n mouth, closed it and blinked rapidly.\n\n\n \"How did they die?\" Retief snapped. \"Did you murder them, cut their\n throats, shoot them or bury them alive? What amusing end did you figure\n out for them? Research, maybe? Cut them open to see what made them\n yell....\"\n\n\n \"No!\" Fith gasped. \"I must correct this terrible false impression at\n once.\"\n\n\n \"False impression, hell,\" Retief said. \"They were Terrans! A simple\n narco-interrogation would get that out of any Groacian who saw the\n parade.\"" ] ]
train	50893	[ "Why was the population of the states along the three Faults so low around the late '40s?", "What could be indicated by the mention in the passage of some newspapers leaving out the question mark regarding \"Only Active Volcano in U.S.?", "Why was the idea of Joseph Schwartzberg regarding the explanation for Kiowa Fault not recognized largely by newspapers?", "How can we interpret Mr. Schwartzberg was feeling from his theory not being taken seriously?", "What could be meant by the Schwartzberg quote in the passage saying that, \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve.\"?", "Why would the band of scientists fear that there might not be pieces to pick up once the affected area population returned?", "Why was mountain climbing prohibited on the Eastern Slope during the time?", "What was the second phase of the natural disaster?", "What was the effect on the Mississippi River after the disaster?", "What is now a similar experience to what was once normal for shipping centers?" ]	[ [ "Flooding from the three Faults was dangerous ", "Sheep farmers were losing ground", "The land was very dry", "It was too difficult to travel the area during that time" ], [ "The newspapers were aiming for dramatic effect by proclaiming it was indeed active", "The newspapers misprinted", "The newspapers were confirming that there was an ongoing eruption", "The newspapers were trying to pass off the dust as smoke from the volcanoes" ], [ "He lacked the credentials needed for such a proclamation", "His information was disproven very early on. ", "His theory lacked the dramatic effect that was desired", "He was not dignified enough to receive the recognition" ], [ "Frustrated because his evidentiary support showed it was logical", "Happy that he might be incorrect and it was only dust", "Disappointed that he had missed his opportunity for scientific acknowledgement. ", "Excited that it could likely be something more exciting" ], [ "The rocks and dust were quickly mixing with water and creating mud.", "The rocks and dust were disappearing.", "The swirling dust and rocks were churning substantially. ", "He was comparing the dust and rocks to a child by their minimal presence. " ], [ "They were doubting the theory by Schwartzberg.", "The damage would be too substantial and there would nothing left to salvage.", "They feared that no one would escape alive. ", "Theft in the area was also on the rise." ], [ "The rocks were shifting too fast and the paths could be confusing", "The flooding was too substantial ", "They feared the danger of rock slides", "Rescue missions were too dangerous due to the sand storms " ], [ "The falling rock that was giving way.", "The dust clouds that were taking over.", "The flock of refugees seeking safety. ", "Annoyingly loud noises that halted progress on rebuilding." ], [ "It has grown substantially.", "It has increased river shipping", "It has merged with the Missouri", "It has diminished to only a fraction of what it once was" ], [ "The Cross-Canada Throughway ", "Traveling ashore to Newport", "Traveling to the Oklahoma Oil Company", "Traveling through the fringe of Kansas" ] ]	[ 3, 1, 3, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s\n geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and\n the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the\n Pecos as far south as Texas.\n\n\n Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was\n suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to\n the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.\n By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults\n were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching\n almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.\n\n\n It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the\n connection. The population of the states affected was in places as\n low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed\n impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere\n else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,\n seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a\n draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at\n about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center\n from the U. S. marched on the land.\nFrom the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River\n in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,\n Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with\n over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water\n had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the\n Louisiana-Mississippi border.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA\nBy ALLAN DANZIG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt has happened a hundred times in the long history\n \nof Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again!\nEveryone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa\n Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting\n to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north\n and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east\n of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about\n all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never\n so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the\n general public.", "Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population\n in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and\n manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created\n axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of\n which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to\n be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American\n west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing\n industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and\n fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made\n its laborious and dusty way west!", "Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of\n the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be\n considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there\n are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the\n Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real\n estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political\n scene.\n\n\n But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile\n when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even\n the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million\n dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy\n today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the\n world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade\n and the ferment of world culture.", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map." ], [ "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte\n River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard\n had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs\n to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day\n as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.", "But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means\n typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north\n under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring,\n into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what\n had been dusty farmland, cities and towns.\n\n\n Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions\n just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of\n western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest\n along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was\n estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives.\n\n\n No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety\n of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished\n from the heart of the North American continent forever.\nIt was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea\n came to America.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl." ], [ "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s\n geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and\n the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the\n Pecos as far south as Texas.\n\n\n Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was\n suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to\n the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.\n By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults\n were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching\n almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.\n\n\n It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the\n connection. The population of the states affected was in places as\n low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed\n impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA\nBy ALLAN DANZIG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt has happened a hundred times in the long history\n \nof Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again!\nEveryone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa\n Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting\n to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north\n and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east\n of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about\n all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never\n so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the\n general public.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte\n River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard\n had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs\n to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day\n as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way." ], [ "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all\n day. \"Not tremors, exactly,\" said the captain of a fishing boat which\n was somehow to ride out the coming flood, \"but like as if the land\n wanted to be somewhere else.\"", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA\nBy ALLAN DANZIG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt has happened a hundred times in the long history\n \nof Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again!\nEveryone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa\n Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting\n to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north\n and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east\n of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about\n all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never\n so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the\n general public.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means\n typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north\n under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring,\n into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what\n had been dusty farmland, cities and towns.\n\n\n Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions\n just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of\n western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest\n along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was\n estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives.\n\n\n No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety\n of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished\n from the heart of the North American continent forever.\nIt was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea\n came to America.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s\n geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and\n the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the\n Pecos as far south as Texas.\n\n\n Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was\n suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to\n the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.\n By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults\n were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching\n almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.\n\n\n It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the\n connection. The population of the states affected was in places as\n low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed\n impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming." ], [ "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all\n day. \"Not tremors, exactly,\" said the captain of a fishing boat which\n was somehow to ride out the coming flood, \"but like as if the land\n wanted to be somewhere else.\"", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA\nBy ALLAN DANZIG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt has happened a hundred times in the long history\n \nof Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again!\nEveryone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa\n Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting\n to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north\n and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east\n of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about\n all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never\n so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the\n general public.", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was\n sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on\n the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be\n rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos\n River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as\n the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most\n terrible sound they had ever heard.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population\n in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and\n manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created\n axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of\n which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to\n be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American\n west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing\n industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and\n fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made\n its laborious and dusty way west!" ], [ "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere\n else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,\n seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a\n draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at\n about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center\n from the U. S. marched on the land.\nFrom the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River\n in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,\n Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with\n over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water\n had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the\n Louisiana-Mississippi border.", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all\n day. \"Not tremors, exactly,\" said the captain of a fishing boat which\n was somehow to ride out the coming flood, \"but like as if the land\n wanted to be somewhere else.\"", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s\n geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and\n the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the\n Pecos as far south as Texas.\n\n\n Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was\n suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to\n the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.\n By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults\n were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching\n almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.\n\n\n It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the\n connection. The population of the states affected was in places as\n low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed\n impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming." ], [ "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "But after a week had gone by, the town of Edison, a good twenty miles\n away from the slides, was still complaining of the dust. Springs was\n going dry, too, apparently from underground disturbances. Not even in\n the Rockies could anyone remember a series of rock slides as bad as\n this.\n\n\n Newspapers in the mountain states gave it a few inches on the front\n page; anything is news in late August. And the geologists became\n interested. Seismologists were reporting unusual activity in the area,\n tremors too severe to be rock slides. Volcanic activity? Specifically,\n a dust volcano? Unusual, they knew, but right on the Kiowa Fault—could\n be.\n\n\n Labor Day crowds read the scientific conjectures with late summer\n lassitude. Sunday supplements ran four-color artists' conceptions of\n the possible volcano. \"Only Active Volcano in U. S.?\" demanded the\n headlines, and some papers even left off the question mark.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "It may seem odd that the simplest explanation was practically not\n mentioned. Only Joseph Schwartzberg, head geographer of the Department\n of the Interior, wondered if the disturbance might not be a settling\n of the Kiowa Fault. His suggestion was mentioned on page nine or ten\n of the Monday newspapers (page 27 of the New York\nTimes\n). The idea\n was not nearly so exciting as a volcano, even a lava-less one, and you\n couldn't draw a very dramatic picture of it.\n\n\n To excuse the other geologists, it must be said that the Kiowa Fault\n had never acted up before. It never sidestepped, never jiggled,\n never, never produced the regular shows of its little sister out in\n California, which almost daily bounced San Francisco or Los Angeles, or\n some place in between. The dust volcano was on the face of it a more\n plausible theory.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte\n River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard\n had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs\n to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day\n as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.", "It was still a matter of academic interest when in the late '40s\n geologists speculated on the relationship between the Kiowa Fault and\n the Conchas Fault farther south, in New Mexico, and which followed the\n Pecos as far south as Texas.\n\n\n Nor was there much in the papers a few years later when it was\n suggested that the Niobrara Fault (just inside and roughly parallel to\n the eastern border of Wyoming) was a northerly extension of the Kiowa.\n By the mid sixties it was definitely established that the three Faults\n were in fact a single line of fissure in the essential rock, stretching\n almost from the Canadian border well south of the New Mexico-Texas line.\n\n\n It is not really surprising that it took so long to figure out the\n connection. The population of the states affected was in places as\n low as five people per square mile! The land was so dry it seemed\n impossible that it could ever be used except for sheep-farming.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA\nBy ALLAN DANZIG\n\n\n Illustrated by WOOD\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine August 1963.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nIt has happened a hundred times in the long history\n \nof Earth—and, sooner or later, will happen again!\nEveryone—all the geologists, at any rate—had known about the Kiowa\n Fault for years. That was before there was anything very interesting\n to know about it. The first survey of Colorado traced its course north\n and south in the narrow valley of Kiowa Creek about twenty miles east\n of Denver; it extended south to the Arkansas River. And that was about\n all even the professionals were interested in knowing. There was never\n so much as a landslide to bring the Fault to the attention of the\n general public.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was\n sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on\n the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be\n rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos\n River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as\n the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most\n terrible sound they had ever heard." ], [ "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "Rock scraped rock with a whining roar. Shuddery as a squeaky piece of\n chalk raked across a blackboard, the noise was deafening. The surfaces\n of the land east and west of the Fault seemed no longer to have any\n relation to each other. To the west, tortured rock reared into cliffs.\n East, where sharp reports and muffled wheezes told of continued\n buckling and dropping, the earth trembled downward. Atop the new\n cliffs, which seemed to grow by sudden inches from heaving rubble, dry\n earth fissured and trembled, sliding acres at a time to fall, smoking,\n into the bucking, heaving bottom of the depression.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was\n sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on\n the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be\n rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos\n River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as\n the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most\n terrible sound they had ever heard.", "The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute\n by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling\n north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine,\n Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered\n through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping\n 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The \"Memphis Tilt\" is today one of\n the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but\n during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed.\nSouth and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma.\n By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves\n advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests\n forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the\n thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.", "As the Fault moved north and south, new areas quivered into unwelcome\n life. Fields and whole mountainsides moved with deceptive sloth down,\n down. They danced \"like sand in a sieve\"; dry, they boiled into rubble.\n Telephone lines, railroad tracks, roads snapped and simply disappeared.\n Virtually all east-west land communication was suspended and the\n President declared a national emergency.\nBy 23 September the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north,\n and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south.\n Trinchera and Branson were totally evacuated, but even so the over-all\n death toll had risen above 1,000.\n\n\n Away to the east the situation was quiet but even more ominous.\n Tremendous fissures opened up perpendicular to the Fault, and a general\n subsidence of the land was noticeable well into Kansas and Nebraska.\n The western borders of these states, and soon of the Dakotas and\n Oklahoma as well, were slowly sinking.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte\n River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard\n had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs\n to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day\n as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.", "Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere\n else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,\n seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a\n draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at\n about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center\n from the U. S. marched on the land.\nFrom the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River\n in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,\n Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with\n over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water\n had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the\n Louisiana-Mississippi border.", "But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means\n typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north\n under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring,\n into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what\n had been dusty farmland, cities and towns.\n\n\n Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions\n just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of\n western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest\n along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was\n estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives.\n\n\n No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety\n of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished\n from the heart of the North American continent forever.\nIt was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea\n came to America.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"" ], [ "The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute\n by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling\n north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine,\n Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered\n through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping\n 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The \"Memphis Tilt\" is today one of\n the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but\n during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed.\nSouth and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma.\n By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves\n advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests\n forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the\n thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge.", "The Fault nicked off the south-east corner of Montana. It worked its\n way north along the Little Missouri. South, it ripped past Roswell, New\n Mexico, and tore down the Pecos toward Texas. All the upper reaches of\n the Missouri were standing puddles by now, and the Red River west of\n Paris, Texas, had begun to run backward.\n\n\n Soon the Missouri began slowly slipping away westward over the slowly\n churning land. Abandoning its bed, the river spread uncertainly across\n farmland and prairie, becoming a sea of mud beneath the sharp new\n cliffs which rose in rending line, ever taller as the land continued to\n sink, almost from Canada to the Mexican border. There were virtually no\n floods, in the usual sense. The water moved too slowly, spread itself\n with no real direction or force. But the vast sheets of sluggish water\n and jelly-like mud formed death-traps for the countless refugees now\n streaming east.", "Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was\n sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on\n the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be\n rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos\n River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as\n the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most\n terrible sound they had ever heard.", "Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere\n else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,\n seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a\n draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at\n about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center\n from the U. S. marched on the land.\nFrom the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River\n in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,\n Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with\n over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water\n had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the\n Louisiana-Mississippi border.", "\"We must keep panic from our minds,\" said the Governor of Alabama in a\n radio message delivered from a hastily arranged all-station hookup. \"We\n of the gallant southland have faced and withstood invasion before.\"\n Then, as ominous creakings and groanings of the earth announced the\n approach of the tidal wave, he flew out of Montgomery half an hour\n before the town disappeared forever.\n\n\n One head of the wave plunged north, eventually to spend itself in\n the hills south of Birmingham. The main sweep followed the lowest\n land. Reaching west, it swallowed Vicksburg and nicked the corner of\n Louisiana. The whole of East Carroll Parish was scoured from the map.", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "There wasn't much to wait for. The news got worse and worse. The Platte\n River, now, was creating a vast mud puddle where the town of Orchard\n had been. Just below Masters, Colorado, the river leaped 70-foot cliffs\n to add to the heaving chaos below. And the cliffs were higher every day\n as the land beneath them groaned downward in mile-square gulps.", "But such lightheartedness and such happy endings were by no means\n typical. The world could only watch aghast as the water raced north\n under the shadow of the cliffs which occasionally crumbled, roaring,\n into the roaring waves. Day by day the relentless rush swallowed what\n had been dusty farmland, cities and towns.\n\n\n Some people were saved by the helicopters which flew mercy missions\n just ahead of the advancing waters. Some found safety in the peaks of\n western Nebraska and the Dakotas. But when the waters came to rest\n along what is roughly the present shoreline of our inland sea, it was\n estimated that over fourteen million people had lost their lives.\n\n\n No one could even estimate the damage to property; almost the entirety\n of eight states, and portions of twelve others, had simply vanished\n from the heart of the North American continent forever.\nIt was in such a cataclysmic birth that the now-peaceful Nebraska Sea\n came to America.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "Washington announced the official hope that the Ozarks would stop the\n wild gallop of the unleashed Gulf, for in northwest Arkansas the land\n rose to over 2,000 feet. But nothing could save Oklahoma. By noon the\n water reached clutching fingers around Mt. Scott and Elk Mountain,\n deluging Hobart and almost all of Greer County.\n\n\n Despite hopeful announcements that the wave was slowing, had virtually\n stopped after inundating Oklahoma City, was being swallowed up in the\n desert near Amarillo, the wall of water continued its advance. For the\n land was still sinking, and the floods were constantly replenished from\n the Gulf. Schwartzberg and his geologists advised the utmost haste in\n evacuating the entire area between Colorado and Missouri, from Texas to\n North Dakota.\n\n\n Lubbock, Texas, went under. On a curling reflex the tidal wave blotted\n out Sweetwater and Big Spring. The Texas panhandle disappeared in one\n great swirl.", "Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily\n unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of\n those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think\n of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential\n curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean,\n it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the\n equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and\n greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark\n Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of\n Dakota.", "the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it\n vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges.\n Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from\n the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was.\n And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of\n shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of\n river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon\n the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "The Arkansas River, at Avondale and North Avondale, was sluggishly\n backing north into the deepening trough. At the rate things were going,\n there might be a new lake the entire length of El Paso and Pueblo\n Counties. And, warned Schwartzberg, this might only be the beginning.\n\n\n By 16 September the landslip had crept down the Huerfano River past\n Cedarwood. Avondale, North Avondale and Boone had totally disappeared.\n Land west of the Fault was holding firm, though Denver had recorded\n several small tremors; everywhere east of the Fault, to almost twenty\n miles away, the now-familiar lurch and steady fall had already sent\n several thousand Coloradans scurrying for safety.\n\n\n All mountain climbing was prohibited on the Eastern Slope because of\n the danger of rock slides from minor quakes. The geologists went home\n to wait.", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "There the devastation was even more thorough, if less spectacular.\n Dry earth churned like mud, and rock shards weighing tons bumped and\n rolled about like pebbles as they shivered and cracked into pebbles\n themselves. \"It looks like sand dancing in a child's sieve,\" said the\n normally impassive Schwartzberg in a nationwide broadcast from the\n scene of disaster. \"No one here has ever seen anything like it.\" And\n the landslip was growing, north and south along the Fault.\n\n\n \"Get out while you can,\" Schwartzberg urged the population of the\n affected area. \"When it's over you can come back and pick up the\n pieces.\" But the band of scientists who had rallied to his leadership\n privately wondered if there would be any pieces.", "Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of\n the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be\n considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there\n are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the\n Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real\n estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political\n scene.\n\n\n But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile\n when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even\n the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million\n dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy\n today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the\n world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade\n and the ferment of world culture.", "our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable\n during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North\n Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana,\n is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent.\nWho today could imagine the United States without the majestic\n sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches\n of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the\n water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the\n afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks\n with the glistening white beaches?\nOf course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong\n gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of" ], [ "It would indeed seem odd to an American of the '50s or '60s of the last\n century to imagine sailors from the merchant fleets of every nation\n walking the streets of Denver, fresh ashore at Newport, only fifteen\n miles away. Or to imagine Lincoln, Fargo, Kansas City and Dallas as\n world ports and great manufacturing centers. Utterly beyond their ken\n would be Roswell, New Mexico; Benton, Wyoming; Westport, Missouri,\n and the other new ports of over a million inhabitants each which have\n developed on the new harbors of the inland sea.", "Fortunately it was decided some years ago that Oklahoma, only one of\n the eight to have completely disappeared, could not in any sense be\n considered to have a continuing political existence. So, though there\n are still families who proudly call themselves Oklahomans, and the\n Oklahoma Oil Company continues to pump oil from its submerged real\n estate, the state has in fact disappeared from the American political\n scene.\n\n\n But this is by now no more than a petty annoyance, to raise a smile\n when the talk gets around to the question of State's Rights. Not even\n the tremendous price the country paid for its new sea—fourteen million\n dead, untold property destroyed—really offsets the asset we enjoy\n today. The heart of the continent, now open to the shipping of the\n world, was once dry and land-locked, cut off from the bustle of trade\n and the ferment of world culture.", "the world. Taken together with its main tributary, the Missouri, it\n vied favorably with such giant systems as the Amazon and the Ganges.\n Now, ending as it does at Memphis and drawing its water chiefly from\n the Appalachian Mountains, it is only a slight remnant of what it was.\n And though the Nebraska Sea today carries many times the tonnage of\n shipping in its ceaseless traffic, we have lost the old romance of\n river shipping. We may only guess what it was like when we look upon\n the Ohio and the truncated Mississippi.", "Unimaginable too would have been the general growth of population\n in the states surrounding the new sea. As the water tables rose and\n manufacturing and trade moved in to take advantage of the just-created\n axis of world communication, a population explosion was touched off of\n which we are only now seeing the diminution. This new westering is to\n be ranked with the first surge of pioneers which created the American\n west. But what a difference! Vacation paradises bloom, a new fishing\n industry thrives; her water road is America's main artery of trade, and\n fleets of all the world sail ... where once the prairie schooner made\n its laborious and dusty way west!", "And transcontinental shipping is somewhat more difficult, with trucks\n and the freight-railroads obliged to take the sea-ferries across the\n Nebraska Sea. We shall never know what the United States was like with\n its numerous coast-to-coast highways busy with trucks and private\n cars. Still, the ferry ride is certainly a welcome break after days of\n driving, and for those who wish a glimpse of what it must have been\n like, there is always the Cross-Canada Throughway and the magnificent\n U. S. Highway 73 looping north through Minnesota and passing through\n the giant port of Alexis, North Dakota, shipping center for the wheat\n of Manitoba and crossroad of a nation.\nThe political situation has long been a thorny problem. Only tattered", "At Biloxi, on the Gulf, there had been uneasy shufflings under foot all\n day. \"Not tremors, exactly,\" said the captain of a fishing boat which\n was somehow to ride out the coming flood, \"but like as if the land\n wanted to be somewhere else.\"", "All through October hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka,\n Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo. St. Louis was made distributing center\n for emergency squads which flew everywhere with milk for babies and\n dog food for evacuating pets. Gasoline trucks boomed west to meet the\n demand for gas, but once inside the \"zone of terror,\" as the newspapers\n now called it, they found their route blocked by eastbound cars on the\n wrong side of the road. Shops left by their fleeing owners were looted\n by refugees from further west; an American Airlines plane was wrecked\n by a mob of would-be passengers in Bismarck, North Dakota. Federal and\n State troops were called out, but moving two million people was not to\n be done in an orderly way.\n\n\n And still the landslip grew larger. The new cliffs gleamed in the\n autumn sunshine, growing higher as the land beneath them continued its\n inexorable descent.", "Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented—and happily\n unrepeated—disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of\n those weeks in October and November, 1973. It is inconceivable to think\n of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential\n curve of interior ocean. Two-thirds as long as the Mediterranean,\n it graduates from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico through the\n equally blue waves of the Mississippi Bight, becoming cooler and\n greener north and west of the pleasant fishing isles of the Ozark\n Archipelago, finally shading into the gray-green chop of the Gulf of\n Dakota.", "Everyone in doomed Biloxi would have done well to have been somewhere\n else that evening. At approximately 8:30 p.m. the town shuddered,\n seemed to rise a little like the edge of a hall carpet caught in a\n draft, and sank. So did the entire Mississippi and Alabama coast, at\n about the same moment. The tidal wave which was to gouge the center\n from the U. S. marched on the land.\nFrom the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain to the Appalachicola River\n in Florida, the Gulf coast simply disappeared. Gulfport, Biloxi,\n Mobile, Pensacola, Panama City: 200 miles of shoreline vanished, with\n over two and a half million people. An hour later a wall of water\n had swept over every town from Dothan, Alabama, to Bogalusa on the\n Louisiana-Mississippi border.", "On the actual scene of the disaster (or the\nscenes\n; it is impossible\n to speak of anything this size in the singular) there was a horrifying\n confusion. Prairie and hill cracked open under intolerable strains as\n the land shuddered downward in gasps and leaps. Springs burst to the\n surface in hot geysers and explosions of steam.\n\n\n The downtown section of North Platte, Nebraska, dropped eight feet,\n just like that, on the afternoon of 4 October. \"We must remain calm,\"\n declared the Governor of Nebraska. \"We must sit this thing out. Be\n assured that everything possible is being done.\" But what could be\n done, with his state dropping straight down at a mean rate of a foot a\n day?", "The water had found its farthest westering. But still it poured north\n along the line of the original Fault. Irresistible fingers closed on\n Sterling, Colorado, on Sidney, Nebraska, on Hot Springs, South Dakota.\n The entire tier of states settled, from south to north, down to its\n eventual place of stability one thousand feet below the level of the\n new sea.\n\n\n Memphis was by now a seaport. The Ozarks, islands in a mad sea, formed\n precarious havens for half-drowned humanity. Waves bit off a corner of\n Missouri, flung themselves on Wichita. Topeka, Lawrence and Belleville\n were the last Kansas towns to disappear. The Governor of Kansas went\n down with his State.\n\n\n Daniel Bernd of Lincoln, Nebraska, was washed up half-drowned in a cove\n of the Wyoming cliffs, having been sucked from one end of vanished\n Nebraska to the other. Similar hair-breadth escapes were recounted on\n radio and television.", "Virtually the only people saved out of the entire population of Pierre,\n South Dakota were the six members of the Creeth family. Plucky Timothy\n Creeth carried and dragged his aged parents to the loft of their barn\n on the outskirts of town. His brother Geoffrey brought along the\n younger children and what provisions they could find—\"Mostly a ham\n and about half a ton of vanilla cookies,\" he explained to his eventual\n rescuers. The barn, luckily collapsing in the vibrations as the waves\n bore down on them, became an ark in which they rode out the disaster.\n\n\n \"We must of played cards for four days straight,\" recalled genial\n Mrs. Creeth when she afterwards appeared on a popular television\n spectacular. Her rural good-humor undamaged by an ordeal few women can\n ever have been called on to face, she added, \"We sure wondered why\n flushes never came out right. Jimanettly, we'd left the king of hearts\n behind, in the rush!\"", "It strikes us today as ironic that from the late '50s there was grave\n concern about the level of the water table throughout the entire area.\nThe even more ironic solution to the problem began in the summer of\n 1973. It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry\n Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could\n expect. Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited\n area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.\n\n\n The report was—no fire at all. The rising cloud was not smoke, but\n dust. Thousands of cubic feet of dry earth rising lazily on the summer\n air. Rock slides, they guessed; certainly no fire. The Forestry Service\n had other worries at the moment, and filed the report.", "The Mississippi River now ended at about Eudora, Arkansas, and minute\n by minute the advancing flood bit away miles of river bed, swelling\n north. Chicot, Jennie, Lake Village, Arkansas City, Snow Lake, Elaine,\n Helena and Memphis felt the tremors. The tormented city shuddered\n through the night. The earth continued its descent, eventually tipping\n 2-1/2 degrees down to the west. The \"Memphis Tilt\" is today one of\n the unique and charming characteristics of the gracious Old Town, but\n during the night of panic Memphis residents were sure they were doomed.\nSouth and west the waters carved deeply into Arkansas and Oklahoma.\n By morning it was plain that all of Arkansas was going under. Waves\n advanced on Little Rock at almost 100 miles an hour, new crests\n forming, overtopping the wave's leading edge as towns, hills and the\n thirst of the soil temporarily broke the furious charge.", "Whirlpools opened. A great welter of smashed wood and human debris was\n sucked under, vomited up and pounded to pieces. Gulf-water crashed on\n the cliffs of New Mexico and fell back on itself in foam. Would-be\n rescuers on the cliffs along what had been the west bank of the Pecos\n River afterwards recalled the hiss and scream like tearing silk as\n the water broke furiously on the newly exposed rock. It was the most\n terrible sound they had ever heard.", "\"We couldn't hear any shouts, of course, not that far away and with all\n the noise,\" said Dan Weaver, Mayor of Carlsbad. \"But we knew there\n were people down there. When the water hit the cliffs, it was like a\n collision between two solid bodies. We couldn't see for over an hour,\n because of the spray.\"\nSalt spray.\nThe ocean had come to New Mexico.\nThe cliffs proved to be the only effective barrier against the westward\n march of the water, which turned north, gouging out lumps of rock and\n tumbling down blocks of earth onto its own back. In places scoops of\n granite came out like ice cream. The present fishing town of Rockport,\n Colorado, is built on a harbor created in such a way.", "Perhaps the North Platte disaster had been more than anyone could take.\n 193 people had died in that one cave-in. Certainly by 7 October it had\n to be officially admitted that there was an exodus of epic proportion.\n Nearly two million people were on the move, and the U. S. was faced\n with a gigantic wave of refugees. Rails, roads and air-lanes were\n jammed with terrified hordes who had left everything behind to crowd\n eastward.", "On 21 October, at Lubbock, Texas, there was a noise variously described\n as a hollow roar, a shriek and a deep musical vibration like a church\n bell. It was simply the tortured rock of the substrata giving way. The\n second phase of the national disaster was beginning.\nThe noise traveled due east at better than 85 miles per hour. In its\n wake the earth to the north \"just seemed to collapse on itself like\n a punctured balloon,\" read one newspaper report. \"Like a cake that's\n failed,\" said a Texarkana housewife who fortunately lived a block\nsouth\nof Thayer Street, where the fissure raced through. There\n was a sigh and a great cloud of dust, and Oklahoma subsided at the\n astounding rate of about six feet per hour.", "Still, it was only a theory. It had to be proved. As the tremors grew\n bigger, along with the affected area, as several towns including\n Edison were shaken to pieces by incredible earthquakes, whole bus- and\n plane-loads of geologists set out for Colorado, without even waiting\n for their university and government department to approve budgets.\n\n\n They found, of course, that Schwartzberg had been perfectly correct.\nThey found themselves on the scene of what was fast becoming the\n most violent and widespread earthquake North America—probably the\n world—has ever seen in historic times. To describe it in the simplest\n terms, land east of the Fault was settling, and at a precipitous rate.", "our second California, was unbelievably muggy, almost uninhabitable\n during the summer months. Our climate today, from Ohio and North\n Carolina to the rich fields of New Mexico and the orchards of Montana,\n is directly ameliorated by the marine heart of the continent.\nWho today could imagine the United States without the majestic\n sea-cliffs in stately parade from New Mexico to Montana? The beaches\n of Wyoming, the American Riviera, where fruit trees grow almost to the\n water's edge? Or incredible Colorado, where the morning skier is the\n afternoon bather, thanks to the monorail connecting the highest peaks\n with the glistening white beaches?\nOf course there have been losses to balance slightly these strong\n gains. The Mississippi was, before 1973, one of the great rivers of" ] ]
train	53016	[ "Who is Beula and what is her connection to the narrator?", "In what room does Captain Hannah barricade himself? ", "What central difference between the planets Gloryanna and Mypore is most important to the story? Why is this significant to Hannah and the narrator?", "What kind of literary device is being used in the story’s title? \n", "What is Ironic about Captain Hannah’s time with the marocca plants? \n", "What is the last step Captain Hannah must conduct in order to deliver successfully fruited plants to Gloryanna. What is the symbolic significance of this? \n", "What does Captain Hannah use as an organic processor? \n", "What does the narrator say Captain Hannah has never been? \n" ]	[ [ "Beula is the narrator’s pet elephant. Her baby belongs to Captain Hannah, linking the two men even though they don’t like each other. \n\n", "Beula is Captain Hannah’s pet elephant. The narrator sold her Captain Hannah years ago, leading to a business relationship between the two men. \n\n", "Beula is Captain Hannah’s pet elephant. Her baby belongs to the narrator, linking the captain and the narrator. \n\n", "Beula is the narrator’s pet elephant. Her baby was sold to Captain Hannah, which led to a business relationship between the two men. \n\n" ], [ "The bathroom of the space bar\n", "The cockpit of the Delta Crucis", "The lobby of the Delta Crucis", "The bathroom of the Delta Crucis \n" ], [ "Mypore has outlawed and eradicated the marocca plants, while Gloryanna continues to cultivate them. Hannah and the narrator think they will be able to make an enormous profit by transporting and selling the plants to Mypore. ", "Gloryanna has outlawed and eradicated the marocca plants, while Mypore continues to to cultivate the plants. Gloryanna’s population is sick of making treks to Mypore just to purchase marocca, so the narrator and Hannah hope to capitalize on their desire by creating a shipping line between Gloryanna and Mypore.", "Gloryanna has outlawed and eradicated the marocca plants, while Mypore continues to to cultivate them. Gloryanna’s population is sick of Myporians trying to sell marocca on their planet, so the narrator and Hannah hope to capitalize on the issue by bringing them to Gloryanna’s black market.", "Gloryanna has outlawed and eradicated the marocca plants, while Mypore continues to cultivate the plants. Hannah and the narrator think they will be able to make an enormous profit by transporting and selling the plants to Gloryanna." ], [ "Metonymy: “Cake Walk” is a literal attribute/adjunct for the part of the ship Captain Hannah grows the marocca in. \n", "Irony: Captain Hannah faces so many trials and tribulations during his time with the plants that his voyage is very much NOT a cakewalk to Gloryanna. \n ", "Metaphor: Cake walk is a metaphor the narrator uses to describe Captain Hannah’s journey once complete. They were both surprised at the venture’s absurd ease. \n", "Euphemism: “Cake walk” is used by the narrator to politely suggest that the plants had their way with Captain Hannah.\n" ], [ "After all Captain Hannah suffers through in order to get to the plants to Gloryanna, it turns out that the Gloryannans have stopped all trade lines. He is asked to leave Gloryannan customs and never return. Hannah suffered for nothing. \n", "After all Captain Hannah suffers through in order to get to the plants to Gloryanna, it turns out that the Gloryannans absolutely detest the plant, and that it is illegal for good reason. The narrator’s plan to earn a profit by selling marocca where they don’t grow was completely wrong. Hannah suffered for nothing.", "After all Captain Hannah suffers through in order to get to the plants to Gloryanna, it turns out that the Myporians are the only people in the solar system who eat its fruit, and that virtually everybody else in the universe is pathologically allergic. ", "After all Captain Hannah suffers through in order to get to the plants to Gloryanna, it turns out that the Gloryannans won’t buy any from him because they are scared of their government. Hannah suffered for nothing. \n" ], [ "Captain Hannah must simulate proper sun exposure in order to ensure the plants’ vines don’t die. Their death would mean no fruit, symbolizing the way in which Hannah’s failure to keep the vines alive is the last possible way in which the narrator’s plan could fail. \n", "Captain Hannah must exterminate all of the spores and bugs before reaching Gloryanna, seeing as the Gloryannans will only accept marocca fruit alone for fear of reinfecting their planet with its spores. It is symbolic that Hannah cannot sell the objects which make the fruit, but only the fruit alone. \n", "Captain Hannah must feed the marocca cuttings from their vines, but only after mulching them through an organic processor. His body turns out to be the only processor on board, meaning Captain Hannah must eat and process the vine clippings with his own body. This symbolizes the kind of will the plants’ have over Hannah—they have inconvenienced him to the extent of his own insides. \n", "Captain Hannah must feed the carollas to the dingleburys, but only after mulching them through an organic processor. His body turns out to be the only processor on board, meaning Captain Hannah must eat and process the bugs with his own body. This symbolizes the kind of will the carollas have over Hannah—they have inconvenienced him to the extent of his own insides. \n" ], [ "A fire pump\n", "The bodies of dead dinglebury bugs\n", "He uses a lamp to simulate the sun’s orbit on the planet Mypore \n", "His own body" ], [ "A gardener \n", "A good pilot \n", "An adequate elephant owner \n", "A handsome man\n" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "\"A\nDelta\nClass freighter can carry almost anything,\" he said at last,\n in a travesty of his usual forceful voice. \"But some things it should\n never try.\"\nHe lapsed back into silence after this uncharacteristic admission. I\n almost felt sorry for him, but just then Beulah came racking across\n the field with her two-ton infant in tow, to show her off to Hannah. I\n walled off my pity. He had foisted those two maudlin mastodons off onto\n me in one of our earlier deals, and if I had somehow been responsible\n for his present troubles, it was no more than he deserved. I rated\n winning for once.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"So for the next several hours I had to keep moving those lights, and\n keep them clear of the vines, and keep the vines from shadowing each\n other to the point where they curled up and died, and I had to do it\ngently\n, surrounded by a bunch of worried dingleburys.\n\n\n \"Every time they got a little too worried, or I slipped and bumped into\n a plant too hard, or looked crosseyed at them, they bit me. If you\n think I look bad now, you should have seen me just about the time the\n blossoms started to burst.\n\n\n \"I was worried about those blossoms. I felt sure that they would smell\n terrible, or make me sick, or hypnotize me, or something. But they just\n turned out to be big, white, odorless flowers. They did nothing for me\n or to me. They drove the dingleburys wild, though, I'm happy to say.\n Made them forget all about me.", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"And it was unnecessary, too. Because apparently the carolla had\n already laid their eggs, or whatever it is that they do, before I\n had fumigated them. After my useless days of agony, a new batch\n came swarming out. And this time there were a few of a much larger\n thing with them—something like an enormous moth. The new thing just\n blundered around aimlessly.\n\n\n \"I lit out for the head again, to keep away from that intolerable\n whining. This time I took a luxurious shower and got rid of most of the\n midges that came through the door with me. I felt almost comfortable,\n in fact, until I resumed my efforts to catch up on my reading.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been\n with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start\n a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to\n cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only\n thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even\n wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It\n was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days\n while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking—at least, it\n was to me.", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep.", "\"But you solved the problem?\"\n\"In a sense,\" said the captain. \"I just emptied the pump back into the\n air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship\n and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a\n good deal while you were working with the tanks?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was\n that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking\n me. So I drew a blank.\"\n\n\n \"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving\n the lights around?\" I asked him. I answered myself at once. \"No. There\n must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet.\"", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed.", "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"The mothlike things—they are called dingleburys—also turn out to\n provide a necessary enzyme. They are supposed to have the same timing\n of their life cycle as the carolla. Apparently the shaking up I had\n given their larvae in moving the tanks and dipping the water up in\n buckets and all that had inhibited them in completing their cycle the\n first time around.\n\n\n \"And the reason they had the same life cycle as the carolla was that\n the adult dinglebury will eat only the adult carolla, and it has to\n fill itself full to bursting before it will reproduce. If I had the\n translation done correctly, they were supposed to dart gracefully\n around, catching carolla on the wing and stuffing themselves happily.", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "He stared at me in silence for a moment. \"Well, it filled the cabin\n with great solid bubbles of water. Water bubbles will oscillate and\n wobble like soap bubbles,\" he went on dreamily, \"but of course,\n they're not empty, like soap bubbles. The surface acts a little like\n a membrane, so that sometimes two of the things will touch and gently\n bounce apart without joining. But just try\ntouching\none of them. You\n could drown—I almost did. Several times.", "\"I had to find out what was wrong with my awkward dingleburys. And\n that, of course, meant going out into the ship again. But I had to do\n that anyway, because it was almost 'daylight', and time for me to start\n shifting the lights again.\n\"The reason for the dingleburys' problem is fairly obvious. When you\n set up artificial gravity by spinning a ship, the gravity is fine down\n near the skin where the plants are. But the gravity potential is very\n high, and it gets very light up where things fly around, going to zero\n on the middle line of the ship. And the unfamiliar gravity gradient,\n together with the Coriolis effect and all, makes the poor dingleburys\n dizzy, so they can't catch carolla.", "\"There was one little catch, of course. The cuttings from the vines\n will poison the plants if they are fed back to them without having been\n mixed with a certain amount of processed mulch. Enzymes again. And\n there was only one special processor on board.\n\n\n \"I was the special processor. That's what the instructions said—I\n translated very carefully—it required an 'organic processor'.\n\n\n \"So I had to eat pounds of that horrible tasting stuff every day, and\n process it the hard way.\n\n\n \"I didn't even have time to scratch my bites. I must have lost weight\n everywhere but in the swollen places, and they looked worse than they\n do now. The doctor says it may take a year before the bumps all go\n away—if they ever do—but I have improved a lot already.", "\"I thought of putting up an electrically charged fence around the\n light, but the bugs had put most of my loose equipment out of action,\n so I got a machete. When I took a swing at one of the vines, something\n bit me on the back of the neck so hard it almost knocked me down. It\n was one of the dingleburys, and it was as mad as blazes. It seems that\n one of the things they do is to defend the marocca against marauders.\n That was the first of my welts, and it put me back in the head in\n about two seconds.\n\n\n \"And what's more, I found that I couldn't kill the damn things. Not if\n I wanted to save the plants. The growth only stops at the end of six\n hours, after the blossoms appear and are visited by the dingleburys. No\n dingleburys, no growth stoppage." ], [ "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"But you solved the problem?\"\n\"In a sense,\" said the captain. \"I just emptied the pump back into the\n air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship\n and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a\n good deal while you were working with the tanks?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was\n that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking\n me. So I drew a blank.\"\n\n\n \"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving\n the lights around?\" I asked him. I answered myself at once. \"No. There\n must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet.\"", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"Not yet,\" said Captain Hannah. \"Like you, I figured I had the\n situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought\n things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the\n tanks in board the\nDelta Crucis\n. It never occurred to me to hunt\n around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to\n hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.\n\n\n \"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade\n mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their\n larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped\n tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal\n stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their\n habits. And now they were mature.\n\n\n \"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made\n a tiny, maddening whine as it flew.\"", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "\"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after\n running some remote controls into there, and then started the\n fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much\n to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions.\n It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges—the\n correct word is carolla—are a necessary part of the life cycle of the\n marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.\n\n\n \"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges\n that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change\n the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late\n before I started, and for once I was right.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep.", "\"And it was unnecessary, too. Because apparently the carolla had\n already laid their eggs, or whatever it is that they do, before I\n had fumigated them. After my useless days of agony, a new batch\n came swarming out. And this time there were a few of a much larger\n thing with them—something like an enormous moth. The new thing just\n blundered around aimlessly.\n\n\n \"I lit out for the head again, to keep away from that intolerable\n whining. This time I took a luxurious shower and got rid of most of the\n midges that came through the door with me. I felt almost comfortable,\n in fact, until I resumed my efforts to catch up on my reading.", "\"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been\n with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start\n a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to\n cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only\n thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even\n wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It\n was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days\n while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking—at least, it\n was to me.", "He stared at me in silence for a moment. \"Well, it filled the cabin\n with great solid bubbles of water. Water bubbles will oscillate and\n wobble like soap bubbles,\" he went on dreamily, \"but of course,\n they're not empty, like soap bubbles. The surface acts a little like\n a membrane, so that sometimes two of the things will touch and gently\n bounce apart without joining. But just try\ntouching\none of them. You\n could drown—I almost did. Several times.", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"We couldn't,\" I protested. \"The Myporians gave us a deadline. If\n we had gone through all of that rigamarole, we would have lost the\n franchise. Besides, they gave you full written instructions about what\n to do under all possible circumstances.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Written in Myporian. A very difficult language to translate.\n Especially when you're barricaded in the head.\"\n\n\n I almost asked him why he had been barricaded in the bathroom of the\nDelta Crucis\n, but I figured it was safer to let him tell me in his\n own way, in his own time.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"I got into parking orbit around Mypore without any\n trouble. The plastic film kept the water in the hydroponic tanks\n without any trouble, even in a no-gravity condition. And by the time I\n had lined up for Gloryanna and Jumped, I figured, like you said, that\n the trip would be a cakewalk." ], [ "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"We couldn't,\" I protested. \"The Myporians gave us a deadline. If\n we had gone through all of that rigamarole, we would have lost the\n franchise. Besides, they gave you full written instructions about what\n to do under all possible circumstances.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Written in Myporian. A very difficult language to translate.\n Especially when you're barricaded in the head.\"\n\n\n I almost asked him why he had been barricaded in the bathroom of the\nDelta Crucis\n, but I figured it was safer to let him tell me in his\n own way, in his own time.\n\n\n \"Well,\" he said, \"I got into parking orbit around Mypore without any\n trouble. The plastic film kept the water in the hydroponic tanks\n without any trouble, even in a no-gravity condition. And by the time I\n had lined up for Gloryanna and Jumped, I figured, like you said, that\n the trip would be a cakewalk.", "He said, \"They made me burn the entire crop right away, of course. They\n didn't get all of the carolla or dingleburys, though. Or spores.\"\n\"Gloryanna III is the original home planet of marocca. They hated the\n stuff, of course, but they liked the profit. Then, when a plague almost\n wiped out the dingleburys, they introduced khorram furs as a cash\n crop. It wasn't as lucrative, but it was so much more pleasant that\n they outlawed marocca. Took them almost fifty years to stamp it out\n completely. Meanwhile, some clever native shipped a load of the stuff\n to Mypore II. He took his time, did it without any trouble and made his\n fortune. And got out again quickly.\n\n\n \"The Gloryannans were going to hold my\nDelta Crucis\nas security to\n pay for the cost of stamping out marocca all over again—those spores\n sprout fast—and for a time I was worried.", "\"You think so? That solution was one of yours, too, wasn't it?\" He\n gazed moodily at his beaker of rhial. \"I must admit it sounded good\n to me, too. In Limbo, moving at multiple light-speeds, the whole\n Universe, of course, turns into a bright glowing spot in our direction\n of motion, with everything else dark. So I lined up the\nDelta Crucis\nperpendicular to her direction of motion, put a once-every-twenty-one\n hour spin on her to match the rotation rates of Mypore II and Gloryanna\n III, and uncovered the view ports to let in the light. It gradually\n brightened until 'noon time', with the ports pointing straight at the\n light source, and then dimmed until we had ten and one-half hours of\n darkness.\n\n\n \"Of course, it didn't work.\"\n\"For Heaven's sake, why not?\"", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely.", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "\"I had to find out what was wrong with my awkward dingleburys. And\n that, of course, meant going out into the ship again. But I had to do\n that anyway, because it was almost 'daylight', and time for me to start\n shifting the lights again.\n\"The reason for the dingleburys' problem is fairly obvious. When you\n set up artificial gravity by spinning a ship, the gravity is fine down\n near the skin where the plants are. But the gravity potential is very\n high, and it gets very light up where things fly around, going to zero\n on the middle line of the ship. And the unfamiliar gravity gradient,\n together with the Coriolis effect and all, makes the poor dingleburys\n dizzy, so they can't catch carolla.", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "\"I got up with the sun the next morning. Hell, I had to, considering\n that it was I who turned the sun on! I found that the dingleburys\n immediately got busy opening small buds on the stems of the marocca\n plants. Apparently they were pollinating them. I felt sure that these\n buds weren't the marocca blossoms from which the fruit formed—I'd\n seen a lot of those while we were on Mypore II and they were much\n bigger and showier than these little acorn-sized buds.\n\n\n \"Of course, I should have translated some more of my instruction book,\n but I was busy.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after\n running some remote controls into there, and then started the\n fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much\n to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions.\n It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges—the\n correct word is carolla—are a necessary part of the life cycle of the\n marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.\n\n\n \"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges\n that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change\n the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late\n before I started, and for once I was right.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep." ], [ "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"So for the next several hours I had to keep moving those lights, and\n keep them clear of the vines, and keep the vines from shadowing each\n other to the point where they curled up and died, and I had to do it\ngently\n, surrounded by a bunch of worried dingleburys.\n\n\n \"Every time they got a little too worried, or I slipped and bumped into\n a plant too hard, or looked crosseyed at them, they bit me. If you\n think I look bad now, you should have seen me just about the time the\n blossoms started to burst.\n\n\n \"I was worried about those blossoms. I felt sure that they would smell\n terrible, or make me sick, or hypnotize me, or something. But they just\n turned out to be big, white, odorless flowers. They did nothing for me\n or to me. They drove the dingleburys wild, though, I'm happy to say.\n Made them forget all about me.", "\"But you solved the problem?\"\n\"In a sense,\" said the captain. \"I just emptied the pump back into the\n air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship\n and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a\n good deal while you were working with the tanks?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was\n that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking\n me. So I drew a blank.\"\n\n\n \"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving\n the lights around?\" I asked him. I answered myself at once. \"No. There\n must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet.\"", "\"I had to find out what was wrong with my awkward dingleburys. And\n that, of course, meant going out into the ship again. But I had to do\n that anyway, because it was almost 'daylight', and time for me to start\n shifting the lights again.\n\"The reason for the dingleburys' problem is fairly obvious. When you\n set up artificial gravity by spinning a ship, the gravity is fine down\n near the skin where the plants are. But the gravity potential is very\n high, and it gets very light up where things fly around, going to zero\n on the middle line of the ship. And the unfamiliar gravity gradient,\n together with the Coriolis effect and all, makes the poor dingleburys\n dizzy, so they can't catch carolla.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"And it was unnecessary, too. Because apparently the carolla had\n already laid their eggs, or whatever it is that they do, before I\n had fumigated them. After my useless days of agony, a new batch\n came swarming out. And this time there were a few of a much larger\n thing with them—something like an enormous moth. The new thing just\n blundered around aimlessly.\n\n\n \"I lit out for the head again, to keep away from that intolerable\n whining. This time I took a luxurious shower and got rid of most of the\n midges that came through the door with me. I felt almost comfortable,\n in fact, until I resumed my efforts to catch up on my reading.", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "\"A\nDelta\nClass freighter can carry almost anything,\" he said at last,\n in a travesty of his usual forceful voice. \"But some things it should\n never try.\"\nHe lapsed back into silence after this uncharacteristic admission. I\n almost felt sorry for him, but just then Beulah came racking across\n the field with her two-ton infant in tow, to show her off to Hannah. I\n walled off my pity. He had foisted those two maudlin mastodons off onto\n me in one of our earlier deals, and if I had somehow been responsible\n for his present troubles, it was no more than he deserved. I rated\n winning for once.", "\"The mothlike things—they are called dingleburys—also turn out to\n provide a necessary enzyme. They are supposed to have the same timing\n of their life cycle as the carolla. Apparently the shaking up I had\n given their larvae in moving the tanks and dipping the water up in\n buckets and all that had inhibited them in completing their cycle the\n first time around.\n\n\n \"And the reason they had the same life cycle as the carolla was that\n the adult dinglebury will eat only the adult carolla, and it has to\n fill itself full to bursting before it will reproduce. If I had the\n translation done correctly, they were supposed to dart gracefully\n around, catching carolla on the wing and stuffing themselves happily.", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "He said, \"They made me burn the entire crop right away, of course. They\n didn't get all of the carolla or dingleburys, though. Or spores.\"\n\"Gloryanna III is the original home planet of marocca. They hated the\n stuff, of course, but they liked the profit. Then, when a plague almost\n wiped out the dingleburys, they introduced khorram furs as a cash\n crop. It wasn't as lucrative, but it was so much more pleasant that\n they outlawed marocca. Took them almost fifty years to stamp it out\n completely. Meanwhile, some clever native shipped a load of the stuff\n to Mypore II. He took his time, did it without any trouble and made his\n fortune. And got out again quickly.\n\n\n \"The Gloryannans were going to hold my\nDelta Crucis\nas security to\n pay for the cost of stamping out marocca all over again—those spores\n sprout fast—and for a time I was worried.", "\"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been\n with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start\n a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to\n cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only\n thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even\n wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It\n was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days\n while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking—at least, it\n was to me.", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"You think so? That solution was one of yours, too, wasn't it?\" He\n gazed moodily at his beaker of rhial. \"I must admit it sounded good\n to me, too. In Limbo, moving at multiple light-speeds, the whole\n Universe, of course, turns into a bright glowing spot in our direction\n of motion, with everything else dark. So I lined up the\nDelta Crucis\nperpendicular to her direction of motion, put a once-every-twenty-one\n hour spin on her to match the rotation rates of Mypore II and Gloryanna\n III, and uncovered the view ports to let in the light. It gradually\n brightened until 'noon time', with the ports pointing straight at the\n light source, and then dimmed until we had ten and one-half hours of\n darkness.\n\n\n \"Of course, it didn't work.\"\n\"For Heaven's sake, why not?\"", "He stared at me in silence for a moment. \"Well, it filled the cabin\n with great solid bubbles of water. Water bubbles will oscillate and\n wobble like soap bubbles,\" he went on dreamily, \"but of course,\n they're not empty, like soap bubbles. The surface acts a little like\n a membrane, so that sometimes two of the things will touch and gently\n bounce apart without joining. But just try\ntouching\none of them. You\n could drown—I almost did. Several times.", "\"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after\n running some remote controls into there, and then started the\n fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much\n to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions.\n It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges—the\n correct word is carolla—are a necessary part of the life cycle of the\n marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.\n\n\n \"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges\n that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change\n the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late\n before I started, and for once I was right.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me." ], [ "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"I thought of putting up an electrically charged fence around the\n light, but the bugs had put most of my loose equipment out of action,\n so I got a machete. When I took a swing at one of the vines, something\n bit me on the back of the neck so hard it almost knocked me down. It\n was one of the dingleburys, and it was as mad as blazes. It seems that\n one of the things they do is to defend the marocca against marauders.\n That was the first of my welts, and it put me back in the head in\n about two seconds.\n\n\n \"And what's more, I found that I couldn't kill the damn things. Not if\n I wanted to save the plants. The growth only stops at the end of six\n hours, after the blossoms appear and are visited by the dingleburys. No\n dingleburys, no growth stoppage.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "\"So for the next several hours I had to keep moving those lights, and\n keep them clear of the vines, and keep the vines from shadowing each\n other to the point where they curled up and died, and I had to do it\ngently\n, surrounded by a bunch of worried dingleburys.\n\n\n \"Every time they got a little too worried, or I slipped and bumped into\n a plant too hard, or looked crosseyed at them, they bit me. If you\n think I look bad now, you should have seen me just about the time the\n blossoms started to burst.\n\n\n \"I was worried about those blossoms. I felt sure that they would smell\n terrible, or make me sick, or hypnotize me, or something. But they just\n turned out to be big, white, odorless flowers. They did nothing for me\n or to me. They drove the dingleburys wild, though, I'm happy to say.\n Made them forget all about me.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after\n running some remote controls into there, and then started the\n fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much\n to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions.\n It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges—the\n correct word is carolla—are a necessary part of the life cycle of the\n marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.\n\n\n \"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges\n that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change\n the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late\n before I started, and for once I was right.", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely.", "\"I got up with the sun the next morning. Hell, I had to, considering\n that it was I who turned the sun on! I found that the dingleburys\n immediately got busy opening small buds on the stems of the marocca\n plants. Apparently they were pollinating them. I felt sure that these\n buds weren't the marocca blossoms from which the fruit formed—I'd\n seen a lot of those while we were on Mypore II and they were much\n bigger and showier than these little acorn-sized buds.\n\n\n \"Of course, I should have translated some more of my instruction book,\n but I was busy.", "\"Not yet,\" said Captain Hannah. \"Like you, I figured I had the\n situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought\n things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the\n tanks in board the\nDelta Crucis\n. It never occurred to me to hunt\n around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to\n hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.\n\n\n \"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade\n mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their\n larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped\n tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal\n stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their\n habits. And now they were mature.\n\n\n \"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made\n a tiny, maddening whine as it flew.\"", "He said, \"They made me burn the entire crop right away, of course. They\n didn't get all of the carolla or dingleburys, though. Or spores.\"\n\"Gloryanna III is the original home planet of marocca. They hated the\n stuff, of course, but they liked the profit. Then, when a plague almost\n wiped out the dingleburys, they introduced khorram furs as a cash\n crop. It wasn't as lucrative, but it was so much more pleasant that\n they outlawed marocca. Took them almost fifty years to stamp it out\n completely. Meanwhile, some clever native shipped a load of the stuff\n to Mypore II. He took his time, did it without any trouble and made his\n fortune. And got out again quickly.\n\n\n \"The Gloryannans were going to hold my\nDelta Crucis\nas security to\n pay for the cost of stamping out marocca all over again—those spores\n sprout fast—and for a time I was worried.", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed." ], [ "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed.", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "\"So for the next several hours I had to keep moving those lights, and\n keep them clear of the vines, and keep the vines from shadowing each\n other to the point where they curled up and died, and I had to do it\ngently\n, surrounded by a bunch of worried dingleburys.\n\n\n \"Every time they got a little too worried, or I slipped and bumped into\n a plant too hard, or looked crosseyed at them, they bit me. If you\n think I look bad now, you should have seen me just about the time the\n blossoms started to burst.\n\n\n \"I was worried about those blossoms. I felt sure that they would smell\n terrible, or make me sick, or hypnotize me, or something. But they just\n turned out to be big, white, odorless flowers. They did nothing for me\n or to me. They drove the dingleburys wild, though, I'm happy to say.\n Made them forget all about me.", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"Anyway, the action of the dingleburys triggered the violent growth\n phase of the marocca plants. Did you know that they plant marocca\n seedlings, back on Mypore II,\nat least\na hundred feet apart? If\n you'll recall, a mature field, which was the only kind we ever saw, is\n one solid mass of green growth.\n\"The book says that it takes just six hours for a marocca field to\n shift from the seedling stage to the mature stage. It didn't seem that\n long. You could\nwatch\nthe stuff grow—groping and crawling along; one\n plant twining with another as they climbed toward the light.\n\n\n \"It was then that I began to get worried. If they twined around the\n light, they would keep me from moving it, and they would shadow it so\n it wouldn't do its job right. In effect, their growth would put out the\n sun.", "He said, \"They made me burn the entire crop right away, of course. They\n didn't get all of the carolla or dingleburys, though. Or spores.\"\n\"Gloryanna III is the original home planet of marocca. They hated the\n stuff, of course, but they liked the profit. Then, when a plague almost\n wiped out the dingleburys, they introduced khorram furs as a cash\n crop. It wasn't as lucrative, but it was so much more pleasant that\n they outlawed marocca. Took them almost fifty years to stamp it out\n completely. Meanwhile, some clever native shipped a load of the stuff\n to Mypore II. He took his time, did it without any trouble and made his\n fortune. And got out again quickly.\n\n\n \"The Gloryannans were going to hold my\nDelta Crucis\nas security to\n pay for the cost of stamping out marocca all over again—those spores\n sprout fast—and for a time I was worried.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"I got up with the sun the next morning. Hell, I had to, considering\n that it was I who turned the sun on! I found that the dingleburys\n immediately got busy opening small buds on the stems of the marocca\n plants. Apparently they were pollinating them. I felt sure that these\n buds weren't the marocca blossoms from which the fruit formed—I'd\n seen a lot of those while we were on Mypore II and they were much\n bigger and showier than these little acorn-sized buds.\n\n\n \"Of course, I should have translated some more of my instruction book,\n but I was busy.", "\"I thought of putting up an electrically charged fence around the\n light, but the bugs had put most of my loose equipment out of action,\n so I got a machete. When I took a swing at one of the vines, something\n bit me on the back of the neck so hard it almost knocked me down. It\n was one of the dingleburys, and it was as mad as blazes. It seems that\n one of the things they do is to defend the marocca against marauders.\n That was the first of my welts, and it put me back in the head in\n about two seconds.\n\n\n \"And what's more, I found that I couldn't kill the damn things. Not if\n I wanted to save the plants. The growth only stops at the end of six\n hours, after the blossoms appear and are visited by the dingleburys. No\n dingleburys, no growth stoppage.", "\"Not yet,\" said Captain Hannah. \"Like you, I figured I had the\n situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought\n things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the\n tanks in board the\nDelta Crucis\n. It never occurred to me to hunt\n around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to\n hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.\n\n\n \"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade\n mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their\n larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped\n tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal\n stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their\n habits. And now they were mature.\n\n\n \"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made\n a tiny, maddening whine as it flew.\"", "\"A\nDelta\nClass freighter can carry almost anything,\" he said at last,\n in a travesty of his usual forceful voice. \"But some things it should\n never try.\"\nHe lapsed back into silence after this uncharacteristic admission. I\n almost felt sorry for him, but just then Beulah came racking across\n the field with her two-ton infant in tow, to show her off to Hannah. I\n walled off my pity. He had foisted those two maudlin mastodons off onto\n me in one of our earlier deals, and if I had somehow been responsible\n for his present troubles, it was no more than he deserved. I rated\n winning for once.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely." ], [ "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "\"Not yet,\" said Captain Hannah. \"Like you, I figured I had the\n situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought\n things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the\n tanks in board the\nDelta Crucis\n. It never occurred to me to hunt\n around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to\n hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.\n\n\n \"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade\n mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their\n larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped\n tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal\n stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their\n habits. And now they were mature.\n\n\n \"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made\n a tiny, maddening whine as it flew.\"", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"There was one little catch, of course. The cuttings from the vines\n will poison the plants if they are fed back to them without having been\n mixed with a certain amount of processed mulch. Enzymes again. And\n there was only one special processor on board.\n\n\n \"I was the special processor. That's what the instructions said—I\n translated very carefully—it required an 'organic processor'.\n\n\n \"So I had to eat pounds of that horrible tasting stuff every day, and\n process it the hard way.\n\n\n \"I didn't even have time to scratch my bites. I must have lost weight\n everywhere but in the swollen places, and they looked worse than they\n do now. The doctor says it may take a year before the bumps all go\n away—if they ever do—but I have improved a lot already.", "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"But you solved the problem?\"\n\"In a sense,\" said the captain. \"I just emptied the pump back into the\n air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship\n and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a\n good deal while you were working with the tanks?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was\n that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking\n me. So I drew a blank.\"\n\n\n \"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving\n the lights around?\" I asked him. I answered myself at once. \"No. There\n must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet.\"", "\"I couldn't figure whether to turn up the fans and dissipate the\n cloud—by spreading it all through the ship—or whether to try to block\n off the other plant room, and save it at least. So I ended up by not\n doing anything, which was the right thing to do. No more plants died\n from the DDT.\n\"So then I did a few experiments, and found that the regular poison\n spray in the ship's fumigation system worked just fine. It killed\n the bugs without doing the plants any harm at all. Of course, the\n fumigation system is designed to work with the fumigator off the ship,\n because it's poisonous to humans too.", "\"I finally blocked the vents and the door edges in the head, after\n running some remote controls into there, and then started the\n fumigation system going. While I was sitting there with nothing much\n to do, I tried to translate what I could of the Myporian instructions.\n It was on page eleven that it mentioned casually that the midges—the\n correct word is carolla—are a necessary part of the life cycle of the\n marocca. The larvae provide an enzyme without which the plants die.\n\n\n \"Of course. I immediately stopped slapping at the relatively few midges\n that had made their way into the head with me, and started to change\n the air in the ship to get rid of the poison. I knew it was too late\n before I started, and for once I was right.", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep.", "\"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been\n with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start\n a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to\n cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only\n thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even\n wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It\n was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days\n while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking—at least, it\n was to me." ], [ "Although he has never been a handsome man, he usually has the\n weathered and austere dignity that comes from plying the remote reaches\n among the stars. Call it the Look of Eagles. Captain Hannah had lost\n the Look of Eagles. His eyes were swollen almost shut; every inch of\n him that showed was a red mass of welts piled on more welts, as though\n he had tangled with a hive of misanthropic bees. The gold-braided hat\n of his trade was not clamped in its usual belligerent position slightly\n over one eye. It was riding high on his head, apparently held up by\n more of the ubiquitous swellings.\n\n\n I figured that he figured that I had something to do with the way he\n looked.\n\n\n \"Shipping marocca to Gloryanna III didn't turn out to be a cakewalk\n after all?\" I suggested.\n\n\n He glared at me in silence.", "only trouble was—the cargo had a will of its own!\nCaptain Hannah climbed painfully down from the\nDelta Crucis\n, hobbled\n across the spaceport to where Beulah and I were waiting to greet him\n and hit me in the eye. Beulah—that's his elephant, but I have to take\n care of her for him because Beulah's baby belongs to me and Beulah has\n to take care of it—kept us apart until we both cooled down a little.\n Then, although still somewhat dubious about it, she let us go together\n across the field to the spaceport bar.\n\n\n I didn't ask Captain Hannah why he had socked me.", "\"Perhaps you would like a drink first, and then you would be willing to\n tell me about it?\"\n\n\n I decided that his wince was intended for a nod, and ordered rhial.\n I only drink rhial when I've been exposed to Captain Hannah. It was\n almost a pleasure to think that\nI\nwas responsible, for a change, for\n having\nhim\ntake the therapy.", "\"And they are growing all right?\" I persisted.\n\n\n \"When I left, marocca was growing like mad,\" said Captain Hannah.\n\n\n I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. I no longer felt the need of\n rhial for myself. \"Tell me about it,\" I suggested.\n\"It was you who said that we should carry those damn plants to\n Gloryanna III,\" he said balefully. \"I ought to black your other eye.\"", "\"And if you think I figured all that out about dingleburys getting\n dizzy at the time, in that madhouse of a ship, then you're crazy. What\n happened was that I saw that there was one of the creatures that didn't\n seem to be having any trouble, but was acting like the book said it\n should. I caught it and examined it. The poor thing was blind, and was\n capturing her prey by sound alone.\n\n\n \"So I spent the whole day—along with my usual chore of shifting the\n lights—blindfolding dingleburys. Which is a hell of a sport for a man\n who is captain of his own ship.\"\n\n\n I must say that I agreed with him, but it seemed to be a good time for\n me to keep my mouth shut.", "\"Of course, when I showed them our contract—that you alone were\n responsible for everything once I landed the plants safely on Gloryanna\n III, they let me go.\n\n\n \"They'll send you the bill. They don't figure it will take them more\n than a few months to complete the job.\"\n\n\n Captain Hannah stopped talking and stood up, painfully and a little\n unsteadily.\n\n\n I'm afraid I didn't even notice when he blacked my other eye. I was too\n busy reaching for the rhial.\nEND", "\"You\ndid\nsucceed in getting the marocca to Gloryanna III?\" I asked\n anxiously, after the elephants had been admired and sent back home.\n The success of that venture—even if the job had turned out to be more\n difficult than we had expected—meant an enormous profit to both of\n us. The fruit of the marocca is delicious and fabulously expensive.\n The plant grew only on the single planet Mypore II. Transshipped seeds\n invariably failed to germinate, which explained its rarity.\n\n\n The Myporians were usually, and understandably, bitterly, opposed to\n letting any of the living plants get shipped off their planet. But when\n I offered them a sizable piece of cash plus a perpetual share of the\n profits for letting us take a load of marocca plants to Gloryanna III,\n they relented and, for the first time in history, gave their assent. In\n fact, they had seemed delighted.\n\n\n \"I got them there safely,\" said Captain Hannah.", "\"But you solved the problem?\"\n\"In a sense,\" said the captain. \"I just emptied the pump back into the\n air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship\n and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket.\"\n\n\n \"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a\n good deal while you were working with the tanks?\"\n\n\n He shrugged. \"I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was\n that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking\n me. So I drew a blank.\"\n\n\n \"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving\n the lights around?\" I asked him. I answered myself at once. \"No. There\n must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet.\"", "\"By that time, though, an occasional sneezing fit and watering eyes\n didn't bother me any. I was far beyond the point where hay fever could\n add to my troubles.\n\n\n \"When I opened the airlock door, though, the spores drifting outside\n set the customs inspectors to sneezing and swearing more than seemed\n reasonable at the time.\" Captain Hannah inhaled a sip of rhial, and\n seemed to be enjoying the powerful stuff. He acted as if he thought he\n had finished.\n\n\n \"Well, go on,\" I urged him. \"The marocca plants were still in good\n shape, weren't they?\"\n\n\n Hannah nodded. \"They were growing luxuriously.\" He nodded his head a\n couple of more times, in spite of the discomfort it must have given\n him.", "\"Not yet,\" said Captain Hannah. \"Like you, I figured I had the\n situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought\n things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the\n tanks in board the\nDelta Crucis\n. It never occurred to me to hunt\n around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to\n hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.\n\n\n \"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade\n mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their\n larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped\n tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal\n stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their\n habits. And now they were mature.\n\n\n \"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made\n a tiny, maddening whine as it flew.\"", "\"Simmer down and have some more rhial,\" I told him. \"Sure I get the\n credit for that. Gloryanna III is almost a twin to Mypore II. You know\n that marocca takes a very special kind of environment. Bright sun most\n of the time—that means an almost cloudless environment. A very equable\n climate. Days and nights the same length and no seasons—that means no\n ecliptical and no axial tilt. But our tests showed that the plants had\n enough tolerance to cause no trouble in the trip in\nDelta Crucis\n.\" A\n light dawned. \"Our tests were no good?\"\n\n\n \"Your tests were no good,\" agreed the captain with feeling. \"I'll tell\n you about it first, and\nthen\nI'll black your other eye,\" he decided.\n\n\n \"You'll remember that I warned you that we should take some marocca\n out into space and solve any problems we might find before committing\n ourselves to hauling a full load of it?\" asked Captain Hannah.", "\"A\nDelta\nClass freighter can carry almost anything,\" he said at last,\n in a travesty of his usual forceful voice. \"But some things it should\n never try.\"\nHe lapsed back into silence after this uncharacteristic admission. I\n almost felt sorry for him, but just then Beulah came racking across\n the field with her two-ton infant in tow, to show her off to Hannah. I\n walled off my pity. He had foisted those two maudlin mastodons off onto\n me in one of our earlier deals, and if I had somehow been responsible\n for his present troubles, it was no more than he deserved. I rated\n winning for once.", "\"The only live midges left in the ship were the ones that had been\n with me during the fumigation process. I immediately tried to start\n a breeding ground for midges, but the midges didn't seem to want to\n cooperate. Whatever I tried to do, they came back to me. I was the only\n thing they seemed to love. I didn't dare bathe, or scratch, or even\n wriggle, for fear of killing more of them. And they kept on itching. It\n was just about unbearable, but I bore it for three interminable days\n while the midges died one by one. It was heartbreaking—at least, it\n was to me.", "\"Well, after the dingleburys had eaten and propagated, they became\n inquisitive. They explored the whole ship, going into places I wouldn't\n have believed it to be possible for them to reach, including the inside\n of the main computer, which promptly shorted out. I finally figured\n that one of the things had managed to crawl up the cooling air exhaust\n duct, against the flow of air, to see what was going on inside.\n\n\n \"I didn't dare to get rid of the things without checking my book, of\n course, so it was back to the head for me. 'Night' had come again—and\n it was the only place I could get any privacy. There were plenty of the\n carolla left to join me outside.\n\n\n \"I showered and swatted and started to read. I got as far as where it\n said that the dingleburys continued to be of importance, and then I'm\n afraid I fell asleep.", "\"So for the next several hours I had to keep moving those lights, and\n keep them clear of the vines, and keep the vines from shadowing each\n other to the point where they curled up and died, and I had to do it\ngently\n, surrounded by a bunch of worried dingleburys.\n\n\n \"Every time they got a little too worried, or I slipped and bumped into\n a plant too hard, or looked crosseyed at them, they bit me. If you\n think I look bad now, you should have seen me just about the time the\n blossoms started to burst.\n\n\n \"I was worried about those blossoms. I felt sure that they would smell\n terrible, or make me sick, or hypnotize me, or something. But they just\n turned out to be big, white, odorless flowers. They did nothing for me\n or to me. They drove the dingleburys wild, though, I'm happy to say.\n Made them forget all about me.", "He stared at me in silence for a moment. \"Well, it filled the cabin\n with great solid bubbles of water. Water bubbles will oscillate and\n wobble like soap bubbles,\" he went on dreamily, \"but of course,\n they're not empty, like soap bubbles. The surface acts a little like\n a membrane, so that sometimes two of the things will touch and gently\n bounce apart without joining. But just try\ntouching\none of them. You\n could drown—I almost did. Several times.", "\"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how\n were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be\n moving?\"\n\n\n \"So what did you do?\" I asked, when that had sunk in. \"If the stem\n doesn't keep winding, the plants die; and they can only take a few\n extra hours of night time before they run down.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" said Captain Hannah in quiet tones of controlled desperation, \"it\n was very simple. I just put enough spin on the ship to make artificial\n gravity, and then I strung a light and moved it every fifteen minutes\n for ten and one-half hours, until I had gone halfway around the room.\n Then I could turn the light off and rest for ten and one-half hours.\n The plants liked it fine.", "\"Of course, first I had to move all the hydroponic tanks from their\n original positions perpendicular to the axial thrust line of the ship\n to a radial position. And because somehow we had picked up half of\n the plants in the northern hemisphere of Mypore and the other half in\n the southern hemisphere, it turned out that half of the plants had a\n sinistral corkscrew and the other half had a dextral. So I had to set\n the plants up in two different rooms, and run an artificial sun for\n each, going clockwise with one, widdershins with the other.\n\n\n \"I won't even talk about what I went through while I was shifting the\n hydroponic tanks, when all the plastic membranes that were supposed to\n keep the water in place started to break.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to know,\" I said sincerely.", "\"While they were having their orgy, I caught up on my reading. It\n was necessary for me to cut back the marocca vines. For one thing,\n I couldn't get up to the area of the bridge. For another, the main\n computer was completely clogged. I could use the auxiliary, on the\n bridge, if I could get to it, but it's a poor substitute. For another\n thing, I would have to cut the stuff way back if I was ever going to\n get the plants out of the ship. And I was a little anxious to get my\nDelta Crucis\nback to normal as soon as possible. But before cutting,\n I had to translate the gouge.\n\"It turns out that it's all right to cut marocca as soon as it stops", "\"For a while I must have been out of my head. I got so caught up in\n the rhythm of the thing that I didn't even notice when we slipped out\n of Limbo into real space near Gloryanna III. It was three days, the\n Control Tower on Gloryanna III told me, that they tried continuously\n to raise me on the communications gear before I heard the alarm bell\n and answered them, so I had to do a good deal of backtracking before\n I could get into parking orbit around the planet, and then set\nDelta\n Crucis\ndown safely. Even as shaky as I was,\nDelta Crucis\nbehaved\n like a lady.\n\n\n \"I hadn't chopped off all of the new growth, although I had the plants\n down to manageable size. Some of the blossoms left on the plants had\n formed fruit, and the fruit had ripened and dried, and the seeds had\n developed fully. They were popping and spreading fine dust-like spores\n all over the ship, those last few hours before I landed." ] ]
train	51310	[ "What is true about the world these characters live in?", "What was Bradley imprisoned for?", "What seems to be the core idea behind the specialist segregation? ", "What seems to be O'Leary's internal dilemma as the story progresses?", "What might the story be trying to point out?", "Why is O'Leary and the Warden at odds?", "What is significant about the riot?", "Why was it advantageous to the prisoners to make noise constantly?", "In the end, what was it that O'Leary smelled throughout the story? " ]	[ [ "They all live under the impression they can only perform one job for their whole life. ", "People are segregated by career, and it's incredibly difficult for them to meet other groups and switch jobs. ", "People are segregated by career, and not allowed to mingle with other groups or switch jobs. ", "People have evolved to only be capable of one \"specialization\" through their lives. " ], [ "She tried to change her career. She didn't want to be in Civil Service anymore. ", "She didn't follow up on her cleaning duty. She didn't know she needed to \"mop up\".", "She is behaving inappropriately, and is being reprimanded for it. ", "She fell in love with someone outside of her specialization, which is illegal. " ], [ "To create a class system and with it a hierarchy. ", "To make humanity work at it's prime, with everyone working at maximum capacity. ", "To provide a means where people are at their happiest, working where they \"should.\" ", "People are uncappable of carrying out more than one job, and the specialist segregation allows them to focus on just one. " ], [ "He is having a hard time convincing himself of the laws that they all follow, and the validity of them. ", "He says to himself that he trusts in the specialization segregation, but he has thoughts that indicate otherwise. ", "The Warden isn't listening to him, and he's scared of overstepping his boundaries to point out the problem. ", "He knows that there is trouble, and he can smell it. He just can't pinpoint from where. " ], [ "A society of specialized people would be incredibly difficult to manage, and ultimately inefficient. ", "A society of specialized people would be incredibly difficult to manage, but worth it for the work that would get done. ", "People will always try to rebel against the system, no matter what form it's in. ", "It goes against human nature to try to segregate people, no matter how it's done. " ], [ "The Warden doesn't want to be aware of any problems, and so dismisses O'Leary's worries. ", "The Warden knows that O'Leary has thoughts of switching jobs. ", "O'Leary knows that something is wrong, but can't push the matter because it would go against their specializations. ", "The Warden is taking pills, and it's warping his judgement. O'Leary knows this. " ], [ "There are so few people involved, but because of the laws against interreacting with other specializations it's a huge issue. ", "It was so easily pulled off. It didn't take a lot of effort for it to be successful. ", "It's making nation wide news. ", "There are a lot of prisoners involved, and they needed to call upon a lot of departments to address it. " ], [ "It convinced the guards and others that they were crazy, and to leave them alone. ", "It intimidated new comers like Bradley. ", "It drew attention away from their escape plan. ", "It annoyed the guards, and made them go through their routes faster. " ], [ "Burning flesh, from Bradley sitting on the bench and hurting herself. ", "The riot. He picked up on the growing unrest, and it came to him as a smell. ", "The blue pills the Warden was taking, that were warping his perception and ultimately kept him from realizing the riot was brewing. ", "Burning flesh, from the shive being formed. It's the \"trouble\" he was detecting. " ] ]	[ 3, 4, 2, 2, 4, 3, 1, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From\n the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved\n to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the\n specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the\n most basic physical necessities—and not even always then.\n\n\n But this was desirable, for the more specialists, the higher the degree\n of civilization. The ultimate should be the complete segregation\n of each specialization—social and genetic measures to make them\n breed true, because the unspecialized man is an uncivilized man,\n or at any rate he does not advance civilization. And letting the\n specializations mix would produce genetic undesirables: clerk-laborer\n or Professional-GI misfits, for example, being only half specialized,\n would be good at no specialization.\n\n\n And the basis of this specialization society was: \"The aptitude groups\n are the true races of mankind.\" Putting it into law was only the legal\n enforcement of a demonstrable fact.", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers\n struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing\n area to hear.\n\n\n They caught the words from a distance—not quite correctly. \"Riot!\"\n gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. \"The wipes! I\ntold\nCharlie they'd get out of hand and—Alys, we aren't safe. You\n know how they are about GI women! I'm going right home and get a club\n and stand right by the door and—\"\n\n\n \"Club!\" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children\n querulously awake in her nursery at home. \"What in God's name is the\n use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You'd\n better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun—you'll need it\n before this night is over.\"", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by\n different names. Old Marquette called it \"the canary;\" Louisiana State\n called it \"the red hats;\" elsewhere it was called \"the hole,\" \"the\n snake pit,\" \"the Klondike.\" When you're in it, you don't much care what\n it is called; it is a place for punishment.\n\n\n And punishment is what you get.\n\n\n Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the\n disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its\n inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of\n its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And\n like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.\n Their names were Sauer and Flock.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"" ], [ "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"Rest period\" it was called—in the rule book. The inmates had a less\n lovely term for it.\nAt the guard's yell, the inmates jumped to their feet.\n\n\n Bradley was a little slow getting off the edge of the steel-slat\n bed—nobody had warned her that the eddy currents in the tangler fields\n had a way of making metal smoke-hot. She gasped but didn't cry out.\n Score one more painful lesson in her new language course. She rubbed\n the backs of her thighs gingerly—and slowly, slowly, for the eddy\n currents did not permit you to move fast. It was like pushing against\n rubber; the faster you tried to move, the greater the resistance.", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked." ], [ "Civilization merely increased the extent of specialization. From\n the born mechanic and the man with the gift of gab, society evolved\n to the point of smaller contact and less communication between the\n specializations, until now they could understand each other on only the\n most basic physical necessities—and not even always then.\n\n\n But this was desirable, for the more specialists, the higher the degree\n of civilization. The ultimate should be the complete segregation\n of each specialization—social and genetic measures to make them\n breed true, because the unspecialized man is an uncivilized man,\n or at any rate he does not advance civilization. And letting the\n specializations mix would produce genetic undesirables: clerk-laborer\n or Professional-GI misfits, for example, being only half specialized,\n would be good at no specialization.\n\n\n And the basis of this specialization society was: \"The aptitude groups\n are the true races of mankind.\" Putting it into law was only the legal\n enforcement of a demonstrable fact.", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "There wasn't anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a\n perfectly good civil-service position—better than post-office clerk,\n not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He\nwas\nproud of it. It was\nright\nthat he should be proud of it. He was\n civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to\n do a good, clean civil-service job.\n\n\n If he had happened to be born a fig—a\nclerk\n, he corrected\n himself—if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been\n proud of that, too. There wasn't anything wrong with being a clerk—or\n a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer, for that matter.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and\n once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The\n breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever\n known.\n\n\n But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to\n come.", "Every prison has its Greensleeves—sometimes they are called by\n different names. Old Marquette called it \"the canary;\" Louisiana State\n called it \"the red hats;\" elsewhere it was called \"the hole,\" \"the\n snake pit,\" \"the Klondike.\" When you're in it, you don't much care what\n it is called; it is a place for punishment.\n\n\n And punishment is what you get.\n\n\n Block O in Estates-General Correctional Institution was the\n disciplinary block, and because of the green straitjackets its\n inhabitants wore, it was called the Greensleeves. It was a community of\n its own, an enclave within the larger city-state that was the Jug. And\n like any other community, it had its leading citizens ... two of them.\n Their names were Sauer and Flock.", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!" ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"" ], [ "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "There wasn't anything wrong with that job, he told himself. It was a\n perfectly good civil-service position—better than post-office clerk,\n not as good as Congressman, but a job you could be proud to hold. He\nwas\nproud of it. It was\nright\nthat he should be proud of it. He was\n civil-service born and bred, and naturally he was proud and content to\n do a good, clean civil-service job.\n\n\n If he had happened to be born a fig—a\nclerk\n, he corrected\n himself—if he had happened to be born a clerk, why, he would have been\n proud of that, too. There wasn't anything wrong with being a clerk—or\n a mechanic or a soldier, or even a laborer, for that matter.", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers\n struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing\n area to hear.\n\n\n They caught the words from a distance—not quite correctly. \"Riot!\"\n gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. \"The wipes! I\ntold\nCharlie they'd get out of hand and—Alys, we aren't safe. You\n know how they are about GI women! I'm going right home and get a club\n and stand right by the door and—\"\n\n\n \"Club!\" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children\n querulously awake in her nursery at home. \"What in God's name is the\n use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You'd\n better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun—you'll need it\n before this night is over.\"", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said." ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "The warden raised his hand. \"Please, O'Leary, don't bother me about\n that kind of stuff.\" He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. He poured\n himself a cup of steaming black coffee from a brewpot, reached in a\n desk drawer for something, hesitated, glanced at O'Leary, then dropped\n a pale blue tablet into the cup. He drank it down eagerly, ignoring the\n scalding heat.\n\n\n He leaned back, looking suddenly happier and much more assured.\n\n\n \"O'Leary, you're a guard captain, right? And I'm your warden. You have\n your job, keeping the inmates in line, and I have mine. Now your job is\n just as important as my job,\" he said piously. \"\nEverybody's\njob is\n just as important as everybody else's, right? But we have to stick to\n our own jobs. We don't want to try to\npass\n.\"", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "\"Hey, Cap'n, wait!\" Sodaro was looking alarmed. \"This isn't a first\n offense. Look at the rap sheet. Yesterday she pulled the same thing in\n the mess hall.\" He shook his head reprovingly at the prisoner. \"The\n block guard had to break up a fight between her and another wench,\n and she claimed the same business—said she didn't understand when the\n other one asked her to move along.\" He added virtuously: \"The guard\n warned her then that next time she'd get the Greensleeves for sure.\"\n\n\n Inmate Bradley seemed to be on the verge of tears. She said tautly: \"I\n don't care. I don't care!\"\n\n\n O'Leary stopped her. \"That's enough! Three days in Block O!\"", "\"Shut up, Sodaro.\"\nCaptain O'leary put down his pencil and looked at the girl. She was\n attractive and young—not beyond hope, surely. Maybe she had got off\n to a wrong start, but the question was, would putting her in the\n disciplinary block help straighten her out? He rubbed his ear and\n looked past her at the line of prisoners on the rap detail, waiting for\n him to judge their cases.\n\n\n He said patiently: \"Bradley, the rules are you have to mop out your\n cell. If you didn't understand what Mathias was talking about, you\n should have asked her. Now I'm warning you, the next time—\"", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"" ], [ "The warden lifted his head, glared, started feebly to speak, hesitated,\n and picked up the long-distance phone. He said sadly to the prison\n operator: \"Get me the governor—fast.\"\nRiot!\nThe word spread out from the prison on seven-league boots.\n\n\n It snatched the city governor out of a friendly game of Seniority\n with his manager and their wives—and just when he was holding the\n Porkbarrel Joker concealed in the hole.\n\n\n It broke up the Base Championship Scramble Finals at Hap Arnold Field\n to the south, as half the contestants had to scramble in earnest to a\n Red Alert that was real.\n\n\n It reached to police precinct houses and TV newsrooms and highway\n checkpoints, and from there it filtered into the homes and lives of the\n nineteen million persons that lived within a few dozen miles of the Jug.\n\n\n Riot. And yet fewer than half a dozen men were involved.", "For the news touched them where their fears lay. Riot! And not merely\n a street brawl among roistering wipes, or a bar-room fight of greasers\n relaxing from a hard day at the plant. The riot was down among the\n corrupt sludge that underlay the state itself. Wipes brawled with wipes\n and no one cared; but in the Jug, all classes were cast together.\nForty miles to the south, Hap Arnold Field was a blaze of light. The\n airmen tumbled out of their quarters and dayrooms at the screech of\n the alert siren, and behind them their wives and children stretched\n and yawned and worried. An alert! The older kids fussed and complained\n and their mothers shut them up. No, there wasn't any alert scheduled\n for tonight; no, they didn't know where Daddy was going; no, the kids\n couldn't get up yet—it was the middle of the night.", "And as soon as they had the kids back in bed, most of the mothers\n struggled into their own airwac uniforms and headed for the briefing\n area to hear.\n\n\n They caught the words from a distance—not quite correctly. \"Riot!\"\n gasped an aircraftswoman first-class, mother of three. \"The wipes! I\ntold\nCharlie they'd get out of hand and—Alys, we aren't safe. You\n know how they are about GI women! I'm going right home and get a club\n and stand right by the door and—\"\n\n\n \"Club!\" snapped Alys, radarscope-sergeant, with two children\n querulously awake in her nursery at home. \"What in God's name is the\n use of a club? You can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head. You'd\n better come along to Supply with me and draw a gun—you'll need it\n before this night is over.\"", "\"The whole bloody thing's going to blow up!\" a helicopter bombardier\n yelled bitterly to his pilot, above the flutter and roar of the\n whirling blades. \"Look at the mobs in Greaserville! The first breakout\n from the Jug's going to start a fight like you never saw and we'll be\n right in the middle of it!\"\n\n\n He was partly right. He would be right in the middle of it—for every\n man, woman and child in the city-state would be right in the middle of\n it. There was no place anywhere that would be spared.\nNo mixing.\nThat\n was the prescription that kept the city-state alive. There's no harm in\n a family fight—and aren't all mechanics a family, aren't all laborers\n a clan, aren't all clerks and office workers related by closer ties\n than blood or skin?", "But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and\n once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The\n breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever\n known.\n\n\n But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to\n come.", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "It was the only thing to do—for her own sake as much as for his. He\n had managed, by strength of will, not to hear that she had omitted\n to say \"sir\" every time she spoke to him, but he couldn't keep it up\n forever and he certainly couldn't overlook hysteria. And hysteria was\n clearly the next step for her.\n\n\n All the same, he stared after her as she left. He handed the rap sheet\n to Sodaro and said absently: \"Too bad a kid like her has to be here.\n What's she in for?\"\n\n\n \"You didn't know, Cap'n?\" Sodaro leered. \"She's in for conspiracy to\n violate the Categoried Class laws. Don't waste your time with her,\n Cap'n. She's a figger-lover!\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "A handful of men, and the enormous bulk of the city-state quivered in\n every limb and class. In its ten million homes, in its hundreds of\n thousands of public places, the city-state's people shook under the\n impact of the news from the prison.", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. \"Take it easy,\n auntie. Come on, get in your cell.\" He steered her in the right\n direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot.\n \"Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules\n say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She's crying!\" He shook his\n head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry\n in the Greensleeves.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"" ], [ "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "\"We got a lady with us! Maybe we ought to cut out this yelling so\n as not to disturb the lady!\" He screeched with howling, maniacal\n laughter. \"Anyway, if we don't cut this out, they'll get us in trouble,\n Flock!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, you think so?\" shrieked Flock. \"Jeez, I wish you hadn't said that,\n Sauer. You got me scared! I'm so scared, I'm gonna have to yell!\"\n\n\n The howling started all over again.\n\n\n The inside guard finished putting the new prisoners away and turned off\n the tangler field once more. He licked his lips. \"Say, you want to take\n a turn in here for a while?\"\n\n\n \"Uh-uh.\" The outside guard shook his head.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "The rockets went home for fuel. The jets went home for fuel. The\n helicopters hung on—still ready, still waiting.\n\n\n The rockets came back and roared harmlessly about, and went away again.\n They stayed away. The helicopter men never faltered and never relaxed.\n The prison below them was washed with light—from the guard posts on\n the walls, from the cell blocks themselves, from the mobile lights of\n the guard squadrons surrounding the walls.\n\n\n North of the prison, on the long, flat, damp developments of reclaimed\n land, the matchbox row houses of the clerical neighborhoods showed\n lights in every window as the figgers stood ready to repel invasion\n from their undesired neighbors to the east, the wipes. In the crowded\n tenements of the laborers' quarters, the wipes shouted from window to\n window; and there were crowds in the bright streets.", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "But the airmen themselves heard the briefing loud and clear over the\n scramble-call speakers, and they knew it was not merely a matter of\n trouble in the wipe quarters. The Jug! The governor himself had called\n them out; they were to fly interdicting missions at such-and-such\n levels on such-and-such flight circuits around the prison.\n\n\n The rockets took off on fountains of fire; and the jets took off with a\n whistling roar; and last of all, the helicopters took off ... and they\n were the ones who might actually accomplish something. They took up\n their picket posts on the prison perimeter, a pilot and two bombardiers\n in each 'copter, stone-faced, staring grimly alert at the prison below.\n\n\n They were ready for the breakout.\n\n\n But there wasn't any breakout.", "His name was Flock.\n\n\n He was still yelling. Sue-Ann Bradley, in the cell across from him,\n thought that maybe, after all, the man was really in pain. Maybe the\n crazy screams were screams of agony, because certainly his face was the\n face of an agonized man.\n\n\n The outside guard bellowed: \"Okay, okay. Take ten!\"\n\n\n Sue-Ann froze, waiting to see what would happen. What actually did\n happen was that the guard reached up and closed the switch that\n actuated the tangler fields on the floors of the cells. The prison\n rules were humanitarian, even for the dregs that inhabited the\n Greensleeves. Ten minutes out of every two hours, even the worst case\n had to be allowed to take his hands out of the restraining garment.", "The guard peered genially into her cell. \"You're okay, auntie.\" She\n proudly ignored him as he slogged deliberately away on his rounds.\n He didn't have to untie her and practically stand over her while\n she attended to various personal matters, as he did with the male\n prisoners. It was not much to be grateful for, but Sue-Ann Bradley was\n grateful. At least she didn't have to live\nquite\nlike a fig—like an\n underprivileged clerk, she told herself, conscience-stricken.\n\n\n Across the hall, the guard was saying irritably: \"What the hell's\n the matter with you?\" He opened the door of the cell with an\n asbestos-handled key held in a canvas glove.\n\n\n Flock was in that cell and he was doubled over.", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "However, he was wrong. Sue-Ann's shoulders were shaking, but not from\n tears. Sue-Ann Bradley had got a good look at Sauer and at Flock as she\n passed them by and she was fighting off an almost uncontrollable urge\n to retch.\nSauer and Flock were what are called prison wolves. They were\n laborers—\"wipes,\" for short—or, at any rate, they had been once.\n They had spent so much time in prisons that it was sometimes hard even\n for them to remember what they really were, outside. Sauer was a big,\n grinning redhead with eyes like a water moccasin. Flock was a lithe\n five-footer with the build of a water moccasin—and the sad, stupid\n eyes of a calf.\n\n\n Sauer stopped yelling for a moment. \"Hey, Flock!\"\n\n\n \"What do you want, Sauer?\" called Flock from his own cell.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "The guard guffawed and lifted her up by one shoulder. \"Take it easy,\n auntie. Come on, get in your cell.\" He steered her in the right\n direction and pointed to a greensleeved straitjacket on the cell cot.\n \"Put that on. Being as you're a lady, we won't tie it up, but the rules\n say you got to wear it and the rules—Hey. She's crying!\" He shook his\n head, marveling. It was the first time he had ever seen a prisoner cry\n in the Greensleeves.", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "But the declassed cons of the Jug were the dregs of every class; and\n once they spread, the neat compartmentation of society was pierced. The\n breakout would mean riot on a bigger scale than any prison had ever\n known.\n\n\n But he was also partly wrong. Because the breakout wasn't seeming to\n come.", "Sue-Ann Bradley looked carefully at the floor and paid them no\n attention. The outside guard pulled the switch that turned on the\n tanglefoot electronic fields that swamped the floor of the block\n corridor and of each individual cell. While the fields were on, you\n could ignore the prisoners—they simply could not move fast enough,\n against the electronic drag of the field, to do any harm. But it was a\n rule that, even in Block O, you didn't leave the tangler fields on all\n the time—only when the cell doors had to be opened or a prisoner's\n restraining garment removed.\n\n\n Sue-Ann walked bravely forward through the opened gate—and fell flat\n on her face. It was her first experience of a tanglefoot field. It was\n like walking through molasses." ], [ "O'Leary snapped erect, abruptly angry. Pass! What the devil way was\n that for the warden to talk to him?\n\n\n \"Excuse the expression, O'Leary,\" the warden said anxiously. \"I mean,\n after all, 'Specialization is the goal of civilization,' right?\" He was\n a great man for platitudes, was Warden Schluckebier. \"\nYou\nknow you\n don't want to worry about\nmy\nend of running the prison. And\nI\ndon't\n want to worry about\nyours\n. You see?\" And he folded his hands and\n smiled like a civil-service Buddha.\nO'Leary choked back his temper. \"Warden, I'm telling you that there's\n trouble coming up. I smell the signs.\"\n\n\n \"Handle it, then!\" snapped the warden, irritated at last.\n\n\n \"But suppose it's too big to handle. Suppose—\"", "Resentment and anger, she could understand. She told herself doggedly\n that resentment and anger were natural and right. They were perfectly\n normal expressions of the freedom-loving citizen's rebellion against\n the vile and stifling system of Categoried Classes. It was\ngood\nthat\n Sauer and Flock still had enough spirit to struggle against the vicious\n system—\n\n\n But did they have to scream so?\n\n\n The senseless yelling was driving her crazy. She abandoned herself to\n weeping and she didn't even care who heard her any more. Senseless!\n\n\n It never occurred to Sue-Ann Bradley that it might not be senseless,\n because noise hides noise. But then she hadn't been a prisoner very\n long.\nIII\n\n\n \"I smell trouble,\" said O'Leary to the warden.", "His name was Liam O'Leary and there was something stinking in his\n nostrils. It was the smell of trouble. He hadn't found what the trouble\n was yet, but he would. That was his business. He was a captain of\n guards in Estates-General Correctional Institution—better known to\n its inmates as the Jug—and if he hadn't been able to detect the scent\n of trouble brewing a cell-block away, he would never have survived to\n reach his captaincy.\n\n\n And her name, he saw, was Sue-Ann Bradley, Detainee No. WFA-656R.\n\n\n He frowned at the rap sheet, trying to figure out what got a girl like\n her into a place like this. And, what was more important, why she\n couldn't adjust herself to it, now that she was in.\n\n\n He demanded: \"Why wouldn't you mop out your cell?\"", "It wasn't pleasant. He finished untying Flock and turned away; let the\n stinking wipe take care of his own troubles. He only had ten minutes to\n get all the way around Block O and the inmates complained like crazy if\n he didn't make sure they all got the most possible free time. He was\n pretty good at snowshoeing through the tangler field. He was a little\n vain about it, even; at times he had been known to boast of his ability\n to make the rounds in two minutes, every time.\n\n\n Every time but this.\n\n\n For Flock moaned behind him, oddly close.\n\n\n The guard turned, but not quickly enough. There was\n Flock—astonishingly, he was half out of his jacket; his arms hadn't\n been in the sleeves at all! And in one of the hands, incredibly, there\n was something that glinted and smoked.", "The guard looked at him doubtfully. It could be a trick, maybe.\n Couldn't it? But he could see Flock's face and the agony in it was real\n enough. And Flock was gasping, through real tears: \"Cramps. I—I—\"\n\n\n \"Ah, you wipes always got a pain in the gut.\" The guard lumbered around\n Flock to the draw-strings at the back of the jacket. Funny smell in\n here, he told himself—not for the first time. And imagine, some people\n didn't believe that wipes had a smell of their own! But this time, he\n realized cloudily, it was a rather unusual smell. Something burning.\n Almost like meat scorching.", "Good laborers were the salt of the Earth! They weren't smart, maybe,\n but they had a—well, a sort of natural, relaxed joy of living. O'Leary\n was a broad-minded man and many times he had thought almost with a\n touch of envy how\ncomfortable\nit must be to be a wipe—a\nlaborer\n.\n No responsibilities. No worries. Just an easy, slow routine of work and\n loaf, work and loaf.\n\n\n Of course, he wouldn't\nreally\nwant that kind of life, because he was\n Civil Service and not the kind to try to cross over class barriers that\n weren't\nmeant\nto be—\n\n\n \"Evening, Cap'n.\"\n\n\n He nodded to the mechanic inmate who was, theoretically, in charge of\n maintaining the prison's car pool, just inside the gate.\n\n\n \"Evening, Conan,\" he said.", "Captain O'Leary took a long drink of water from the fountain marked\n \"Civil Service.\" But it didn't wash the taste out of his mouth, the\n smell from his nose.\n\n\n What got into a girl to get her mixed up with that kind of dirty\n business? He checked out of the cell blocks and walked across the\n yard, wondering about her. She'd had every advantage—decent Civil\n Service parents, a good education, everything a girl could wish for. If\n anything, she had had a better environment than O'Leary himself, and\n look what she had made of it.\n\n\n The direction of evolution is toward specialization and Man is no\n exception, but with the difference that his is the one species that\n creates its own environment in which to specialize. From the moment\n that clans formed, specialization began—the hunters using the weapons\n made by the flint-chippers, the food cooked in clay pots made by the\n ceramists, over fire made by the shaman who guarded the sacred flame.", "\"Evening, Cap'n.\" A bleary old inmate orderly stood up straight and\n touched his cap as O'Leary passed by.\n\n\n \"Evening.\"\nO'Leary noted, with the part of his mind that always noted those\n things, that the orderly had been leaning on his broom until he'd\n noticed the captain coming by. Of course, there wasn't much to\n sweep—the spray machines and sweeperdozers had been over the\n cobblestones of the yard twice already that day. But it was an inmate's\n job to keep busy. And it was a guard captain's job to notice when they\n didn't.", "\"It isn't,\" the warden said positively. \"Don't borrow trouble with\n all your supposing, O'Leary.\" He sipped the remains of his coffee,\n made a wry face, poured a fresh cup and, with an elaborate show of not\n noticing what he was doing, dropped three of the pale blue tablets into\n it this time.\n\n\n He sat beaming into space, waiting for the jolt to take effect.\n\n\n \"Well, then,\" he said at last. \"You just remember what I've told you\n tonight, O'Leary, and we'll get along fine. 'Specialization is the—'\n Oh, curse the thing.\"\n\n\n His phone was ringing. The warden picked it up irritably.\n\n\n That was the trouble with those pale blue tablets, thought O'Leary;\n they gave you a lift, but they put you on edge.", "Sue-Ann Bradley heard them before she reached the Greensleeves. She\n was in a detachment of three unfortunates like herself, convoyed by an\n irritable guard, climbing the steel steps toward Block O from the floor\n below, when she heard the yelling.\n\n\n \"Owoo-o-o,\" screamed Sauer from one end of the cell block and\n \"Yow-w-w!\" shrieked Flock at the other.\n\n\n The inside deck guard of Block O looked nervously at the outside deck\n guard. The outside guard looked impassively back—after all, he was on\n the outside.\n\n\n The inside guard muttered: \"Wipe rats! They're getting on my nerves.\"\n\n\n The outside guard shrugged.", "But he hadn't let go.\n\n\n He didn't let go. And he didn't stop.\nIV\n\n\n It was Flock on the phone to the warden—Flock with his eyes still\n streaming tears, Flock with Sauer standing right behind him, menacing\n the two bound deck guards.\n\n\n Sauer shoved Flock out of the way. \"Hey, Warden!\" he said, and the\n voice was a cheerful bray, though the serpent eyes were cold and\n hating. \"Warden, you got to get a medic in here. My boy Flock, he hurt\n himself real bad and he needs a doctor.\" He gestured playfully at the\n guards with the shiv. \"I tell you, Warden. I got this knife and I got\n your guards here. Enough said? So get a medic in here quick, you hear?\"\n\n\n And he snapped the connection.\n\n\n O'Leary said: \"Warden, I told you I smelled trouble!\"", "\"Trouble? Trouble?\" Warden Schluckebier clutched his throat and his\n little round eyes looked terrified—as perhaps they should have. Warden\n Godfrey Schluckebier was the almighty Caesar of ten thousand inmates in\n the Jug, but privately he was a fussy old man trying to hold onto the\n last decent job he would have in his life.\n\n\n \"Trouble?\nWhat\ntrouble?\"\n\n\n O'Leary shrugged. \"Different things. You know Lafon, from Block A? This\n afternoon, he was playing ball with the laundry orderlies in the yard.\"\n\n\n The warden, faintly relieved, faintly annoyed, scolded: \"O'Leary, what\n did you want to worry me for? There's nothing wrong with playing ball\n in the yard. That's what recreation periods are for.\"", "Conan, now—he was a big buck greaser and he would be there for the\n next hour, languidly poking a piece of fluff out of the air filter on\n the prison jeep. Lazy, sure. Undependable, certainly. But he kept the\n cars going—and, O'Leary thought approvingly, when his sentence was up\n in another year or so, he would go back to his life with his status\n restored, a mechanic on the outside as he had been inside, and he\n certainly would never risk coming back to the Jug by trying to pass as\n Civil Service or anything else. He knew his place.\n\n\n So why didn't this girl, this Sue-Ann Bradley, know hers?\nII", "\"Detail,\nhalt\n!\" The two guards turned to see what was coming in as\n the three new candidates for the Greensleeves slumped to a stop at the\n head of the stairs. \"Here they are,\" Sodaro told them. \"Take good care\n of 'em, will you? Especially the lady—she's going to like it here,\n because there's plenty of wipes and greasers and figgers to keep her\n company.\" He laughed coarsely and abandoned his charges to the Block O\n guards.\n\n\n The outside guard said sourly: \"A woman, for God's sake. Now O'Leary\n knows I hate it when there's a woman in here. It gets the others all\n riled up.\"\n\n\n \"Let them in,\" the inside guard told him. \"The others are riled up\n already.\"", "\"You're yellow,\" the inside guard said moodily. \"Ah, I don't know why I\n don't quit this lousy job. Hey, you! Pipe down or I'll come in and beat\n your head off!\"\n\n\n \"Ee-ee-ee!\" screamed Sauer in a shrill falsetto. \"I'm scared!\" Then he\n grinned at the guard, all but his water-moccasin eyes. \"Don't you know\n you can't hurt a wipe by hitting him on the head, Boss?\"\n\n\n \"Shut\nup\n!\" yelled the inside guard.\n\n\n Sue-Ann Bradley's weeping now was genuine. She simply could not help\n it. The crazy yowling of the hard-timers, Sauer and Flock, was getting\n under her skin. They weren't even—even\nhuman\n, she told herself\n miserably, trying to weep silently so as not to give the guards the\n satisfaction of hearing her—they were animals!", "\"All right,\" croaked Flock, tears trickling out of eyes nearly shut\n with pain.\n\n\n But it wasn't the tears that held the guard; it was the shining,\n smoking thing, now poised at his throat. A shiv! It looked as though\n it had been made out of a bed-spring, ripped loose from its frame God\n knows how, hidden inside the greensleeved jacket God knows how—filed,\n filed to sharpness over endless hours.\n\n\n No wonder Flock moaned—the eddy currents in the shiv were slowly\n cooking his hand; and the blister against his abdomen, where the shiv\n had been hidden during other rest periods, felt like raw acid.\n\"All right,\" whispered Flock, \"just walk out the door and you won't get\n hurt. Unless the other screw makes trouble, you won't get hurt, so tell\n him not to, you hear?\"\n\n\n He was nearly fainting with the pain.", "The girl lifted her head angrily and took a step forward. The block\n guard, Sodaro, growled warningly: \"Watch it, auntie!\"\n\n\n O'Leary shook his head. \"Let her talk, Sodaro.\" It said in the\nCivil\n Service Guide to Prison Administration\n: \"Detainees will be permitted\n to speak in their own behalf in disciplinary proceedings.\" And O'Leary\n was a man who lived by the book.\n\n\n She burst out: \"I never got a chance! That old witch Mathias never told\n me I was supposed to mop up. She banged on the door and said, 'Slush\n up, sister!' And then, ten minutes later, she called the guards and\n told them I refused to mop.\"\n\n\n The block guard guffawed. \"Wipe talk—that's what she was telling you\n to do. Cap'n, you know what's funny about this? This Bradley is—\"", "\"You don't see what I mean, Warden. Lafon was a professional on the\n outside—an architect. Those laundry cons were laborers. Pros and wipes\n don't mix; it isn't natural. And there are other things.\"\n\n\n O'Leary hesitated, frowning. How could you explain to the warden that\n it didn't\nsmell\nright?\n\n\n \"For instance—Well, there's Aunt Mathias in the women's block. She's\n a pretty good old girl—that's why she's the block orderly. She's a\n lifer, she's got no place to go, she gets along with the other women.\n But today she put a woman named Bradley on report. Why? Because she\n told Bradley to mop up in wipe talk and Bradley didn't understand. Now\n Mathias wouldn't—\"", "\"Hello,\" barked the warden, not even glancing at the viewscreen. \"What\n the devil do you want? Don't you know I'm—What? You did\nwhat\n?\n You're going to WHAT?\"\n\n\n He looked at the viewscreen at last with a look of pure horror.\n Whatever he saw on it, it did not reassure him. His eyes opened like\n clamshells in a steamer.\n\n\n \"O'Leary,\" he said faintly, \"my mistake.\"\n\n\n And he hung up—more or less by accident; the handset dropped from his\n fingers.\n\n\n The person on the other end of the phone was calling from Cell Block O.\n\n\n Five minutes before, he hadn't been anywhere near the phone and it\n didn't look as if his chances of ever getting near it were very good.\n Because five minutes before, he was in his cell, with the rest of the\n hard-timers of the Greensleeves.", "My Lady Greensleeves\nBy FREDERIK POHL\n\n\n Illustrated by GAUGHAN\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction February 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThis guard smelled trouble and it could be\n \ncounted on to come—for a nose for trouble\n \nwas one of the many talents bred here!\nI" ] ]
train	51092	[ "What is the significance of the title of the story to the context?", "Based on the context of the story, on which day was the package received to the home?", "Who was Sally in relation to Milly in the story?", "Had the portrait of H. H. Hartshorne not been knocked off the wall, what would have likely happened in the story?", "How long had the branch of Hartshorne-Logan been opened?", "Why did the staff at Hartshorne-Logan have to substitute some of the items in the package?", "Why had Ann Hartley written the first letter to Hartshorne-Logan?", "What was Ann’s first complaint with the dress she ordered for Sally?", "What caused Sally to float through the air?", "What happened to Les when he held the eyeball from the detective kit?" ]	[ [ "It’s a reference to the dangers contained within the package. ", "It’s a reference to the delay of the package being received. ", "It’s a reference for the postman to know the package wasn’t broken in shipment ", "It’s a reference to there being a baby toy rattle inside the box. " ], [ "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday " ], [ "Her great-grandmother ", "Her grandmother ", "Her mother", "Herself in a past life. " ], [ "Milly would have never been born. ", "Mr. Hawkins would have fired everyone who attended the party. ", "The partygoers would have remained sober that night. ", "The package would have never been delivered. " ], [ "Eighty years", "Eight years", "Twenty years", "Two years " ], [ "They were sold out of because of the holiday sales. ", "They had recalled most of the items because they were dangerous.", "They were outdated by many years. ", "They were too drunk to read the catalog numbers correctly. " ], [ "To disregard her complaint about the package not being received. ", "To complain about incorrect items being sent. ", "To complain about the package not being received. ", "To request a refund for the package being damaged. " ], [ "It was much to small for the child. ", "The shoulders were lumpier than a small girl’s dress should be. ", "It was the incorrect color. ", "It was much too large for the small child. " ], [ "The manky that was in the shipment. ", "The strange doorbell with no wire. ", "They eyeball from the detective kit. ", "The dress that was in the shipment. " ], [ "It caused him to leave black finger-marks on everything he touched. ", "It left his hands sticky even after repeatedly washing. ", "It burned his hands. ", "His hands started to turn bright green. " ] ]	[ 3, 2, 2, 4, 1, 3, 3, 3, 4, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three\n times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed\n trees and midnight church services.\n\n\n The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of\n the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese foot-wrestling in\n one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty\n pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary\n opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the\n foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump\n against the wall.\n\n\n He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H.\n Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its\n glass splintered against the floor.\nThe noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even\n felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand.", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "\"He put stuff in the sugar?\" A deep, booming voice came from the front\n of the house. Mother and son looked through the hall. A policeman stood\n on the threshold of the front door. \"I heard that! The woman next door\n claims that her husband is poisoned. Young man, I'm going to put you\n under arrest.\"\n\n\n The policeman stepped over the threshold. A blue flash darted from\n the doorbell box, striking him squarely on the chest. The policeman\n staggered back, sitting down abruptly on the porch. A scent of ozone\n drifted through the house.\n\n\n \"Close the door, close the door,\" the doorbell was chanting urgently.\n\n\n \"Where's that ambulance?\" Dr. Schwartz yelled from the top of the\n steps. \"The child's getting worse.\"", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared\n unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly.\n Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start\n shaking him.\n\n\n \"I got something important to tell you,\" Bob said rapidly, ready to\n duck. \"I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to\n tell you what I did.\"\n\n\n \"I heard all about what you did,\" Ann said, advancing again. \"And\n you're not going to slip away from me.\"\n\n\n \"Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear,\"\n Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor.\nAnn looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The\n doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: \"Don't answer me,\n don't answer me, don't go to the door.\"", "\"Don't bother trying,\" Ann said miserably. \"Just cut it off.\"\n\n\n Dr. Schwartz pulled scissors from his bag and clipped at a sleeve. When\n he had cut it to the shoulder, he gently began to peel back the edges\n of the cloth. Sally writhed and kicked, then collapsed in a faint. The\n physician smoothed the folds hastily back into place.\n\n\n He looked helpless as he said to Ann: \"I don't know quite what to do.\n The flesh starts to hemorrhage when I pull at the cloth. She'd bleed to\n death if I yanked it off. But it's such an extreme allergy that it may\n kill her, if we leave it in contact with the skin.\"", "Les held up his hands, palms toward the doctor. \"What's wrong with me?\n My fingers look all right. But they leave black marks on everything I\n touch.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked closely at the fingertips. \"Every human has natural\n oil on the skin. That's how detectives get results with their\n fingerprint powder. But I've never heard of nigrification, in this\n sense. Better not try to commit any crimes until you've seen a skin\n specialist.\"\nAnn was peering through the window, curious about the ambulance despite\n her own troubles. She saw two attendants carry Mr. Burnett, motionless\n and white, on a stretcher from the house next door into the ambulance.\n A third member of the crew was struggling with a disheveled Mrs.\n Burnett at the door. Shrieks that sounded like \"Murder!\" came sharply\n through the window.\n\n\n \"I know those bearers,\" Dr. Schwartz said. He yanked the window open.\n \"Hey, Pete! What's wrong?\"", "\"Oh. Something like those name cards with something funny printed on\n them, like 'Another hour shot.' Well, if there's a little tape in there\n repeating that message, you'd better shut that part off. It might get\n boring after a while. And it might insult someone.\"\n\n\n Ann went to the door and turned the knob. The door didn't open. The\n figure of Mrs. Burnett, half-visible through the heavy curtain, shifted\n impatiently on the porch.\n\n\n Les yanked at the doorknob. It didn't yield for him, either. He looked\n up at the doorbell, which he had installed just above the upper part\n of the door frame.\n\n\n \"Queer,\" he said. \"That isn't in contact with the door itself. I don't\n see how it can keep the door from opening.\"", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "Les kicked the hassock into the hall closet, tossed the manky in after\n it and shut the door firmly. As the door closed, he saw the entire\n interior of the dark closet brighten into a wet-lettuce green.\n\n\n When he turned back to Ann, she was staring at her left hand. The\n wedding band that Les had put there a dozen years ago was a brilliant\n green, shedding its soft glow over the finger up to the first knuckle.\n\n\n Ann felt the scream building up inside her. She opened her mouth to let\n it out, then put her hand in front of her mouth to keep it in, finally\n jerked the hand away to prevent the glowing ring from turning her front\n teeth green.\n\n\n She collapsed into Les's arms, babbling incomprehensibly.", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle." ], [ "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms.", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared\n unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly.\n Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start\n shaking him.\n\n\n \"I got something important to tell you,\" Bob said rapidly, ready to\n duck. \"I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to\n tell you what I did.\"\n\n\n \"I heard all about what you did,\" Ann said, advancing again. \"And\n you're not going to slip away from me.\"\n\n\n \"Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear,\"\n Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor.\nAnn looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The\n doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: \"Don't answer me,\n don't answer me, don't go to the door.\"", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "\"I already have it,\" Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother.\n The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the\n kitchen table.\n\n\n \"Excitement isn't good for me,\" Mrs. Burnett said testily. \"I've had a\n lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband is better?\"\n\n\n \"Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me.\" Mrs.\n Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the\n house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall.\n Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed\n with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed\n the threshold.\n\n\n Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She\n nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction.", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"" ], [ "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms.", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "His jaw dropped. \"My God! Ann, what—\"\n\n\n Ann was staring, too, but not at her daughter. \"Les! The hassock! It\n used to be brown!\"\n\n\n The hassock was a livid shade of green. A neon, demanding, screaming\n green that clashed horribly with the soft browns and reds in which Ann\n had furnished the room.\n\n\n \"That round thing must be leaking,\" Les said. \"But did you see Sally\n when she—\"\n\n\n Ann's frazzled nerves carried a frantic order to her muscles. She\n jumped up, strode to the hassock and picked up the manky with two\n fingers. She tossed it to Les. Immediately, she regretted her action.\n\n\n \"Drop it!\" she yelled. \"Maybe it'll turn you green, too!\"", "\"We'll have to send it back,\" Ann said, \"and get the one we ordered.\"\n\n\n She tried to take it off, but the child squawked violently. Ann grabbed\n her daughter's arms, held them above her head and pulled at the dress.\n It seemed to be stuck somewhere. When Ann released the child's arms to\n loosen the dress, Sally squirmed away. She took one step forward, then\n began to float three inches above the ground. She landed just before\n she collided with the far wall.\nSally looked scared until she saw her mother's face. Then she squealed\n in delight.\n\n\n Ann's legs were rubber. She was shaking her head and wobbling\n uncertainly toward her daughter when the door opened behind her.\n\n\n \"It's me,\" her husband said. \"Slow day at the office, so I came home\n early.\"\n\n\n \"Les! I'm going crazy or something. Sally just—\"", "\"Don't bother trying,\" Ann said miserably. \"Just cut it off.\"\n\n\n Dr. Schwartz pulled scissors from his bag and clipped at a sleeve. When\n he had cut it to the shoulder, he gently began to peel back the edges\n of the cloth. Sally writhed and kicked, then collapsed in a faint. The\n physician smoothed the folds hastily back into place.\n\n\n He looked helpless as he said to Ann: \"I don't know quite what to do.\n The flesh starts to hemorrhage when I pull at the cloth. She'd bleed to\n death if I yanked it off. But it's such an extreme allergy that it may\n kill her, if we leave it in contact with the skin.\"", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"", "\"I already have it,\" Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother.\n The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the\n kitchen table.\n\n\n \"Excitement isn't good for me,\" Mrs. Burnett said testily. \"I've had a\n lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband is better?\"\n\n\n \"Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me.\" Mrs.\n Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the\n house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall.\n Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed\n with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed\n the threshold.\n\n\n Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She\n nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"" ], [ "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three\n times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed\n trees and midnight church services.\n\n\n The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of\n the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese foot-wrestling in\n one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty\n pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary\n opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the\n foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump\n against the wall.\n\n\n He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H.\n Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its\n glass splintered against the floor.\nThe noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even\n felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand.", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"", "RATTLE OK\nBy HARRY WARNER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhat better way to use a time machine than\n \nto handle department store complaints? But\n \npleasing a customer should have its limits!\nThe Christmas party at the Boston branch of Hartshorne-Logan was\n threatening to become more legendary than usual this Christmas.\n\n\n The farm machinery manager had already collapsed. When he slid under\n the table containing the drinks, Miss Pringle, who sold millinery, had\n screamed: \"He'll drown!\"\n\n\n One out of every three dirty stories started by party attendees had\n remained unfinished, because each had reminded someone else of another\n story.", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "\"Oh. Something like those name cards with something funny printed on\n them, like 'Another hour shot.' Well, if there's a little tape in there\n repeating that message, you'd better shut that part off. It might get\n boring after a while. And it might insult someone.\"\n\n\n Ann went to the door and turned the knob. The door didn't open. The\n figure of Mrs. Burnett, half-visible through the heavy curtain, shifted\n impatiently on the porch.\n\n\n Les yanked at the doorknob. It didn't yield for him, either. He looked\n up at the doorbell, which he had installed just above the upper part\n of the door frame.\n\n\n \"Queer,\" he said. \"That isn't in contact with the door itself. I don't\n see how it can keep the door from opening.\"", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared\n unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly.\n Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start\n shaking him.\n\n\n \"I got something important to tell you,\" Bob said rapidly, ready to\n duck. \"I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to\n tell you what I did.\"\n\n\n \"I heard all about what you did,\" Ann said, advancing again. \"And\n you're not going to slip away from me.\"\n\n\n \"Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear,\"\n Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor.\nAnn looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The\n doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: \"Don't answer me,\n don't answer me, don't go to the door.\"", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "\"I already have it,\" Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother.\n The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the\n kitchen table.\n\n\n \"Excitement isn't good for me,\" Mrs. Burnett said testily. \"I've had a\n lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband is better?\"\n\n\n \"Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me.\" Mrs.\n Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the\n house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall.\n Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed\n with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed\n the threshold.\n\n\n Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She\n nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction." ], [ "The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three\n times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed\n trees and midnight church services.\n\n\n The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of\n the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese foot-wrestling in\n one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty\n pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary\n opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the\n foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump\n against the wall.\n\n\n He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H.\n Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its\n glass splintered against the floor.\nThe noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even\n felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand.", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "RATTLE OK\nBy HARRY WARNER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhat better way to use a time machine than\n \nto handle department store complaints? But\n \npleasing a customer should have its limits!\nThe Christmas party at the Boston branch of Hartshorne-Logan was\n threatening to become more legendary than usual this Christmas.\n\n\n The farm machinery manager had already collapsed. When he slid under\n the table containing the drinks, Miss Pringle, who sold millinery, had\n screamed: \"He'll drown!\"\n\n\n One out of every three dirty stories started by party attendees had\n remained unfinished, because each had reminded someone else of another\n story.", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"The poor woman must be dead by now,\" he objected, secretly angry\n that he hadn't thought of such a fine party stunt himself. Then he\n brightened. \"Unless—\" he said it loud enough for the employes to scent\n a great proposal and the room grew quiet—\"unless we broke the rules\n just once and used the time warp on a big mission!\"\n\n\n There was a silence. Finally, from an anonymous voice in one corner:\n \"Would the warp work over eighty years? We were always told that it\n must be used only for complaints within three days.\"\n\n\n \"Then let's find out!\" Mr. Hawkins downed the rest of his drink and\n pulled a batch of keys from his pocket. \"Someone scoot down to the\n warehouse. Tell the watchman that it's on my authority. Hunt up the\n stuff that's on the order. Get the best of everything. Ignore the\n catalogue numbers—they've changed a hundred times in all these years.\"", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"", "\"Oh. Something like those name cards with something funny printed on\n them, like 'Another hour shot.' Well, if there's a little tape in there\n repeating that message, you'd better shut that part off. It might get\n boring after a while. And it might insult someone.\"\n\n\n Ann went to the door and turned the knob. The door didn't open. The\n figure of Mrs. Burnett, half-visible through the heavy curtain, shifted\n impatiently on the porch.\n\n\n Les yanked at the doorknob. It didn't yield for him, either. He looked\n up at the doorbell, which he had installed just above the upper part\n of the door frame.\n\n\n \"Queer,\" he said. \"That isn't in contact with the door itself. I don't\n see how it can keep the door from opening.\"", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"" ], [ "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "\"The poor woman must be dead by now,\" he objected, secretly angry\n that he hadn't thought of such a fine party stunt himself. Then he\n brightened. \"Unless—\" he said it loud enough for the employes to scent\n a great proposal and the room grew quiet—\"unless we broke the rules\n just once and used the time warp on a big mission!\"\n\n\n There was a silence. Finally, from an anonymous voice in one corner:\n \"Would the warp work over eighty years? We were always told that it\n must be used only for complaints within three days.\"\n\n\n \"Then let's find out!\" Mr. Hawkins downed the rest of his drink and\n pulled a batch of keys from his pocket. \"Someone scoot down to the\n warehouse. Tell the watchman that it's on my authority. Hunt up the\n stuff that's on the order. Get the best of everything. Ignore the\n catalogue numbers—they've changed a hundred times in all these years.\"", "RATTLE OK\nBy HARRY WARNER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhat better way to use a time machine than\n \nto handle department store complaints? But\n \npleasing a customer should have its limits!\nThe Christmas party at the Boston branch of Hartshorne-Logan was\n threatening to become more legendary than usual this Christmas.\n\n\n The farm machinery manager had already collapsed. When he slid under\n the table containing the drinks, Miss Pringle, who sold millinery, had\n screamed: \"He'll drown!\"\n\n\n One out of every three dirty stories started by party attendees had\n remained unfinished, because each had reminded someone else of another\n story.", "The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three\n times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed\n trees and midnight church services.\n\n\n The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of\n the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese foot-wrestling in\n one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty\n pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary\n opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the\n foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump\n against the wall.\n\n\n He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H.\n Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its\n glass splintered against the floor.\nThe noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even\n felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand.", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "\"Les, I think we've made poor Mrs. Burnett angry,\" Ann said. \"She's so\n upset over her poor husband's health and she thinks we're insulting\n her.\"\n\n\n Les didn't hear her. He strode to the detective set, followed at a safe\n distance by the eyeball, and picked up the box.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch out!\" Bob cried. A small flashlight fell from the box,\n landed on its side and its bulb flashed on, throwing a pencil of light\n across Les's hands.\nBob retrieved the flashlight and turned it off while Les glanced\n through an instruction booklet, frowning.\n\n\n \"This toy is too complicated for a ten-year-old boy,\" Les told his\n wife. \"I don't know why you ordered such a thing.\" He tossed the\n booklet into the empty box.", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms." ], [ "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "With the proper mixture of respect and bonhommie, he lifted the heavy\n picture out of its frame. A yellowed envelope slipped to the floor as\n the picture came free. Hawkins rolled the picture like a scroll and put\n it into a desk drawer, for later attention. Then he looked around for a\n drink that would make him feel even better.\n\n\n A sorting clerk in the mail order department wasn't used to liquor. She\n picked up the envelope and looked around vaguely for the mail-opening\n machine.\n\n\n \"Hell, Milly, you aren't working!\" someone shouted at her. \"Have\n another!\"\n\n\n Milly snapped out of it. She giggled, suppressed a ladylike belch and\n returned to reality. Looking at the envelope, she said: \"Oh, I see.\n They must have stuck it in to tighten the frame. Gee, it's old.\"", "Mr. Hawkins had refreshed himself. He decided that he liked Milly's\n voice. To hear more of it, he said to her: \"I'll bet that's been in\n there ever since the picture was framed. There's a company legend that\n that picture was put up the day this branch opened, eighty years ago.\"\n\n\n \"I didn't know the company ever used buff envelopes like this.\" Milly\n turned it over in her hands. The ancient glue crackled as she did so.\n The flap popped open and an old-fashioned order blank fell out.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins' eyes widened. He bent, reached painfully over his potbelly\n and picked up the order form.", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "\"Les, I think we've made poor Mrs. Burnett angry,\" Ann said. \"She's so\n upset over her poor husband's health and she thinks we're insulting\n her.\"\n\n\n Les didn't hear her. He strode to the detective set, followed at a safe\n distance by the eyeball, and picked up the box.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch out!\" Bob cried. A small flashlight fell from the box,\n landed on its side and its bulb flashed on, throwing a pencil of light\n across Les's hands.\nBob retrieved the flashlight and turned it off while Les glanced\n through an instruction booklet, frowning.\n\n\n \"This toy is too complicated for a ten-year-old boy,\" Les told his\n wife. \"I don't know why you ordered such a thing.\" He tossed the\n booklet into the empty box.", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "\"I already have it,\" Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother.\n The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the\n kitchen table.\n\n\n \"Excitement isn't good for me,\" Mrs. Burnett said testily. \"I've had a\n lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband is better?\"\n\n\n \"Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me.\" Mrs.\n Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the\n house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall.\n Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed\n with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed\n the threshold.\n\n\n Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She\n nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared\n unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly.\n Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start\n shaking him.\n\n\n \"I got something important to tell you,\" Bob said rapidly, ready to\n duck. \"I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to\n tell you what I did.\"\n\n\n \"I heard all about what you did,\" Ann said, advancing again. \"And\n you're not going to slip away from me.\"\n\n\n \"Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear,\"\n Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor.\nAnn looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The\n doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: \"Don't answer me,\n don't answer me, don't go to the door.\"", "RATTLE OK\nBy HARRY WARNER, JR.\n\n\n Illustrated by FINLAY\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction December 1956.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhat better way to use a time machine than\n \nto handle department store complaints? But\n \npleasing a customer should have its limits!\nThe Christmas party at the Boston branch of Hartshorne-Logan was\n threatening to become more legendary than usual this Christmas.\n\n\n The farm machinery manager had already collapsed. When he slid under\n the table containing the drinks, Miss Pringle, who sold millinery, had\n screamed: \"He'll drown!\"\n\n\n One out of every three dirty stories started by party attendees had\n remained unfinished, because each had reminded someone else of another\n story.", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms." ], [ "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"We'll have to send it back,\" Ann said, \"and get the one we ordered.\"\n\n\n She tried to take it off, but the child squawked violently. Ann grabbed\n her daughter's arms, held them above her head and pulled at the dress.\n It seemed to be stuck somewhere. When Ann released the child's arms to\n loosen the dress, Sally squirmed away. She took one step forward, then\n began to float three inches above the ground. She landed just before\n she collided with the far wall.\nSally looked scared until she saw her mother's face. Then she squealed\n in delight.\n\n\n Ann's legs were rubber. She was shaking her head and wobbling\n uncertainly toward her daughter when the door opened behind her.\n\n\n \"It's me,\" her husband said. \"Slow day at the office, so I came home\n early.\"\n\n\n \"Les! I'm going crazy or something. Sally just—\"", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "\"You aren't going to believe me, Doctor,\" Ann said while he took the\n child's temperature, \"but we can't get that dress off Sally.\"\n\n\n \"Kids are stubborn sometimes.\" Dr. Schwartz whistled softly when he\n looked at the thermometer. \"She's pretty sick. I want a blood count\n before I try to move her. Let me undress her.\"\n\n\n Sally had been mumbling half-deliriously. She made no effort to resist\n as the doctor picked her up. But when he raised a fold of the dress and\n began to pull it back, she screamed.\n\n\n The doctor dropped the dress and looked in perplexity at the point\n where it touched Sally's skin.\n\n\n \"It's apparently an allergy to some new kind of material. But I don't\n understand why the dress won't come off. It's not stuck tight.\"", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "The only good thing about the morning for Ann was the fact that the\n manky had quieted down some time in the night. After she got Bob to\n school, she gingerly opened the closet door. The manky was now glowing\n a bright pink and seemed slightly larger. Deep violet lettering stood\n out on its side:\n\n\n \"\nToday is Wednesday. For obvious reasons, the manky will not operate\n today.\n\"\n\n\n The mailman brought a letter from Hartshorne-Logan. Ann stared stupidly\n at the envelope, until she realized that this wasn't an impossibly\n quick answer to the letter she had written yesterday. It must have\n crossed in the mail her complaint about the non-arrival of the order.\n She tore open the envelope and read:", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "His jaw dropped. \"My God! Ann, what—\"\n\n\n Ann was staring, too, but not at her daughter. \"Les! The hassock! It\n used to be brown!\"\n\n\n The hassock was a livid shade of green. A neon, demanding, screaming\n green that clashed horribly with the soft browns and reds in which Ann\n had furnished the room.\n\n\n \"That round thing must be leaking,\" Les said. \"But did you see Sally\n when she—\"\n\n\n Ann's frazzled nerves carried a frantic order to her muscles. She\n jumped up, strode to the hassock and picked up the manky with two\n fingers. She tossed it to Les. Immediately, she regretted her action.\n\n\n \"Drop it!\" she yelled. \"Maybe it'll turn you green, too!\"", "Milly was still deciphering the form. Now she let out a little squeal\n of excitement.\n\n\n \"Look, Mr. Hawkins! The name on this order—it's my great-grandmother!\n Isn't that wonderful? I was just a little girl when she died. I can\n barely remember her as a real old woman. But I remember that my\n grandmother never bought anything from Hartshorne-Logan because of some\n trouble her mother had once with the firm. My mother didn't want me to\n come to work here because of that.\"\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins put his arm around Milly in a way that he intended to\n look fatherly. It didn't. \"Well, now. Since it's your relative, let's\n thrill the old girl. We wouldn't have vacuum sacks any more. So we'll\n substitute a manky!\"\nAnn Hartley was returning from mailing the letter when she found the\n large parcel on her doorstep. She put her hands on her hips and stared\n pugnaciously at the bundle.", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"", "\"Les, I think we've made poor Mrs. Burnett angry,\" Ann said. \"She's so\n upset over her poor husband's health and she thinks we're insulting\n her.\"\n\n\n Les didn't hear her. He strode to the detective set, followed at a safe\n distance by the eyeball, and picked up the box.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch out!\" Bob cried. A small flashlight fell from the box,\n landed on its side and its bulb flashed on, throwing a pencil of light\n across Les's hands.\nBob retrieved the flashlight and turned it off while Les glanced\n through an instruction booklet, frowning.\n\n\n \"This toy is too complicated for a ten-year-old boy,\" Les told his\n wife. \"I don't know why you ordered such a thing.\" He tossed the\n booklet into the empty box.", "Ann put her mouth close to the glass, shouting: \"Won't you come to the\n back door, Mrs. Burnett? This one is stuck.\"\n\n\n \"I just wanted to borrow some sugar,\" the woman cried from the porch.\n \"I realize that I'm a terrible bother.\" But she walked down the front\n steps and disappeared around the side of the house.\n\n\n \"Don't open the back door.\" The well-modulated voice from the small\n doorbell box threatened to penetrate every corner of the house. Ann\n looked doubtfully at her husband's lips. They weren't moving.\n\n\n \"If this is ventriloquism—\" she began icily.\n\n\n \"I'll have to order another doorbell just like this one, for the\n office,\" Les said. \"But you'd better let the old girl in. No use\n letting her get peeved.\"", "\"This thing has never been processed!\" Raising his voice, he shouted\n jovially, \"Hey, people! You're all fired! Here's an order that\n Hartshorne-Logan never filled! We can't have such carelessness. This\n poor woman has waited eighty years for her merchandise!\"\nMilly was reading aloud the scrawled words on the order form:\n\n\n \"Best electric doorbell. Junior detective kit. Disposable sacks for\n vacuum cleaner. Dress for three-year-old girl.\" She turned to the\n assistant general manager, struck with an idea for the first time in\n her young life. \"Let's fill this order right now!\"", "\"Don't bother trying,\" Ann said miserably. \"Just cut it off.\"\n\n\n Dr. Schwartz pulled scissors from his bag and clipped at a sleeve. When\n he had cut it to the shoulder, he gently began to peel back the edges\n of the cloth. Sally writhed and kicked, then collapsed in a faint. The\n physician smoothed the folds hastily back into place.\n\n\n He looked helpless as he said to Ann: \"I don't know quite what to do.\n The flesh starts to hemorrhage when I pull at the cloth. She'd bleed to\n death if I yanked it off. But it's such an extreme allergy that it may\n kill her, if we leave it in contact with the skin.\"", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"" ], [ "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"We'll have to send it back,\" Ann said, \"and get the one we ordered.\"\n\n\n She tried to take it off, but the child squawked violently. Ann grabbed\n her daughter's arms, held them above her head and pulled at the dress.\n It seemed to be stuck somewhere. When Ann released the child's arms to\n loosen the dress, Sally squirmed away. She took one step forward, then\n began to float three inches above the ground. She landed just before\n she collided with the far wall.\nSally looked scared until she saw her mother's face. Then she squealed\n in delight.\n\n\n Ann's legs were rubber. She was shaking her head and wobbling\n uncertainly toward her daughter when the door opened behind her.\n\n\n \"It's me,\" her husband said. \"Slow day at the office, so I came home\n early.\"\n\n\n \"Les! I'm going crazy or something. Sally just—\"", "His jaw dropped. \"My God! Ann, what—\"\n\n\n Ann was staring, too, but not at her daughter. \"Les! The hassock! It\n used to be brown!\"\n\n\n The hassock was a livid shade of green. A neon, demanding, screaming\n green that clashed horribly with the soft browns and reds in which Ann\n had furnished the room.\n\n\n \"That round thing must be leaking,\" Les said. \"But did you see Sally\n when she—\"\n\n\n Ann's frazzled nerves carried a frantic order to her muscles. She\n jumped up, strode to the hassock and picked up the manky with two\n fingers. She tossed it to Les. Immediately, she regretted her action.\n\n\n \"Drop it!\" she yelled. \"Maybe it'll turn you green, too!\"", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms.", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "\"I'm going to return it, if you don't smudge it up,\" she replied. \"Look\n at the marks you made on the instructions.\" The black finger-marks\n stood out clearly against the shiny, coated paper.\n\n\n Les looked at his hands. \"I didn't do it,\" he said, pressing his clean\n fingertips against the kitchen table.\n\n\n Black fingerprints, a full set of them, stood out against the sparkling\n polished table's surface.\n\n\n \"I think the Detectolite did it,\" Bob said. \"The instructions say\n you've got to be very careful with it, because its effects last for a\n long time.\"\n\n\n Les began scrubbing his hands vigorously at the sink. Ann watched him\n silently, until she saw his fingerprints appear on the faucet, the soap\n and the towel. She began to yell at him for making such a mess, when\n Sally floated into the kitchen. The girl was wearing a nightgown.", "\"Your dress ought to be here,\" Ann said. She found scissors in her\n sewing box, tossed a cushion onto the floor, sat on it, and began to\n open the parcel.\n\n\n \"Now I'll have to write another letter to explain that they should\n throw away my letter of complaint,\" she told her daughter. \"And by the\n time they get my second letter, they'll have answered my first letter.\n Then they'll write again.\" Out of consideration for Sally, she omitted\n the expletives that she wanted to add.\n\n\n The translucent cord was too tough for the scissors. Ann was about to\n hunt for a razor blade when Sally clutched at an intersection of the\n cord and yanked. The twine sprang away from the carton as if it were\n alive. The paper wrappings flapped open.\n\n\n \"There!\" Sally said.", "The back door was already open, because it was a warm day. The screen\n door had no latch, held closed by a simple spring. Ann pushed it open\n when Mrs. Burnett waddled up the three back steps, and smiled at her\n neighbor.\n\n\n \"I'm so sorry you had to walk around the house. It's been a rather\n hectic day in an awful lot of ways.\"\nSomething seemed to impede Mrs. Burnett as she came to the threshold.\n She frowned and shoved her portly frame against something invisible.\n It apparently yielded abruptly, because she staggered forward into\n the kitchen, nearly falling. She stared grimly at Ann and looked\n suspiciously behind her.\n\n\n \"The children have some new toys,\" Ann improvised hastily. \"Sally is\n so excited over a new dress that she's positively feverish. Let's see\n now—it was sugar that you want, wasn't it?\"", "Ann repressed an irrational urge to slap her daughter. Instead, she\n tossed the wrappings aside and removed the lid from the carton. A\n slightly crushed thin cardboard box lay on top. Ann pulled out the\n dress and shook it into a freely hanging position. Then she groaned.\n\n\n It was green and she had ordered blue. It didn't remotely resemble\n the dress she had admired from the Hartshorne-Logan catalogue\n illustration. Moreover, the shoulders were lumpier than any small\n girl's dress should be.\n\n\n But Sally was delighted. \"Mine!\" she shrilled, grabbing for the dress.\n\n\n \"It's probably the wrong size, too,\" Ann said, pulling off Sally's\n dress to try it on. \"Let's find as many things to complain about as we\n can.\"\nThe dress fitted precisely, except for the absurd shoulder bumps. Sally\n was radiant for a moment. Then her small face sobered and she started\n to look vacantly at the distant wall.", "\"You aren't going to believe me, Doctor,\" Ann said while he took the\n child's temperature, \"but we can't get that dress off Sally.\"\n\n\n \"Kids are stubborn sometimes.\" Dr. Schwartz whistled softly when he\n looked at the thermometer. \"She's pretty sick. I want a blood count\n before I try to move her. Let me undress her.\"\n\n\n Sally had been mumbling half-deliriously. She made no effort to resist\n as the doctor picked her up. But when he raised a fold of the dress and\n began to pull it back, she screamed.\n\n\n The doctor dropped the dress and looked in perplexity at the point\n where it touched Sally's skin.\n\n\n \"It's apparently an allergy to some new kind of material. But I don't\n understand why the dress won't come off. It's not stuck tight.\"", "\"Don't bother trying,\" Ann said miserably. \"Just cut it off.\"\n\n\n Dr. Schwartz pulled scissors from his bag and clipped at a sleeve. When\n he had cut it to the shoulder, he gently began to peel back the edges\n of the cloth. Sally writhed and kicked, then collapsed in a faint. The\n physician smoothed the folds hastily back into place.\n\n\n He looked helpless as he said to Ann: \"I don't know quite what to do.\n The flesh starts to hemorrhage when I pull at the cloth. She'd bleed to\n death if I yanked it off. But it's such an extreme allergy that it may\n kill her, if we leave it in contact with the skin.\"", "\"The minute I write a letter to complain about you, you turn up!\" she\n told the parcel. She nudged her toe peevishly against the brown paper\n wrappings that were tied with a half-transparent twine she had never\n seen before.\n\n\n The label was addressed in a wandering scrawl, a sharp contrast to\n the impersonal typing on the customary Hartshorne-Logan bundles. But\n the familiar RATTLE OK sticker was pasted onto the box, indicating to\n the delivery man that the contents would make a rattling sound and\n therefore hadn't been broken in shipment.\n\n\n Ann sighed and picked up her bundle. With a last look at the lovely\n spring afternoon and the quiet suburban landscape, she went into the\n house.\n\n\n Two-year-old Sally heard the box rattling. She waddled up on chubby\n legs and grabbed her mother's skirt. \"Want!\" she said decisively.", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "Les kicked the hassock into the hall closet, tossed the manky in after\n it and shut the door firmly. As the door closed, he saw the entire\n interior of the dark closet brighten into a wet-lettuce green.\n\n\n When he turned back to Ann, she was staring at her left hand. The\n wedding band that Les had put there a dozen years ago was a brilliant\n green, shedding its soft glow over the finger up to the first knuckle.\n\n\n Ann felt the scream building up inside her. She opened her mouth to let\n it out, then put her hand in front of her mouth to keep it in, finally\n jerked the hand away to prevent the glowing ring from turning her front\n teeth green.\n\n\n She collapsed into Les's arms, babbling incomprehensibly.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "\"Yes. It's a little gadget that looks like a water pistol. Your son\n insists that he didn't know it would make clothing transparent. He\n claims it was just accident that he tried it out when he was walking\n by the gym during calisthenics. We've had to call upon every family\n in the neighborhood for blankets. Bob has always been a good boy and\n we believe that we can expel him quietly without newspaper publicity\n involving his name, if you'll—\"\n\n\n \"I'll be right down,\" Ann said. \"I mean I won't be right down. I've got\n a sick baby here. Don't do anything till I telephone my husband. And\n I'm sorry for Bob. I mean I'm sorry for the girls, and for the boys,\n too. I'm sorry for—for everything. Good-by.\"\nJust as she hung up the telephone, the doorbell rang. It rang with a\n normal buzz, then began to play soft music. Ann opened the door without\n difficulty, to admit Dr. Schwartz.", "The recently developed liquors which affected the bloodstream three\n times faster had driven away twinges of conscience about untrimmed\n trees and midnight church services.\n\n\n The star salesman for mankies and the gentleman who was in charge of\n the janitors were putting on a display of Burmese foot-wrestling in\n one corner of the general office. The janitor foreman weighed fifty\n pounds less than the Burma gentleman, who was the salesman's customary\n opponent. So the climax of one tactic did not simply overturn the\n foreman. He glided through the air, crashing with a very loud thump\n against the wall.\n\n\n He wasn't hurt. But the impact knocked the hallowed portrait of H. H.\n Hartshorne, co-founder, from its nail. It tinkled imposingly as its\n glass splintered against the floor.\nThe noise caused a temporary lull in the gaiety. Several employes even\n felt a passing suspicion that things might be getting out of hand." ], [ "\"Where did this come from?\" Les held a small object in the palm of\n his hand, keeping it away from his body. A few drops of something\n unpleasant were dripping from his fingers. The object looked remarkably\n like a human eyeball. It was human-size, complete with pupil, iris and\n rather bloodshot veins.\n\n\n \"Hey, that's mine,\" Bob said. \"You know, this is a funny detective kit.\n That was in it. But there aren't instructions on how it works.\"\n\n\n \"Well, put it away,\" Ann told Bob sharply. \"It's slimy.\"\n\n\n Les laid the eyeball on the table and walked away. The eyeball rolled\n from the smooth, level table, bounced twice when it hit the floor, then\n rolled along, six inches behind him. He turned and kicked at it. The\n eyeball rolled nimbly out of the path of the kick.", "\"Les, I think we've made poor Mrs. Burnett angry,\" Ann said. \"She's so\n upset over her poor husband's health and she thinks we're insulting\n her.\"\n\n\n Les didn't hear her. He strode to the detective set, followed at a safe\n distance by the eyeball, and picked up the box.\n\n\n \"Hey, watch out!\" Bob cried. A small flashlight fell from the box,\n landed on its side and its bulb flashed on, throwing a pencil of light\n across Les's hands.\nBob retrieved the flashlight and turned it off while Les glanced\n through an instruction booklet, frowning.\n\n\n \"This toy is too complicated for a ten-year-old boy,\" Les told his\n wife. \"I don't know why you ordered such a thing.\" He tossed the\n booklet into the empty box.", "Les held up his hands, palms toward the doctor. \"What's wrong with me?\n My fingers look all right. But they leave black marks on everything I\n touch.\"\n\n\n The doctor looked closely at the fingertips. \"Every human has natural\n oil on the skin. That's how detectives get results with their\n fingerprint powder. But I've never heard of nigrification, in this\n sense. Better not try to commit any crimes until you've seen a skin\n specialist.\"\nAnn was peering through the window, curious about the ambulance despite\n her own troubles. She saw two attendants carry Mr. Burnett, motionless\n and white, on a stretcher from the house next door into the ambulance.\n A third member of the crew was struggling with a disheveled Mrs.\n Burnett at the door. Shrieks that sounded like \"Murder!\" came sharply\n through the window.\n\n\n \"I know those bearers,\" Dr. Schwartz said. He yanked the window open.\n \"Hey, Pete! What's wrong?\"", "He tossed the manky onto the hassock and delved into the carton again.\n Sally was still in his arms.\n\n\n \"That's the doorbell, I think,\" he said, looking at the next object. It\n had a lovely, tubular shape, a half-dozen connecting rods and a plug\n for a wall socket.\n\n\n \"That's funny,\" Ann mused, her mind distracted from Sally for a moment.\n \"It looks terribly expensive. Maybe they sent door chimes instead of\n the doorbell.\"\n\n\n The bottom of the carton contained the detective outfit that they had\n ordered for their son. Ann glanced at its glaringly lithographed cover\n and said: \"Les, about Sally. Put her down a minute and watch what she\n does.\"\nLes stared at his wife and put the child onto the rug. Sally began to\n walk, then rose and again floated, this time toward the hassock on\n which the manky lay.", "\"I'm going to return it, if you don't smudge it up,\" she replied. \"Look\n at the marks you made on the instructions.\" The black finger-marks\n stood out clearly against the shiny, coated paper.\n\n\n Les looked at his hands. \"I didn't do it,\" he said, pressing his clean\n fingertips against the kitchen table.\n\n\n Black fingerprints, a full set of them, stood out against the sparkling\n polished table's surface.\n\n\n \"I think the Detectolite did it,\" Bob said. \"The instructions say\n you've got to be very careful with it, because its effects last for a\n long time.\"\n\n\n Les began scrubbing his hands vigorously at the sink. Ann watched him\n silently, until she saw his fingerprints appear on the faucet, the soap\n and the towel. She began to yell at him for making such a mess, when\n Sally floated into the kitchen. The girl was wearing a nightgown.", "\"Why did you do it?\" Ann asked Bob, her anger suddenly slumping into\n weary sadness. \"People will suspect you of being a sex maniac for the\n rest of your life. You can't possibly explain—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother about the girls' clothing,\" Bob said, \"because it was\n only an accident. The really important thing is something else I did\n before I left the house.\"\n\n\n Les, cursing softly, hurried past them on the way to answer the\n knocking. He ignored the doorbell's pleas.\n\n\n \"I forgot about it,\" Bob continued, \"when that ray gun accidentally\n went off. Then when they put me in the principal's office, I had time\n to think, and I remembered. I put some white stuff from the detective\n kit into that sugar we lent Mrs. Burnett last night. I just wanted to\n see what would happen. I don't know exactly what effect—\"", "\"I already have it,\" Bob said, handing a filled cup to his mother.\n The boy turned back to the detective set which he had spread over the\n kitchen table.\n\n\n \"Excitement isn't good for me,\" Mrs. Burnett said testily. \"I've had a\n lot of troubles in my life. I like peace and quiet.\"\n\n\n \"Your husband is better?\"\n\n\n \"Worse. I'm sure I don't know why everything happens to me.\" Mrs.\n Burnett edged toward the hall, trying to peer into the front of the\n house. Ann stood squarely in front of the door leading to the hall.\n Defeated, Mrs. Burnett left. A muffled volley of handclapping, mixed\n with a few faint cheers, came from the doorbell-box when she crossed\n the threshold.\n\n\n Ann went into the hall to order Les to disconnect the doorbell. She\n nearly collided with him, coming in the other direction.", "The whole family decided that bed might be a good idea, soon after\n dinner. When the lights went out, the house seemed to be nearly normal.\n Les put on a pair of gloves and threw a pillowcase over the eyeball.\n Bob rigged up trestles to warn visitors from the front porch. Ann\n put small wads of cotton into her ears, because she didn't like the\n rhythmic rattle, soft but persistent, that emerged from the hall\n closet where the manky sat. Sally was whining occasionally in her sleep.\nWhen daylight entered her room, Sally's nightgown had turned back into\n the new dress. But the little girl was too sick to get out of bed.\n She wasn't hungry, her nose was running, and she had a dry cough. Les\n called the doctor before going to work.", "The manky's rattle suddenly began rhythmically from the lower part of\n the house. Ann clutched the side of the chair, trying to keep herself\n under control. A siren wailed somewhere down the street, grew louder\n rapidly, suddenly going silent at the peak of its crescendo.\n\n\n Dr. Schwartz glanced outside the window. \"An ambulance. Looks as if\n they're stopping here.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no,\" Ann breathed. \"Something's happened to Les.\"\n\n\n \"It sure will,\" Les said grimly, walking into the bedroom. \"I won't\n have a job if I can't get this stuff off my fingers. Big black\n fingerprints on everything I touch. I can't handle correspondence or\n shake hands with customers. How's the kid? What's the ambulance doing\n out front?\"\n\n\n \"They're going to the next house down the street,\" the physician said.\n \"Has there been sickness there?\"", "Les kicked the hassock into the hall closet, tossed the manky in after\n it and shut the door firmly. As the door closed, he saw the entire\n interior of the dark closet brighten into a wet-lettuce green.\n\n\n When he turned back to Ann, she was staring at her left hand. The\n wedding band that Les had put there a dozen years ago was a brilliant\n green, shedding its soft glow over the finger up to the first knuckle.\n\n\n Ann felt the scream building up inside her. She opened her mouth to let\n it out, then put her hand in front of her mouth to keep it in, finally\n jerked the hand away to prevent the glowing ring from turning her front\n teeth green.\n\n\n She collapsed into Les's arms, babbling incomprehensibly.", "His jaw dropped. \"My God! Ann, what—\"\n\n\n Ann was staring, too, but not at her daughter. \"Les! The hassock! It\n used to be brown!\"\n\n\n The hassock was a livid shade of green. A neon, demanding, screaming\n green that clashed horribly with the soft browns and reds in which Ann\n had furnished the room.\n\n\n \"That round thing must be leaking,\" Les said. \"But did you see Sally\n when she—\"\n\n\n Ann's frazzled nerves carried a frantic order to her muscles. She\n jumped up, strode to the hassock and picked up the manky with two\n fingers. She tossed it to Les. Immediately, she regretted her action.\n\n\n \"Drop it!\" she yelled. \"Maybe it'll turn you green, too!\"", "He said: \"It's all right. There must be balloons or something in the\n shoulders of that dress. I'll tie a paperweight to Sally's dress and\n that'll hold her down until we undress her. Don't worry. And that green\n dye or whatever it is will wash off.\"\n\n\n Ann immediately felt better. She put her hands behind her back, pulled\n off her ring and slipped it into her apron pocket. Les was sentimental\n about her removing it.\n\n\n \"I'll get dinner,\" she said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel.\n \"Maybe you'd better start a letter to Hartshorne-Logan. Let's go into\n the kitchen, Sally.\"", "\"My God!\" Ann forgot her tongue before the children. \"She got out of\n that dress herself. Where did she get that nightgown?\"\n\n\n Ann fingered the garment. She didn't recognize it as a nightgown. But\n in cut and fold, it was suspiciously like the dress that had arrived in\n the parcel. Her heart sank.\n\n\n She picked up the child, felt the hot forehead, and said: \"Les, I think\n it's the same dress. It must change color or something when it's time\n for a nap. It seems impossible, but—\" She shrugged mutely. \"And I\n think Sally's running a temperature. I'm going to put her to bed.\"\n\n\n She looked worriedly into the reddened eyes of the small girl, who\n whimpered on the way to the bedroom. Ann carried her up the stairs,\n keeping her balance with difficulty, as Sally threatened to pop upward\n out of her arms.", "The front man with the stretcher looked up. \"I don't know. This guy's\n awful sick. I think his wife is nuts.\"\n\n\n Mrs. Burnett had broken free. She dashed halfway down the sidewalk,\n gesticulating wildly to nobody in particular.\n\n\n \"It's murder!\" she screamed. \"Murder again! He's been poisoned! He's\n going to die! It means the electric chair!\"\n\n\n The orderly grabbed her again. This time he stuffed a handkerchief into\n her mouth to quiet her.\n\n\n \"Come back to this house as soon as you deliver him,\" Dr. Schwartz\n shouted to the men. \"We've got a very sick child up here.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid this would happen,\" Les said. \"The poor woman already has\n lost three husbands. If this one is sick, it's no wonder she thinks\n that somebody is poisoning him.\"", "Ann strode resolutely toward the rear of the house. She kept her eyes\n determinedly off the tinge of green that was showing through the apron\n pocket and didn't dare look back at her daughter's unsettling means of\n propulsion.\nA half-hour later, when the meal was almost ready, two things happened:\n Bob came home from school through the back door and a strange voice\n said from the front of the house, \"Don't answer the front door.\"\n\n\n Ann stared at her son. He stared back at her, the detective outfit\n under his arm.\n\n\n She went into the front room. Her husband was standing with fists on\n hips, looking at the front door, chuckling. \"Neatest trick I've seen\n in a long time. That voice you heard was the new doorbell. I put it up\n while you were in the kitchen. Did you hear what happened when old lady\n Burnett out there pushed the button?\"", "\"He put stuff in the sugar?\" A deep, booming voice came from the front\n of the house. Mother and son looked through the hall. A policeman stood\n on the threshold of the front door. \"I heard that! The woman next door\n claims that her husband is poisoned. Young man, I'm going to put you\n under arrest.\"\n\n\n The policeman stepped over the threshold. A blue flash darted from\n the doorbell box, striking him squarely on the chest. The policeman\n staggered back, sitting down abruptly on the porch. A scent of ozone\n drifted through the house.\n\n\n \"Close the door, close the door,\" the doorbell was chanting urgently.\n\n\n \"Where's that ambulance?\" Dr. Schwartz yelled from the top of the\n steps. \"The child's getting worse.\"", "Bob stuck his head around the bedroom door. His mother stared\n unbelievingly for a moment, then advanced on him threateningly.\n Something in his face restrained her, just as she was about to start\n shaking him.\n\n\n \"I got something important to tell you,\" Bob said rapidly, ready to\n duck. \"I snuck out of the principal's office and came home. I got to\n tell you what I did.\"\n\n\n \"I heard all about what you did,\" Ann said, advancing again. \"And\n you're not going to slip away from me.\"\n\n\n \"Give me a chance to explain something. Downstairs. So he won't hear,\"\n Bob ended in a whisper, nodding toward the doctor.\nAnn looked doubtfully at Les, then followed Bob down the stairs. The\n doorbell was monotonously saying in a monotone: \"Don't answer me,\n don't answer me, don't go to the door.\"", "Sally crouched to jump at her father. Before she could leap, he grabbed\n her up bodily and hugged her. Then he saw the box.\n\n\n \"Your order's here? Good. What's this thing?\" He was looking at a small\n box he had pulled from the carton. Its lid contained a single word:\n MANKY. The box rattled when he shook it.\n\n\n Les pulled off the lid and found inside a circular, shiny metal object.\n A triangular trio of jacks stuck out from one end.\n\n\n \"Is this the doorbell? I've never seen a plug like this. And there's no\n wire.\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Ann said. \"Les, listen. A minute ago, Sally—\"\n\n\n He peered into the box for an instruction sheet, uselessly. \"They must\n have made a mistake. It looks like some kind of farm equipment.\"", "\"It's all in the spirit of good, clean fun!\" cried Mr. Hawkins, the\n assistant general manager. Since he was the highest executive present,\n worries vanished. Everyone felt fine. There was a scurry to shove the\n broken glass out of sight and to turn more attention to another type of\n glasses.\n\n\n Mr. Hawkins himself, acting by reflex, attempted to return the portrait\n to its place until new glass could be obtained. But the fall had sprung\n the frame at one corner and it wouldn't hang straight.\n\n\n \"We'd better put old H. H. away for safekeeping until after the\n holiday,\" he told a small, blonde salesclerk who was beneath his\n attention on any working day.", "\"We regret to inform you that your order cannot be filled until the\n balance you owe us has been reduced. From the attached form, you will\n readily ascertain that the payment of $87.56 will enable you to resume\n the purchasing of merchandise on credit. We shall fill your recent\n order as soon....\"\n\n\n Ann crumpled the letter and threw it into the imitation fireplace,\n knowing perfectly well that it would need to be retrieved for Les after\n work tonight. She had just decided to call Hartshorne-Logan's complaint\n department when the phone rang.\n\n\n \"I'm afraid I must ask you to come down to the school, Mrs. Morris,\" a\n voice said. \"Your son is in trouble. He claims that it's connected with\n something that his parents gave him.\"\n\n\n \"My son?\" Ann asked incredulously. \"Bob?\"" ] ]
train	50103	[ "Why did Amanda know Giles so well?", "Why had Harry left Earth?", "How did Giles feel about family in the beginning?", "How is Earth perceived in this story?", "Why couldn't they find a volunteer to man the big ship?", "How does rejuvenation work?", "After seeing Dr. Cobb, what isn't something Giles thought about doing?", "Which word doesn't describe Jordan?", "What is likely the reason that Dr. Vincenti left Earth?", "What is not a lesson Giles learned?" ]	[ [ "she had worked with him for over 100 years", "they had dated once", "she paid attention to what he liked and didn't like", "it was her job to do so" ], [ "to get married and start a family", "the law stated that he must leave due to overpopulation", "he had committed a crime that required him to emigrate to another place", "he had been born illegally on Earth" ], [ "he cared less about them as time wore on", "Harry reminded him too much of his ex-wife", "he liked some of his children, but not all of them", "he loved them but didn't want to travel for ninety years" ], [ "it's run by an intelligent, motivated Council", "it is a weaker planet now because few discoveries are taking place there", "it's in the center of all of the other planets, so it's visited often", "people want to live there, as it's the richest planet" ], [ "the ship wasn't going to be ready for a long time", "there was no proof that it was safe for humans", "the rats didn't survive, so people probably wouldn't", "no one wanted to spend that much time on the ship" ], [ "it re-trains the brain to develop younger cells", "it injects a serum in the body that reverses time", "exercises are done to re-energize muscles", "drugs convince the body to feel younger" ], [ "volunteering to man the big ship", "seeing another doctor for a second opinion", "dating again", "finding a new place to live" ], [ "intelligent", "motivated", "impatient", "heroic" ], [ "he missed his family and wanted to live with them", "he wanted to share his newest discovery with a different planet", "there wasn't a lot of demand for doctors on Earth", "he discovered the truth about rejuvenation" ], [ "All good things come to an end", "Enjoying your job makes life worth living", "Never take life for granted", "Family is an important part of life" ] ]	[ 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 4, 4, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "Amanda, so you can stop\n figuring ways to get me there.”\nShe smiled back suddenly, without\n feigning it. “Then you’re all\n right?”\n“As all right as I’ll ever be,”\n he told her. “They tell me I’m just\n growing old.”\nThis time her laugh was heartier.\n He caught himself before he\n could echo her mirth in a different\n voice and went inside where she\n had the coffee waiting for him.\nOddly, it still tasted good to\n him.\nThe projection was off, he saw,\n wondering whether he’d left it on\n or not. He snapped the switch and\n saw the screen light up, with the", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "wanted no solicitous glances this\n morning. Drat it, maybe he\n should move out. Maybe trying\n family life again would give him\n some new interests. Amanda probably\n would be willing to marry\n him; she’d hinted at a date once.\nHe stopped, shocked by the\n awareness that he hadn’t been out\n with a woman for....\nHe couldn’t remember how\n long it had been. Nor why.\n“In the spring, a young man’s\n fancy,” he quoted to himself, and\n then shuddered.\nIt hadn’t been that kind of\n spring for him—not this rejuvenation\n nor the last, nor the one\n before that.", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could" ], [ "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "“Bill,” he said, “start getting\n the big ship into production. I’ve\n found a volunteer.”\nHe’d been driven to it, he knew,\n as he watched the man’s amazed\n face snap from the screen. From\n the first suspicion of his trouble,\n something inside him had been\n forcing him to make this decision.\n And maybe it would do no good.\n Maybe the ship would fail. But\n thirty years was a number a man\n could risk.\nIf he made it, though....\nWell, he’d see those grandchildren\n of his this year—and\n Harry. Maybe he’d even tell\n Harry the truth, once they got\n done celebrating the reunion. And", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "when he’d had a mansion and\n counted his wealth in possessions,\n instead of the treasures he could\n build inside himself for the future\n ahead. He was getting positively\n childish!\nYet he relished the feeling of\n having Dubbins drive his car.\n More than anything else, he’d\n loved being driven. Even after\n chauffeurs were a thing of the\n past, Harry had driven him\n around. Now he’d taken to walking,\n as so many others had, for\n even with modern safety measures\n so strict, there was always\n a small chance of some accident\n and nobody had any desire to\n spend the long future as a cripple.", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor," ], [ "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation." ], [ "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor,", "there’d be other grandchildren.\n With the ship, he’d have time\n enough to look them up. Plenty\n of time!\nThirty years was a long time,\n when he stopped to think of it.\n—LESTER DEL REY", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "The\nDwindling\nYears\nHe didn’t expect to be last—but\n neither did he anticipate\n the horror of being the first!\nBy LESTER DEL REY\nIllustrated by JOHNS\nNEARLY TWO hundred\n years of habit carried the\n chairman of Exodus Corporation\n through the morning ritual\n of crossing the executive\n floor. Giles made the expected\n comments, smiled the proper\n smiles and greeted his staff by\n the right names, but it was purely\n automatic. Somehow, thinking\n had grown difficult in the mornings\n recently.\nInside his private office, he\n dropped all pretense and slumped", "“Bill,” he said, “start getting\n the big ship into production. I’ve\n found a volunteer.”\nHe’d been driven to it, he knew,\n as he watched the man’s amazed\n face snap from the screen. From\n the first suspicion of his trouble,\n something inside him had been\n forcing him to make this decision.\n And maybe it would do no good.\n Maybe the ship would fail. But\n thirty years was a number a man\n could risk.\nIf he made it, though....\nWell, he’d see those grandchildren\n of his this year—and\n Harry. Maybe he’d even tell\n Harry the truth, once they got\n done celebrating the reunion. And", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until" ], [ "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "“Bill,” he said, “start getting\n the big ship into production. I’ve\n found a volunteer.”\nHe’d been driven to it, he knew,\n as he watched the man’s amazed\n face snap from the screen. From\n the first suspicion of his trouble,\n something inside him had been\n forcing him to make this decision.\n And maybe it would do no good.\n Maybe the ship would fail. But\n thirty years was a number a man\n could risk.\nIf he made it, though....\nWell, he’d see those grandchildren\n of his this year—and\n Harry. Maybe he’d even tell\n Harry the truth, once they got\n done celebrating the reunion. And", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "there’d be other grandchildren.\n With the ship, he’d have time\n enough to look them up. Plenty\n of time!\nThirty years was a long time,\n when he stopped to think of it.\n—LESTER DEL REY", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "mind and tried to fight it off. He’d\n only skimmed the report, but this\n made no sense. “You mean you\n can calibrate your guiding devices\n accurately enough to get a\n missile where you want it and\n back?”\n“\nWhat?\n” Jordan’s voice rattled\n the speaker. “Of course not! It\n took two accidents to get the\n thing back to us—and with a\n half-light-year miss that delayed\n it about twenty years before the\n Procyon shuttle heard its signal.\n Pre-setting a course may take\n centuries, if we can ever master\n it. Even with Sirius expecting the\n missiles and ready to cooperate.", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor," ], [ "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could", "“I’d rather know the whole\n truth,” he said. His voice sounded\n dead in his ears. “The worst first.\n The rejuvenation...?”\nCobb sighed and yet seemed relieved.\n “Failed.” He stopped, and\n his hands touched the reports on\n his desk. “Completely,” he added\n in a low, defeated tone.\n“But I thought that was impossible!”\n“So did I. I wouldn’t believe\n it even yet—but now I find it\n isn’t the first case. I spent the\n night at Medical Center going up\n the ranks until I found men who\n really know about it. And now I\n wish I hadn’t.” His voice ran\n down and he gathered himself together", "Could they really dwindle\n down? Suppose he couldn’t rejuvenate\n all the way? He knew\n that there were some people who\n didn’t respond as well as others.\n Sol Graves, for instance. He’d\n been fifty when he finally learned\n how to work with the doctors and\n they could only bring him back to\n about thirty, instead of the normal\n early twenties. Would that\n reduce the slice of eternity that\n rejuvenation meant? And what\n had happened to Sol?\nOr suppose it wasn’t rejuvenation,\n after all; suppose something\n had gone wrong with him\n permanently?\nHe fought that off, but he\n couldn’t escape the nagging", "after the treatment!\nBut with all the equipment, it\n wasn’t impossible for a mistake\n to happen. It had been no fault of\n his ... he was sure of that ... his\n mind was easy to reach ... he\n could relax so easily....\nHe came out of it without\n even a headache, while they were\n removing the probes, but the\n fatigue on the operator’s face told\n him it had been a long and difficult\n job. He stretched experimentally,\n with the eternal unconscious\n expectation that he would\n find himself suddenly young\n again. But that, of course, was ridiculous.\n It took days for the mind\n to work on all the cells and to\n repair the damage of time.", "about his head and the earpieces\n were fitted. The drugs were shot\n painlessly into his arm and the\n light-pulser was adjusted to his\n brain-wave pattern.\nIt had been nothing like this his\n first time. Then it had required\n months of mental training, followed\n by crude mechanical and\n drug hypnosis for other months.\n Somewhere in every human brain\n lay the memory of what his cells\n had been like when he was young.\n Or perhaps it lay in the cells\n themselves, with the brain as only\n a linkage to it. They’d discovered\n that, and the fact that the mind\n could effect physical changes in\n the body. Even such things as", "feel it. Some of the panic symptoms\n were returning; the pulse in\n his neck was pounding and his\n breath was growing difficult.\n Sweat ran down his sides from\n his armpit and he wiped his palms\n against his coat.\n“Any particular emotional\n strain when you were treated—some\n major upset in your life?”\n Cobb asked.\nGiles thought as carefully as\n he could, but he remembered\n nothing like that. “You mean—it\n didn’t take? But I never had\n any trouble, Doctor. I was one of\n the first million cases, when a\n lot of people couldn’t rejuvenate\n at all, and I had no trouble even\n then.”", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "cancer could be willed out of existence—provided\n the brain\n could be reached far below the\n conscious level and forced to\n operate.\nThere had been impossible\n faith cures for millenia—cataracts\n removed from blinded eyes\n within minutes, even—but finding\n the mechanism in the brain\n that worked those miracles had\n taken an incredible amount of\n study and finding a means of\n bringing it under control had\n taken even longer.\nNow they did it with dozens of\n mechanical aids in addition to\n the hypnotic instructions—and\n did it usually in a single sitting,\n with the full transformation of\n the body taking less than a week", "Cobb considered it, hesitated as\n if making up his mind to be frank\n against his better judgment. “I\n can’t see any other explanation.\n You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing\n serious, but quite definite—as\n well as other signs\n of aging. I’m afraid the treatment\n didn’t take fully. It might have\n been some unconscious block\n on your part, some infection not\n diagnosed at the time, or even a\n fault in the treatment. That’s\n pretty rare, but we can’t neglect\n the possibility.”\nHE STUDIED his charts again\n and then smiled. “So we’ll\n give you another treatment. Any\n reason you can’t begin immediately?”", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "doubts at the doctor’s words.\nHe got up once to stare at himself\n in the mirror. Ten hours had\n gone by and there should have\n been some signs of improvement.\n He couldn’t be sure, though,\n whether there were or not.\nHe looked no better the next\n morning when he finally dragged\n himself up from the little sleep\n he’d managed to get. The hollows\n were still there and the circles\n under his eyes. He searched for\n the gray in his hair, but the traitorous\n strands had been removed\n at the doctor’s office and he could\n find no new ones.\nHe looked into the dining room\n and then went by hastily. He", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days" ], [ "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "Cobb considered it, hesitated as\n if making up his mind to be frank\n against his better judgment. “I\n can’t see any other explanation.\n You’ve got a slight case of angina—nothing\n serious, but quite definite—as\n well as other signs\n of aging. I’m afraid the treatment\n didn’t take fully. It might have\n been some unconscious block\n on your part, some infection not\n diagnosed at the time, or even a\n fault in the treatment. That’s\n pretty rare, but we can’t neglect\n the possibility.”\nHE STUDIED his charts again\n and then smiled. “So we’ll\n give you another treatment. Any\n reason you can’t begin immediately?”", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "feel it. Some of the panic symptoms\n were returning; the pulse in\n his neck was pounding and his\n breath was growing difficult.\n Sweat ran down his sides from\n his armpit and he wiped his palms\n against his coat.\n“Any particular emotional\n strain when you were treated—some\n major upset in your life?”\n Cobb asked.\nGiles thought as carefully as\n he could, but he remembered\n nothing like that. “You mean—it\n didn’t take? But I never had\n any trouble, Doctor. I was one of\n the first million cases, when a\n lot of people couldn’t rejuvenate\n at all, and I had no trouble even\n then.”", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned," ], [ "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "Even that failed him, though.\n He’d developed one of the finest\n chess collections in the world, but\n tonight it held no interest. And\n when he drew out his tools and\n tried working on the delicate,\n lovely jade for the set he was\n carving his hands seemed to be\n all thumbs. None of the other interests\n he’d developed through\n the years helped to add to the\n richness of living now.\nHe gave it up and went to bed—to\n have the fragment of that\n song pop into his head. Now there\n was no escaping it. Something\n about the years—or was it days—dwindling\n down to something\n or other.", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "wanted no solicitous glances this\n morning. Drat it, maybe he\n should move out. Maybe trying\n family life again would give him\n some new interests. Amanda probably\n would be willing to marry\n him; she’d hinted at a date once.\nHe stopped, shocked by the\n awareness that he hadn’t been out\n with a woman for....\nHe couldn’t remember how\n long it had been. Nor why.\n“In the spring, a young man’s\n fancy,” he quoted to himself, and\n then shuddered.\nIt hadn’t been that kind of\n spring for him—not this rejuvenation\n nor the last, nor the one\n before that.", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually", "“That bad, Arthur?” she asked.\n“Just a little tired,” he told\n her, refilling the cup. She’d made\n the coffee stronger than usual\n and it seemed to cut through\n some of the thickness in his head.\n “I guess I’m getting old, Amanda.”\nShe smiled dutifully at the\n time-worn joke, but he knew she\n wasn’t fooled. She’d cycled to\n middle age four times in her\n job and she probably knew him\n better than he knew himself—which\n wouldn’t be hard, he\n thought. He’d hardly recognized\n the stranger in the mirror as he\n tried to shave. His normal thinness\n had looked almost gaunt", "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "Amanda, so you can stop\n figuring ways to get me there.”\nShe smiled back suddenly, without\n feigning it. “Then you’re all\n right?”\n“As all right as I’ll ever be,”\n he told her. “They tell me I’m just\n growing old.”\nThis time her laugh was heartier.\n He caught himself before he\n could echo her mirth in a different\n voice and went inside where she\n had the coffee waiting for him.\nOddly, it still tasted good to\n him.\nThe projection was off, he saw,\n wondering whether he’d left it on\n or not. He snapped the switch and\n saw the screen light up, with the", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "somehow lost; the city beyond\n the window blurred as he\n studied it, and he swung the chair\n back so violently that his hand\n jerked painfully on the forelock\n he’d been twisting.\nThen he was staring unbelievingly\n at the single white hair that\n was twisted with the dark ones\n between his fingers.\nLike an automaton, he bent\n forward, his other hand groping\n for the mirror that should be in\n one of the drawers. The dull pain\n in his chest sharpened and his\n breath was hoarse in his throat,\n but he hardly noticed as he found\n the mirror and brought it up. His\n eyes focused reluctantly. There", "doubts at the doctor’s words.\nHe got up once to stare at himself\n in the mirror. Ten hours had\n gone by and there should have\n been some signs of improvement.\n He couldn’t be sure, though,\n whether there were or not.\nHe looked no better the next\n morning when he finally dragged\n himself up from the little sleep\n he’d managed to get. The hollows\n were still there and the circles\n under his eyes. He searched for\n the gray in his hair, but the traitorous\n strands had been removed\n at the doctor’s office and he could\n find no new ones.\nHe looked into the dining room\n and then went by hastily. He" ], [ "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "group. A very pleasant family in\n a very pleasant world.\nHe read Harry’s note again,\n with its praise for the planet and\n its invitation. He wondered if\n Dr. Vincenti had received an invitation\n like that, before he left.\n Or had he even been one of those\n to whom the same report had\n been delivered by some doctor?\n It didn’t matter, but it would explain\n things, at least.\nTwenty years to Centaurus,\n while the years dwindled down—\nThen abruptly the line finished\n itself. “The years dwindle down\n to a precious few....” he remembered.\n “A precious few.”\nThose dwindling years had", "But if you don’t feel well—”\n“I’m all right!” he told her\n sharply. Then he steadied himself\n and managed to smile. “Thanks\n for the coffee, Amanda.”\nShe accepted dismissal reluctantly.\n When she was gone, he\n sat gazing at the report from Jordan\n at Research.\nFor eighty years now, they’d\n been sending out the little ships\n that vanished at greater than the\n speed of light, equipped with\n every conceivable device to make\n them return automatically after\n taking pictures of wherever they\n arrived. So far, none had ever returned\n or been located. This was\n the first hope they’d found that\n the century-long trips between", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "his old answers. “We’re still ahead\n in medicine and we’ll get the\n other discoveries eventually, without\n interrupting the work of making\n the Earth fit for our longevity.\n We can wait. We’ll have to.”\nTHE YOUNGER man stared\n at him with the strange puzzled\n look Giles had seen too often\n lately. “Damn it, haven’t you read\n my report? We know the super-light\n drive works! That missile\n reached Sirius in less than ten\n days. We can have the secret of\n this antigravity in less than a\n year! We—”\n“Wait a minute.” Giles felt the\n thickness pushing back at his", "praise for the solar system where\n he’d been sent. He barely mentioned\n being married on the way\n or his dozen children, but filled\n most of the frame with glowing\n description and a plea for his\n father to join him there!\nGILES SNORTED and turned\n to the third frame, which\n showed a group picture of the\n family in some sort of vehicle,\n against the background of an alien\n but attractive world.\nHe had no desire to spend\n ninety years cooped up with a\n bunch of callow young emigrants,\n even in one of the improved Exodus\n shuttles. And even if Exodus\n ever got the super-light", "and there were hollows in his\n face and circles under his eyes.\n Even his hair had seemed thinner,\n though that, of course, was\n impossible.\n“Anything urgent on the Procyon\n shuttle?” he asked as she\n continue staring at him with worried\n eyes.\nSHE JERKED her gaze away\n guiltily and turned to the incoming\n basket. “Mostly drugs for\n experimenting. A personal letter\n for you, relayed from some place\n I never heard of. And one of the\n super-light missiles! They found\n it drifting half a light-year out\n and captured it. Jordan’s got a\n report on it and he’s going crazy.", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated", "could still fill his time with work—work\n that might even be useful.\n In the future, men would\n need the super-light drive if they\n were to span much more of the\n Universe than now. And he could\n speed up the work in some ways\n still, even if he could never see\n its finish.\nIt would be cold comfort but it\n was something. And he might\n keep busy enough to forget sometimes\n that the years were gone\n for him.\nAutomatic habit carried him\n through the office again, to Amanda’s\n desk, where her worry was\n still riding her. He managed a\n grin and somehow the right words\n came to his lips. “I saw the doctor,", "stars in the ponderous shuttles\n might be ended and he should\n have been filled with excitement\n at Jordan’s hasty preliminary report.\nHe leafed through it. The little\n ship apparently had been picked\n up by accident when it almost\n collided with a Sirius-local ship.\n Scientists there had puzzled over\n it, reset it and sent it back. The\n two white rats on it had still been\n alive.\nGiles dropped the report wearily\n and picked up the personal\n message that had come on the\n shuttle. He fingered the microstrip\n inside while he drank another\n coffee, and finally pulled\n out the microviewer. There were", "people still in the odd, wheelless\n vehicle on the alien planet.\nFOR A long moment, he stared\n at the picture without thinking,\n and then bent closer. Harry’s\n face hadn’t changed much. Giles\n had almost forgotten it, but there\n was still the same grin there. And\n his grandchildren had a touch\n of it, too. And of their grandfather’s\n nose, he thought. Funny,\n he’d never seen even pictures of\n his other grandchildren. Family\n ties melted away too fast for interstellar\n travel.\nYet there seemed to be no\n slackening of them in Harry’s\n case, and somehow it looked like\n a family, rather than a mere", "various nostrums, giving him no\n peace. Constant questions about\n how he felt, constant little looks\n of worry—until he’d been ready\n to yell at the boy. In fact, he\n had.\nFunny, he couldn’t picture really\n losing his temper here. Families\n did odd things to a man.\nHE LISTENED to a few of\n the discussions after the dinner,\n but he’d heard them all before,\n except for one about the\n super-speed drive, and there he\n had no wish to talk until he could\n study the final report. He gave up\n at last and went to his own suite.\n What he needed was a good\n night’s sleep after a little relaxation.", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "projected picture from Harry, across\n the desk from the communicator.\n“Antigravity!” His voice was\n unbelieving as he turned his head\n to face the older man. “What\n world is that?”\nGiles forced his attention on\n the picture again and this time\n he noticed the vehicle shown. It\n was enough like an old model\n Earth conveyance to pass casual\n inspection, but it floated wheellessly\n above the ground. Faint\n blur lines indicated it had been\n moving when the picture was\n taken.\n“One of my sons—” Giles\n started to answer. “I could find\n the star’s designation....”\nJordan cursed harshly. “So we", "I mean the big ship. We’ve had it\n drafted for building long enough;\n now we can finish it in three\n months. We know the drive works.\n We know it’s fast enough to reach\n Procyon in two weeks. We even\n know life can stand the trip. The\n rats were unharmed.”\nGiles shook his head at what\n the other was proposing, only\n partly believing it. “Rats don’t\n have minds that could show any\n real damage such as the loss of\n power to rejuvenate. We can’t put\n human pilots into a ship with our\n drive until we’ve tested it more\n thoroughly, Bill, even if they\n could correct for errors on arrival.", "Maybe if we put in stronger signaling\n transmitters....”\n“Yeah. Maybe in two centuries\n we’d have a through route charted\n to Sirius. And we still wouldn’t\n have proved it safe for human\n pilots. Mr. Giles, we’ve got to\n have the big ship. All we need is\none\nvolunteer!”\nIt occurred to Giles then that\n the man had been too fired with\n the idea to think. He leaned back,\n shaking his head again wearily.\n “All right, Bill. Find me one volunteer.\n Or how about you? Do\n you really want to risk losing the\n rest of your life rather than waiting\n a couple more centuries until", "drive working, there was no reason\n he should give up his work.\n The discovery that men could\n live practically forever had put\n an end to most family ties; sentiment\n wore thin in half a century—which\n wasn’t much time\n now, though it had once seemed\n long enough.\nStrange how the years seemed\n to get shorter as their number increased.\n There’d been a song\n once—something about the years\n dwindling down. He groped for\n the lines and couldn’t remember.\n Drat it! Now he’d probably lie\n awake most of the night again,\n trying to recall them.\nThe outside line buzzed musically,\n flashing Research’s number.", "three frames to the message, he\n saw with some surprise.\nHe didn’t need to see the signature\n on the first projection.\n Only his youngest son would have\n sent an elaborate tercentenary\n greeting verse—one that would\n arrive ninety years too late! Harry\n had been born just before Earth\n passed the drastic birth limitation\n act and his mother had\n spoiled him. He’d even tried to\n avoid the compulsory emigration\n draft and stay on with his mother.\n It had been the bitter quarrels\n over that which had finally\n broken Giles’ fifth marriage.\nOddly enough, the message in\n the next frame showed none of\n that. Harry had nothing but", "we know it’s safe? If you do, I’ll\n order the big ship.”\nJordan opened his mouth and\n for a second Giles’ heart caught\n in a flux of emotions as the\n man’s offer hovered on his lips.\n Then the engineer shut his mouth\n slowly. The belligerence ran out\n of him.\nHe looked sick, for he had no\n answer.\nNO SANE man would risk a\n chance for near eternity\n against such a relatively short\n wait. Heroism had belonged to\n those who knew their days were\n numbered, anyhow.\n“Forget it, Bill,” Giles advised.\n “It may take longer, but eventually" ], [ "when it was necessary because\n someone called across to him.\n Ordinarily, he was quick to support\n the idea of clubs in place\n of private families. A man here\n could choose his group and grow\n into them. Yet he wasn’t swallowed\n by them, as he might be by\n a family. Giles had been living\n here for nearly a century now and\n he’d never regretted it. But tonight\n his own group irritated him.\nHe puzzled over it, finding no\n real reason. Certainly they weren’t\n forcing themselves on him. He\n remembered once when he’d had\n a cold, before they finally licked\n that; Harry had been a complete\n nuisance, running around with", "GILES TRIED to stop scaring\n himself and partially succeeded,\n until he reached the doctor’s\n office. Then it was no longer necessary\n to frighten himself. The\n wrongness was too strong, no matter\n how professional Cobb’s smile!\nHe didn’t hear the preliminary\n words. He watched the smile vanish\n as the stack of reports came\n out. There was no nurse here\n now. The machines were quiet—and\n all the doors were shut.\nGiles shook his head, interrupting\n the doctor’s technical jargon.\n Now that he knew there was reason\n for his fear, it seemed to\n vanish, leaving a coldness that\n numbed him.", "by an effort. “It’s a shock\n to me, too, Mr. Giles. But—well,\n to simplify it, no memory is perfect—even\n cellular memory. It\n loses a little each time. And the\n effect is cumulative. It’s like an\n asymptotic curve—the further it\n goes, the steeper the curve. And—well,\n you’ve passed too far.”\nHe faced away from Giles,\n dropping the reports into a\n drawer and locking it. “I wasn’t\n supposed to tell you, of course.\n It’s going to be tough enough\n when they’re ready to let people\n know. But you aren’t the first and\n you won’t be the last, if that’s any", "He climbed into it, still partly\n numbed, and began driving mechanically,\n no longer wondering\n about the dangers that might possibly\n arise. Those wouldn’t matter\n much now. For a man who\n had thought of living almost forever,\n thirty years was too short\n a time to count.\nHe was passing near the club\n and started to slow. Then he\n went on without stopping. He\n wanted no chance to have them\n asking questions he couldn’t answer.\n It was none of their business.\n Dubbins had been kind—but\n now Giles wanted no kindness.\nThe street led to the office\n and he drove on. What else was\n there for him? There, at least, he", "Giles remembered that Dubbins\n was waiting for him, but this\n was more important. It hadn’t\n been a joke about his growing old,\n after all. But now, in a few days,\n he’d be his old—no, of course\n not—his young self again!\nThey went down the hall to\n another office, where Giles waited\n outside while Cobb conferred\n with another doctor and technician,\n with much waving of charts.\n He resented every second of it.\n It was as if the almost forgotten\n specter of age stood beside him,\n counting the seconds. But at last\n they were through and he was led\n into the quiet rejuvenation room,\n where the clamps were adjusted", "been precious once. He unexpectedly\n recalled his own grandfather\n holding him on an old\n knee and slipping him candy\n that was forbidden. The years\n seemed precious to the old man\n then.\nAmanda’s voice came abruptly\n over the intercom. “Jordan wants\n to talk to you,” she said, and the\n irritation was sharp in her voice.\n “He won’t take no!”\nGiles shrugged and reached for\n the projector, to cut it off. Then,\n on impulse, he set it back to the\n picture, studying the group again\n as he switched on Jordan’s wire.\nBut he didn’t wait for the hot\n words about whatever was the\n trouble.", "Giles grunted in irritation. He\n wasn’t ready to face Jordan yet.\n But he shrugged and pressed the\n button.\nThe intense face that looked\n from the screen was frowning as\n Jordan’s eyes seemed to sweep\n around the room. He was still\n young—one of the few under\n a hundred who’d escaped deportation\n because of special ability—and\n patience was still foreign to\n him.\nThen the frown vanished as\n an expression of shock replaced\n it, and Giles felt a sinking sensation.\n If he looked\nthat\nbad—\nBut Jordan wasn’t looking at\n him; the man’s interest lay in the", "it was still possible to find personal\n servants. Now he managed\n the club on a level of quasi-equality\n with the members. For the\n moment, though, he’d slipped\n back into the old ways.\nGILES FOUND himself lying\n on his couch, partially undressed,\n with the pillows just right\n and a long drink in his hand. The\n alcohol combined with the reaction\n from his panic to leave him\n almost himself again. After all,\n there was nothing to worry about;\n Earth’s doctors could cure anything.\n“I guess you’d better call Dr.\n Vincenti,” he decided. Vincenti\n was a member and would probably\n be the quickest to get.", "consolation. We’ve got a longer\n time scale than we used to have—but\n it’s in centuries, not in\n eons. For everybody, not just\n you.”\nIt was no consolation. Giles\n nodded mechanically. “I won’t\n talk, of course. How—how long?”\nCobb spread his hands unhappily.\n “Thirty years, maybe. But\n we can make them better. Geriatric\n knowledge is still on record.\n We can fix the heart and all the\n rest. You’ll be in good physical\n condition, better than your grandfather—”\n“And then....” Giles couldn’t\n pronounce the words. He’d grown\n old and he’d grow older. And", "“Thanks,” said Giles. “Ten\n o’clock is fine.”\nDubbins was still waiting, reading\n a paper whose headlined feature\n carried a glowing account of\n the discovery of the super-light\n missile and what it might mean.\n He took a quick look at Giles and\n pointed to it. “Great work, Mr.\n Giles. Maybe we’ll all get to see\n some of those other worlds yet.”\n Then he studied Giles more carefully.\n “Everything’s in good shape\n now, sir?”\n“The doctor says everything’s\n going to be fine,” Giles answered.\nIt was then he realized for the\n first time that Cobb had said no", "He finished the drink, feeling\n still better, and was sitting\n up when Dubbins came back.\n“Dr. Cobb wants you to come\n to his office at once, sir,” he said,\n dropping to his knee to help\n Giles with his shoes. “I’d be\n pleased to drive you there.”\nGiles frowned. He’d expected\n Cobb to come to him. Then he\n grimaced at his own thoughts.\n Dubbins’ manners must have carried\n him back into the past; doctors\n didn’t go in for home visits\n now—they preferred to see their\n patients in the laboratories that\n housed their offices. If this kept\n on, he’d be missing the old days", "we’ll find a way. With time\n enough, we’re bound to. And\n when we do, the ship will be\n ready.”\nThe engineer nodded miserably\n and clicked off. Giles turned\n from the blank screen to stare\n out of the windows, while his\n hand came up to twist at the lock\n of hair over his forehead. Eternity!\n They had to plan and build\n for it. They couldn’t risk that\n plan for short-term benefits. Usually\n it was too easy to realize that,\n and the sight of the solid, time-enduring\n buildings outside should\n have given him a sense of security.\nToday, though, nothing seemed\n to help. He felt choked, imprisoned,", "with an old-fashioned desk and\n chairs that almost concealed the\n cabinets of equipment beyond.\nHe listened as Giles stumbled\n out his story. Halfway through,\n the nurse took a blood sample\n with one of the little mosquito\n needles and the machinery behind\n the doctor began working on\n it.\n“Your friend told me about the\n gray hair, of course,” Cobb said.\n At Giles’ look, he smiled faintly.\n “Surely you didn’t think people\n could miss that in this day and\n age? Let’s see it.”\nHe inspected it and began\n making tests. Some were older\n than Giles could remember—knee", "were other white strands in his\n dark hair.\nThe mirror crashed to the floor\n as he staggered out of the office.\nIt was only two blocks to Giles’\n residence club, but he had to\n stop twice to catch his breath\n and fight against the pain that\n clawed at his chest. When he\n reached the wood-paneled lobby,\n he was barely able to stand.\nDubbins was at his side almost\n at once, with a hand under\n his arm to guide him toward his\n suite.\n“Let me help you, sir,” Dubbins\n suggested, in the tones\n Giles hadn’t heard since the man\n had been his valet, back when", "COBB LED him back to the\n first office, where he was given\n an injection of some kind and\n another sample of his blood was\n taken, while the earlier tests were\n repeated. But finally the doctor\n nodded.\n“That’s all for now, Mr. Giles.\n You might drop in tomorrow\n morning, after I’ve had a chance\n to complete my study of all this.\n We’ll know by then whether you’ll\n need more treatment. Ten o’clock\n okay?”\n“But I’ll be all right?”\nCobb smiled the automatic reassurance\n of his profession. “We\n haven’t lost a patient in two hundred\n years, to my knowledge.”", "“I’ll wait for you, sir,” Dubbins\n offered as they stopped beside\n the low, massive medical building.\nIt was almost too much consideration.\n Giles nodded, got out\n and headed down the hall uncertainly.\n Just how bad did he\n look? Well, he’d soon find out.\nHe located the directory and\n finally found the right office, its\n reception room wall covered\n with all the degrees Dr. Cobb had\n picked up in some three hundred\n years of practice. Giles felt\n better, realizing it wouldn’t be\n one of the younger men.\nCOBB APPEARED himself,\n before the nurse could take\n over, and led Giles into a room", "Dubbins shook his head. “Dr.\n Vincenti isn’t with us, sir. He\n left a year ago to visit a son in\n the Centauri system. There’s a\n Dr. Cobb whose reputation is\n very good, sir.”\nGiles puzzled over it doubtfully.\n Vincenti had been an oddly\n morose man the last few times\n he’d seen him, but that could\n hardly explain his taking a twenty-year\n shuttle trip for such a\n slim reason. It was no concern of\n his, though. “Dr. Cobb, then,” he\n said.\nGiles heard the other man’s\n voice on the study phone, too low\n for the words to be distinguishable.", "reflex, blood pressure, pulse\n and fluoroscope. Others involved\n complicated little gadgets that\n ran over his body, while meters\n bobbed and wiggled. The blood\n check came through and Cobb\n studied it, to go back and make\n further inspections of his own.\nAt last he nodded slowly.\n “Hyper-catabolism, of course. I\n thought it might be. How long\n since you had your last rejuvenation?\n And who gave it?”\n“About ten years ago,” Giles\n answered. He found his identity\n card and passed it over, while\n the doctor studied it. “My sixteenth.”\nIt wasn’t going right. He could", "such thing. A statement that\n lightning had never struck a\n house was no guarantee that it\n never would. It was an evasion\n meant to give such an impression.\nThe worry nagged at him all\n the way back. Word had already\n gone around the club that he’d\n had some kind of attack and\n there were endless questions that\n kept it on his mind. And even\n when it had been covered and\n recovered, he could still sense the\n glances of the others, as if he\n were Vincenti in one of the man’s\n more morose moods.\nHe found a single table in the\n dining room and picked his way\n through the meal, listening to\n the conversation about him only", "can send a message on the shuttle,\n begging for their secret in a\n couple of hundred years! While\n a hundred other worlds make a\n thousand major discoveries they\n don’t bother reporting! Can’t the\n Council see\nanything\n?”\nGiles had heard it all before.\n Earth was becoming a backwater\n world; no real progress had been\n made in two centuries; the young\n men were sent out as soon as\n their first fifty years of education\n were finished, and the older men\n were too conservative for really\n new thinking. There was a measure\n of truth in it, unfortunately.\n“They’ll slow up when their\n populations fill,” Giles repeated" ] ]
train	20038	[ "Who is writing this?", "What is Jodie Allen most likely to say about Donald Trump?", "Who does Chatterbox likely agree the most with?", "What isn't something mentioned in multiple events?", "What isn't a place that the information came from?", "Which word best describes the writers of 2, 7, and 17?" ]	[ [ "Chatterbox", "a variety of people", "Dan Crist", "Chatterbox's readers" ], [ "I'd vote for him for president", "Donald should be proud of himself", "Donald deserves his negative rating", "the people's dislike for Donald was exaggerated" ], [ "Dan Crist", "Felicia", "Walt Mossberg", "Henry Cohen" ], [ "famous people", "politics", "technology", "world events" ], [ "news columnists", "viewers of his blog", "news shows", "anonymous writers" ], [ "optimistic", "enthusiastic", "sorrowful", "sarcastic" ] ]	[ 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 4 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play." ], [ "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play." ], [ "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play." ], [ "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play.", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:" ], [ "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play." ], [ "Eleven-Twelfths of 1999 In Review \n\n When Chatterbox invited readers to nominate events, significant deaths, good and bad movies, etc., for 1999--a year likely to get little attention in the coming weeks, as news organizations choose instead to review the entire century or millennium--the response was overwhelming. Chatterbox had promised to publish his official \"1999 In Review\" item before Thanksgiving, but some distant memory of a scruple persuaded him to wait till November was over. Nothing ever happens in December.", "Don't forget Woodstock 1999 --the concert of \"peace and love\" that ended in a literal blaze of glory when in an hours-long tribute to the original Woodstock, the mob started ripping down vendor booths and anything else that would burn and piling it onto the bonfires scattered about the scene. [ Chatterbox interjects: Didn't people get assaulted and raped, too?] I'm getting all sentimental just thinking about it. \n\n You also left out all the shooting rampages . Several were done in the name of God or love supposedly. They were all committed by \"quiet, shy\" people who \"mostly kept to\" themselves. I've started to hang around only loud, obnoxious people. \n\n --Susan Hoechstetter \n\n \n\n 8. A Lunatic Rhapsody for the New York Yankees", "OK, that's not quite true. Hordes of protesters in Seattle are making the World Trade Organization's meeting there a much more exciting TV story than anyone expected it to be. Reader Dan Crist (who finds Chatterbox's habit of referring to himself in the third person \"rather annoying and less than professional\") points out that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941. Also, Chatterbox (moonlighting as \"Today's Papers\" columnist) observed not quite one year ago that the House of Representatives cast its second presidential-impeachment vote in U.S. history on Dec. 19, 1998. (That same news-filled day, the U.S. ended an air war against Iraq and Bob Livingston said he'd decided not to become House speaker after all.) Two months after the impeachment vote, the Senate failed to convict the president--a highly significant event of 1999 that, for some bizarre reason, slipped Chatterbox's mind until several indignant readers wrote in to remind him of it.", "What an extraordinary year! A right-wing conspiracy topples the president, and the governor of Texas reveals himself in a series of debates to be a natural leader with an innate gift for connecting with his audience, a sure sign of his electoral success next year. A new Thomas Harris book brilliantly takes us deeper into the mind of a serial killer; a new Star Wars movie redefines the very nature of entertainment; a new Stanley Kubrick film changes the whole national dialogue about sex and marriage; a new TV series from the creator of SportsNight --oh, I can't even bring myself to bash that piece of do-gooder twaddle. If only McDonald's had come out with three more boldly adult-flavored hamburgers, it would have been a perfect year for dud megaevents--all leading up of course to Y2K, the limpest milestone in human history. \n\n --Mike Gebert \n\n \n\n 7 . Children Behaving Badly in 1999", "Susan Strasberg (anonymous tipster; Strasberg played Anne Frank in the original production of the Broadway adaptation, which some people think wasn't Jewish enough) \n\n Mel Torme (Steve Reiness) \n\n Mrs. Whozit [ Chatterbox interjects : her name was Anne Sheafe Miller], the first person ever to be saved by penicillin (Blair Bolles) \n\n \n\n 6. 1999: The Road Not Taken", "The Yankees can actually be referred to as the glue that held the century together. Of course, as the 1999 World Series champions, they are a significant \"story of the year.\" However, this one singular achievement must be considered in a broader context. \n\n 1999 represented the team's 25th championship of the century. This beats, by one, the most championships any one team won during the century. The Montreal Canadiens have won 23 Stanley Cups. However, the Yankees, an American team, playing in the \"City of the Century\" (so called by me to reflect the amazing growth and transformation of one city during this period), who play the \"National Pastime,\" are truly an amazing story.", "Photographs of: Donald Trump by Peter Morgan/Reuters; Natalie Portman by Keith Hamshere/Lucasfilm Ltd./Reuters; New York Yankees players by Gary Hershorn/Reuters; KLA member by Hazir Reka/Reuters.", "The team's first championship occurred in 1921; therefore, they have won 25 of the last 78 years, nearly one in three. This level of sustained excellence is not matched in sports or in any other aspect of society. The 1999 win is possibly the most unique. With free-agency, expansion, and three levels of playoffs, it is much harder to win today than in past years. In fact, by winning three of the last four championships, they are the first team to accomplish this feat during the eras of free-agency and of divisional play.", "15. Annals of Justice in 1999 \n\n \n\n Matthew Shepard: the despicable defense . \n\n -- anonymous tipster \n\n \n\n 16. Get Me a New Century, Quick \n\n \n\n A sitting president was accused of rape. \n\n --Ananda Gupta \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Yes, but the evidence was shaky--something the Wall Street Journal 's editorial page, which broke the story, was not very forthcoming about. As Jack Shafer wrote in this column, Ronald Reagan, after he left office, was also accused of having once committed rape. The evidence there was shaky, too. \n\n 17. The Most Important Thing of All That Happened in 1999", "By now, it should be clear that Chatterbox isn't much good at year-in-review journalism. Fortunately, Chatterbox's readers are very good at it. He will now turn this survey over to them. \n\n ( Disclaimer: Although Chatterbox previously stated that he wouldn't include opinions he disagreed with, that standard proved too confining. Where Chatterbox has solid information or opinions to the contrary, he occasionally interjects below. Obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour reader comments were discarded, but if you don't find your nominee below it doesn't necessarily mean that it was obviously stupid or unnecessarily sour. ) \n\n Here are 20 important things that happened in 1999: \n\n 1. Most Hated Celebrity--Ever?", "New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson came out for ending drug prohibition. Though this by itself has no immediate effect, it makes it respectable, for the first time, for political leaders to discuss the subject, and thereby brings closer the day when the vast majority of crimes will no longer be committed, when billions of dollars will be freed to help the inner city instead of to ruin black people's lives, and when we will stop, as in Samuel Butler's Erewhon , imprisoning people for the crime of being sick. \n\n --Henry Cohen \n\n \n\n Chatterbox interjects: Didn't Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke do the same thing 11 years ago? \n\n 10. Don't Worry in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Dalai Lama proclaimed that most important thing in the world is to be happy. \n\n --Margaret Taylor", "The New York Times reported on Nov. 10, 1999, that a new record had been set in the latest Times /CBS poll: [Its] highest negative rating ever scored by a person in the news. The honor went to Reform Party candidate Donald Trump, who managed to make an unfavorable impression upon some 70 percent of those polled. The paper noted that this achievement far eclipsed the last comparably negative rating--the 55 percent score attained by Linda Tripp. Presumably this came as no surprise to Mr. Trump, who, upon announcing the formation of a presidential exploratory committee on Oct. 7, 1999, had cited polls with \"amazing results\"--a remark that was widely misinterpreted at the time. \n\n -- Jodie Allen of U.S. News & World Report (and frequent \n\n Slate contributor)", "2. Most Foolishly Ignored Parts of the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n The dog that did bark but no one noticed--the political turmoil in the three great South Asian nations of India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which now are well on the way to passing the three northern Asian nations of China, Japan, and Russia in population (Indonesia is fourth, Pakistan just passed Japan to seventh, India will soon pass China to first). But Americans are still fixated on northern Asia--Clinton says he must deal with China, because \"you can't ignore a billion people with nuclear weapons,\" but his own policy toward India shows that you sure can! \n\n --Jim Chapin \n\n \n\n 3. Worst/Best Films of 1999", "Oops ... well then, the best of '99 was The Red Violin --lyrical, magical, musical, wonderful! \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox hasn't seen it.] \n\n 4. Most Shameless (and Unsuccessful) Attempt To Have It Both Ways in 1999 : \n\n \n\n Sen. Arlen Specter, citing Scottish law, finds Clinton \"not proven\" on the impeachment charges. \n\n --Andrew Solovay \n\n \n\n 5. Rest in Peace in 1999: \n\n \n\n Stanley Kubrick (multiple sources) \n\n John Kennedy Jr. (multiple sources)", "The Sultan of Swat, the Iron Man, the Yankee Clipper, the Mick, and Yogi--these strong, masculine names are synonymous with the team, the sport, and American history. They went hand in hand with two world wars, Superman, and America's superpower status. The 1999 squad does not feature \"a name.\" This team, with its myriad of human-interest stories, its international roster, and no star, is representative of '90s man, male sensitivity, Pax American interests, and the new political paradigm. \n\n \n\n --Jim Landau from North Potomac, Md. (formerly of the Bronx) \n\n 9. A Big Shot Calls for Decriminalizing Drug Use in 1999", "11. The Athletic Bra Seen 'Round the World in 1999 \n\n \n\n Public interest and media attention to the women's World Cup in soccer. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 12. Another Overlooked Foreign-Policy Event in 1999 \n\n \n\n Presidential primary elections for the first time ever in Mexico. \n\n --Tom Horton \n\n \n\n 13. Policing the World Is Shown To Work in 1999", "Here's my nominee for worst movie of the year (complete category should be: \"Worst Movie of the Year That Assumedly Adult Male Reviewers Slathered Over\"): There's Something About Mary --a pathetically sophomoric, penis-obsessed mess that wouldn't even appeal to Larry Flynt! \n\n -- Felicia, Menlo Park, Cal. \n\n \n\n Chatterbox replies: \n\n \n\n You've got the wrong year. That was 1998 . \n\n \n\n [Chatterbox didn't have the heart to add that he thought There's Something About Mary was pretty funny, especially the joke about \"the franks or the beans.\"] \n\n Felicia replies:", "In 1999, more than half of U.S. homes had a PC, for the first time (i.e., home-PC penetration passed 50 percent). Of course, most of these PCs crashed all the time, but it's still a significant development. By the way, Internet hookups in homes are still well below 50 percent. \n\n --Walt Mossberg, \"Personal Technology\" columnist for the Wall Street Journal (and occasional rock-music historian for this column) \n\n \n\n 18. All Dolled Up and Nowhere To Go in 1999 \n\n \n\n General Pinochet \n\n --Jodie Maurer \n\n \n\n 19. Senate Endorses Nuclear Proliferation in 1999", "I nominate as the most under-reported story of the year (and the last few years) the continuing alarmist predictions by foreign-policy and military experts about peacekeeping efforts, which are then proved wrong and immediately forgotten. This year, the obvious one is Kosovo, but the year is also ending with East Timor, where the Aussies and their allies successfully stopped the slaughter with no casualties. \n\n These followed Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda as places where the West delayed sending in troops because of alarmist predictions. \n\n --Jerry Skurnik \n\n \n\n 14. Barbara Walters Did This One on Her Year-End Special, But It's Still Good \n\n \n\n Don't forget, Susan Lucci finally won an Emmy . \n\n --anonymous tipster", "The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , thereby decapitating nuclear-arms control and sending Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the message that the United States won't raise a big stink if they try to join India and Pakistan. The president woke up to this possibility at about the moment it was realized, and started lobbying for passage of the treaty a day after it became too late. \n\n --Josh Pollack \n\n \n\n 20. Unremarked Natural Disaster in 1999 \n\n \n\n The Indian Supercyclone is the biggest, this century at least. \n\n --Samir Raiyani" ] ]
train	43046	[ "What crime did Moran commit?", "Which of the follow characteristics does NOT give Moran the impression that the planet that the Nadine is approaching may be habitable?", "Which term best describes the ease of space travel within the context of the passage?", "Why is the crew of the Nadine not more upset that Moran stole their spacecraft?", "What, within the context of the passage, is a 'marker'?", "If, after being marooned on the alien planet, Moran does not discover any edible vegetation, how would he be expected to survive?", "Which term does NOT describe Moran's tone toward the other five crew members?", "Why does Moran think it could be beneficial if one of the crew members was killed on the alien planet?", "What is hiding underneath the gigantic mound on the alien planet?", "What is the most likely reason that creatures on the alien planet have grown to such a large size?" ]	[ [ "theft", "fraud", "murder", "treason" ], [ "shape of the ice cap", "composition of the ice cap", "location of the ice cap", "size of the ice cap" ], [ "complex", "evolving", "strict", "flexible" ], [ "They view Moran as a potential sacrifice to any predators or officials they may discover upon the alien planet.", "They are fugitives just like Moran, and don't believe he has a motive to thwart their mission.", "They have no space navigation experience, while Moran does, and view him as potentially useful.", "They are not threatened by Moran because he does not have any weapons on his person." ], [ "A microchip inserted into a person, designating them as a fugitive", "A safe space for a spacecraft to land on an alien planet", "A sound picked up on a radar that reveals the closest habitable planet", "A location on the alien planet that indicates high predatory activity" ], [ "His space-suit is equipped with a nozzle through which he can absorb nutrients in gas form.", "His only option would be to prey on animals, bacteria, fungi, or other living creatures.", "He could use limited, fast-growing seed packets provided by the crew members of the Nadine.", "He would not have any viable chance of survival without non-toxic vegetation." ], [ "resigned", "bitter", "vindictive", "sarcastic" ], [ "He would be more likely to survive an attack from the Nadine crew if they ambushed him.", "He could convert their body to nutrients, which he could use to survive longer on the alien planet.", "He and the remaining crew members could pass security clearance with only five members on board.", "He could steal the deceased crew member's identity and use it to start a new life on a new planet." ], [ "A pulsing, reeking object egg casing that contains countless unhatched beetle eggs", "An empty spacecraft where a crew member had survived long enough to set up a marker", "A 'yard-worm,' which is an uncontrolled type of an 'inch-worm'", "The remains of a crew that had landed on the alien planet a century earlier" ], [ "The planet is being used by the government as a site to breed creatures that could keep the population in check.", "The planet's atmosphere comprises gases that target the DNA of living creatures, causing them to grow in size.", "The planet, like many others, is being used as a site to copy a habitable eco-system, but has been left unchecked.", "The planet's cheesy, perforated ground is made up of a substance that causes living creatures to mutate." ] ]	[ 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 3 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of\n the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by\n long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the\n government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem\n the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't\n expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.\n Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm\n when Moran had used desperate measures against them.\n\n\n Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.\n\n\n \"Calling ground,\" he said briskly. \"Calling ground! We pick up your\n signal. Please reply.\"", "engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,\n dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to\n hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the\n overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present\n companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht\n was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of\n surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be\n landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which\n was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a\n planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd\n done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for\n months.", "He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on\n space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in\n the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance\n for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger\n carrying the\nNadine's\nfuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd\n knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the\n fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly\n took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he\n drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the\nNadine's\ncrew in the", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute", "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.\n\n\n \"What's that stuff there, the ground?\" he demanded. \"We burned it away\n in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the\n place of grass!\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Moran as if brightly, \"that's what I'm to make a garden in.\n Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the\n delightful sounds of nature.\"\n\n\n Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.\n\n\n \"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,\" he said with\n finality.\n\n\n Moran said bitingly;\n\n\n \"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!\"", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "\"I think,\" said Carol, to Moran, \"that if it's too tropical where this\n signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the\n ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.\n That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep\n enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the\n emergency-kit, anyhow.\"\nThe emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,\n with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even\n possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would\n provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,\n though, and Moran grimaced.", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "PLANET of DREAD\nBy MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrator ADKINS\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI.\nMoran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.\n The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.\n He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he\n was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.\nMoran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans\n which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air.", "Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish\n stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The\n thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was\n a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its\n fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like\n growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately\n by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then\n arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its\n hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive\n color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but\n somehow sedate.\n\n\n Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to\n speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;\n\n\n \"\nWhat's the matter? What do you see?\n\"" ], [ "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "The\nNadine\nwas out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the\n galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of\n every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar\n system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and\n prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran\n could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a\n cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but\n nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.\nThe ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet", "He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.\n Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin\n and reedy wabbling whine continued. The\nNadine\nwent on toward the\n enlarging cloudy mass ahead.\n\n\n Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I think,\" said Carol, \"that we should land. People have been here. If\n they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.\n Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris.\"", "Burleigh nodded. The\nNadine\nhad cleared for Loris. That was where it\n should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its\n proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap\n went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings\n appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the\n atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been\n highlands.", "There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the\nNadine's\ncourse in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was\n the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which\n anything could be seen at all.\n\n\n The\nNadine\nchecked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged\n and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used\n rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The\n yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down\n with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous\n tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a\n burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid\n stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that\n at some places they quivered persistently.", "find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,\n and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was\n the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.\n The\nNadine\nneeded to make a planet-fall for this.", "rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told\n much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the\n planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not\n allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or\n hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,\n told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would\n have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with\n small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant\n wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the\n thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the\n passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging\n respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These\n people on the\nNadine\nwere capable. They'd managed to recapture the\nNadine\nfrom him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't\n seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an\n indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last\n landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.\nThey'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from", "\"We'd better spread out,\" added Moran, \"or else we'll break through that\n skin and be floundering in this mess.\"\n\n\n \"I'm giving the orders, Moran!\" said Burleigh shortly. \"But what you say\n does make sense.\"\nHe and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing\n was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the\n hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.\n\n\n The ground was not as level as it appeared from the\nNadine's\ncontrol-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a\n quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at\n one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood\n staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air.", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs.", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "\"I think,\" said Carol, to Moran, \"that if it's too tropical where this\n signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the\n ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.\n That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep\n enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the\n emergency-kit, anyhow.\"\nThe emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,\n with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even\n possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would\n provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,\n though, and Moran grimaced." ], [ "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should\n painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds\n men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological\n system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely\n complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of\n Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was\n subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as\n well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for\n settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.\n Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the", "He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on\n space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in\n the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance\n for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger\n carrying the\nNadine's\nfuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd\n knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the\n fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly\n took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he\n drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the\nNadine's\ncrew in the", "Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without\n any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time\n to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The\n wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the\n rest of the space-noises together.\nThe yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Watch our height, Carol.\"\n\n\n She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of\n course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five\n thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so\n small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,\n and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the\n surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on\n down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost\n palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.", "\"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt\n around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.\" There was\n an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an\n equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness\n of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing\n everywhere. \"We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century\n at least!\"", "Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the\n passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging\n respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These\n people on the\nNadine\nwere capable. They'd managed to recapture the\nNadine\nfrom him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't\n seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an\n indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last\n landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.\nThey'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets,\n and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That was\n the way to find out where one was, when one's position became doubtful.\n The\nNadine\nneeded to make a planet-fall for this.", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "The\nNadine\nwas out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the\n galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of\n every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar\n system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and\n prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran\n could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a\n cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but\n nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.\nThe ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet", "He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in\n hand, he'd made the\nNadine\ntake off from Coryus III with a trip-tape\n picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for\n another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was\n because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's\n location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in\n practically any direction for a length of time that was at least\n indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had\n elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller\n craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to", "There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which\n now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was\n true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards\n from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound\n shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through\n the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was\n no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four\n feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and\n somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it\n stirred.", "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground\n looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a\n rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very\n small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter\n on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the\n color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But\n there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and\n there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of\n vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.\n\n\n Harper spoke from the direction-finder;\n\n\n \"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder.\"", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a\n colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory\n food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet\n before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It\n wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown\n large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the\n ground....", "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs." ], [ "Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the\n passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging\n respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These\n people on the\nNadine\nwere capable. They'd managed to recapture the\nNadine\nfrom him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't\n seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an\n indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last\n landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.\nThey'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on\n space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in\n the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance\n for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger\n carrying the\nNadine's\nfuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd\n knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the\n fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly\n took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he\n drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the\nNadine's\ncrew in the", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute", "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,\n dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to\n hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the\n overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present\n companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht\n was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of\n surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be\n landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which\n was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a\n planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd\n done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for\n months.", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "The\nNadine\nwas out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the\n galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of\n every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar\n system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and\n prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran\n could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a\n cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but\n nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.\nThe ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet", "He couldn't blame them. He'd made another difficulty, too. Blaster in\n hand, he'd made the\nNadine\ntake off from Coryus III with a trip-tape\n picked at random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for\n another starting-point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was\n because the drive had been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship's\n location was in doubt. It could have travelled at almost any speed in\n practically any direction for a length of time that was at least\n indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself without trouble. It had\n elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. But smaller\n craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process would be to", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of\n the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by\n long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the\n government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem\n the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't\n expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.\n Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm\n when Moran had used desperate measures against them.\n\n\n Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.\n\n\n \"Calling ground,\" he said briskly. \"Calling ground! We pick up your\n signal. Please reply.\"", "\"We'd better spread out,\" added Moran, \"or else we'll break through that\n skin and be floundering in this mess.\"\n\n\n \"I'm giving the orders, Moran!\" said Burleigh shortly. \"But what you say\n does make sense.\"\nHe and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing\n was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the\n hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.\n\n\n The ground was not as level as it appeared from the\nNadine's\ncontrol-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a\n quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at\n one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood\n staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.", "He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.\n Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin\n and reedy wabbling whine continued. The\nNadine\nwent on toward the\n enlarging cloudy mass ahead.\n\n\n Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I think,\" said Carol, \"that we should land. People have been here. If\n they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.\n Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris.\"", "There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the\nNadine's\ncourse in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was\n the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which\n anything could be seen at all.\n\n\n The\nNadine\nchecked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged\n and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used\n rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The\n yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down\n with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous\n tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a\n burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid\n stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that\n at some places they quivered persistently.", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air." ], [ "The rest of the ship's company came into the control-room. Burleigh\n waved his hand at the speaker.\n\n\n \"Listen!\"\nThey heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the\n innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.\n\n\n \"That's a marker,\" Carol announced. \"I saw a costume-story tape once\n that had that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet\n or other, so the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to\n be a long time ago, though.\"\n\n\n \"It's weak,\" observed Burleigh. \"We'll try answering it.\"", "Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.\n\n\n \"What's that stuff there, the ground?\" he demanded. \"We burned it away\n in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the\n place of grass!\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Moran as if brightly, \"that's what I'm to make a garden in.\n Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the\n delightful sounds of nature.\"\n\n\n Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.\n\n\n \"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,\" he said with\n finality.\n\n\n Moran said bitingly;\n\n\n \"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!\"", "There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground\n looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a\n rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very\n small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter\n on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the\n color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But\n there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and\n there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of\n vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.\n\n\n Harper spoke from the direction-finder;\n\n\n \"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder.\"", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the\nNadine's\ncourse in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was\n the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which\n anything could be seen at all.\n\n\n The\nNadine\nchecked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged\n and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used\n rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The\n yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down\n with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous\n tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a\n burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid\n stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that\n at some places they quivered persistently.", "Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The\n mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the\n ash-covered stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. The enigmatic,\n dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid\n something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous\n cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked\n carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the\n leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the\n fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which\n now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was\n true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards\n from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound\n shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through\n the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was\n no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four\n feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and\n somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it\n stirred.", "\"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!\"\n\n\n Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He\n heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural\n radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.\n\n\n \"Do you hear what I do?\" he asked sardonically.\n\n\n Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the\n speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,\n such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar\n skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This\n was something else.\n\n\n Burleigh said:\n\n\n \"Hm ... Call the others, Harper.\"", "Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without\n any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time\n to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The\n wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the\n rest of the space-noises together.\nThe yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Watch our height, Carol.\"\n\n\n She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of\n course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five\n thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so\n small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,\n and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the\n surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on\n down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost\n palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt\n around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.\" There was\n an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an\n equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness\n of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing\n everywhere. \"We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century\n at least!\"", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Burleigh nodded. The\nNadine\nhad cleared for Loris. That was where it\n should make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its\n proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap\n went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings\n appeared. There were cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the\n atmosphere. The darker vague areas previously seen might have been\n highlands.", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.\n Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin\n and reedy wabbling whine continued. The\nNadine\nwent on toward the\n enlarging cloudy mass ahead.\n\n\n Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I think,\" said Carol, \"that we should land. People have been here. If\n they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.\n Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris.\"", "Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.\nII.\nThey went back to the\nNadine\nfor weapons more adequate for\n encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not\n effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons\n but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself\n together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to\n go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow\n disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite\n separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures\n in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes." ], [ "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs.", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "\"I think,\" said Carol, to Moran, \"that if it's too tropical where this\n signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the\n ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.\n That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep\n enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the\n emergency-kit, anyhow.\"\nThe emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,\n with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even\n possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would\n provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,\n though, and Moran grimaced.", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.\n\n\n \"What's that stuff there, the ground?\" he demanded. \"We burned it away\n in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the\n place of grass!\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Moran as if brightly, \"that's what I'm to make a garden in.\n Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the\n delightful sounds of nature.\"\n\n\n Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.\n\n\n \"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,\" he said with\n finality.\n\n\n Moran said bitingly;\n\n\n \"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!\"", "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air.", "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "\"Right,\" growled Burleigh again. \"Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The\n rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside.\"\nMoran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a\n suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging\n metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took\n the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical\n nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as\n easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their\n special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people\n displayed in every action.\n\n\n \"If there's a lifeboat left,\" said Carol suddenly, \"Moran might be able\n to do something with it.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, yes!\" said Moran. \"It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough\n to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!\"", "\"What the devil—.\"\n\n\n Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the\n cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in\n obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent\n that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over\n the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels\n under it.\nCarol's voice came over the helmet-phones.\n\n\n \"\nThey're—bugs!\n\" she said incredulously. \"\nThey're beetles! They're\n twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around\n the galaxy, but that's what they are!\n\"", "PLANET of DREAD\nBy MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrator ADKINS\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI.\nMoran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.\n The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.\n He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he\n was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.\nMoran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans\n which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "The\nNadine\nwas out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the\n galaxy shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of\n every color of the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar\n system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and\n prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran\n could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. It was a\n cloudy world. There were some dim markings near one lighted limb, but\n nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest was—clouds.\nThe ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of\n the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by\n long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the\n government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem\n the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't\n expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.\n Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm\n when Moran had used desperate measures against them.\n\n\n Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.\n\n\n \"Calling ground,\" he said briskly. \"Calling ground! We pick up your\n signal. Please reply.\"" ], [ "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of\n the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by\n long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the\n government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem\n the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't\n expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.\n Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm\n when Moran had used desperate measures against them.\n\n\n Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.\n\n\n \"Calling ground,\" he said briskly. \"Calling ground! We pick up your\n signal. Please reply.\"", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "\"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!\"\n\n\n Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He\n heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural\n radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.\n\n\n \"Do you hear what I do?\" he asked sardonically.\n\n\n Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the\n speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,\n such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar\n skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This\n was something else.\n\n\n Burleigh said:\n\n\n \"Hm ... Call the others, Harper.\"", "Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.\n\n\n \"What's that stuff there, the ground?\" he demanded. \"We burned it away\n in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the\n place of grass!\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Moran as if brightly, \"that's what I'm to make a garden in.\n Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the\n delightful sounds of nature.\"\n\n\n Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.\n\n\n \"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,\" he said with\n finality.\n\n\n Moran said bitingly;\n\n\n \"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!\"", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,\n dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to\n hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the\n overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present\n companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht\n was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of\n surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be\n landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which\n was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a\n planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd\n done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for\n months.", "Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the\n passage leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging\n respect that he didn't give him a chance to do anything drastic. These\n people on the\nNadine\nwere capable. They'd managed to recapture the\nNadine\nfrom him, but they were matter-of-fact about it. They didn't\n seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an\n indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last\n landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.\nThey'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "\"I think,\" said Carol, to Moran, \"that if it's too tropical where this\n signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the\n ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.\n That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep\n enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the\n emergency-kit, anyhow.\"\nThe emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,\n with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even\n possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would\n provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,\n though, and Moran grimaced.", "\"We'd better spread out,\" added Moran, \"or else we'll break through that\n skin and be floundering in this mess.\"\n\n\n \"I'm giving the orders, Moran!\" said Burleigh shortly. \"But what you say\n does make sense.\"\nHe and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing\n was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the\n hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.\n\n\n The ground was not as level as it appeared from the\nNadine's\ncontrol-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a\n quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at\n one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood\n staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.", "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on\n space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in\n the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance\n for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger\n carrying the\nNadine's\nfuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd\n knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the\n fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly\n took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he\n drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the\nNadine's\ncrew in the", "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve." ], [ "\"\nLook out! It's coming! Kill it! Kill it—.\n\"\n\n\n He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on\n his way out of the hollow he'd carved when he heard Harper cry out\n horribly.\n\n\n He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke\n and stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.\n\n\n It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too\n many people on the\nNadine\n. They need not maroon him. In fact, they\n wouldn't dare.\n\n\n A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated\n as thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if\n Harper were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He'd go on\n from here in the\nNadine\n, necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.", "investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from\n Coryus Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world\n Moran did not know. They might be sent back where they came from. In\n effect, with six people on board instead of five, the\nNadine\ncould not\n land anywhere for supplies. With five on board, as her papers declared,\n she could. And Moran was the extra man whose presence would rouse\n space-port officials' suspicion of the rest. So he had to be dumped.", "thrashed out very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht\nNadine\n, with Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion.\n From the viewpoint of the\nNadine's\nship's company, it was simply\n necessary to get rid of Moran. In their predicament he might have come\n to the same conclusion; but he was not at all enthusiastic about their\n decision. He would die of it.", "\"It's a ship,\" said Moran curtly. \"It crash-landed and its crew set up a\n signal to call for help. None came, or they'd have turned the beacon\n off. Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived\n as I'm expected to live until they died as I'm expected to die.\"\n\n\n Burleigh said angrily;\n\n\n \"You'd do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!\"\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Moran, \"but a man can gripe, can't he?\"", "She hadn't said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned.\n Maybe she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don't live long.\n Moran wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why\n they had revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the\n five off in what they considered a strategic retreat but their\n government would think defeat. Moran's own situation was perfectly\n clear.\n\n\n He'd killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by\n anybody, and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe,\n which was the reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been\n very important, and the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and\n killed him in fair combat made no difference. Moran had needed to get\n off-planet, and fast. But space-travel regulations are especially\n designed to prevent such escapes.", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"I think,\" said Carol, to Moran, \"that if it's too tropical where this\n signal's coming from, we'll take you somewhere near enough to the\n ice-cap to have an endurable climate. I've been figuring on food, too.\n That will depend on where we are from Loris because we have to keep\n enough for ourselves. But we can spare some. We'll give you the\n emergency-kit, anyhow.\"\nThe emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two,\n with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even\n possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would\n provide food in a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought,\n though, and Moran grimaced.", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;", "surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps\n there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a\n man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find.\nMoran observed these things from the control-room of the\nNadine\n, then\n approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with\n no reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the\nNadine's\nfour-man crew\n watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh\n said encouragingly;", "\"Right,\" growled Burleigh again. \"Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The\n rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside.\"\nMoran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a\n suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging\n metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took\n the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical\n nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as\n easily as in ship-clothing. The others of the landing-party donned their\n special garments with the brisk absence of fumbling that these people\n displayed in every action.\n\n\n \"If there's a lifeboat left,\" said Carol suddenly, \"Moran might be able\n to do something with it.\"\n\n\n \"Ah, yes!\" said Moran. \"It's very likely that the ship hit hard enough\n to kill everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!\"", "engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,\n dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to\n hand. He punched the take-off button and only seconds later the\n overdrive. Then the yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present\n companions got the drive dismantled two days later and once the yacht\n was out of overdrive they efficiently gave him his choice of\n surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he wouldn't be\n landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding return—which\n was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back to a\n planet from which they'd carried away a criminal, even though they'd\n done it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for\n months.", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs.", "Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of\n the movement. But they didn't watch him suspiciously. They were alert by\n long habit. Burleigh said they'd been Underground people, fighting the\n government of their native world, and they'd gotten away to make it seem\n the revolt had collapsed. They'd go back later when they weren't\n expected, and start it up again. Moran considered the story probable.\n Only people accustomed to desperate actions would have remained so calm\n when Moran had used desperate measures against them.\n\n\n Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.\n\n\n \"Calling ground,\" he said briskly. \"Calling ground! We pick up your\n signal. Please reply.\"", "He'd made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on\n space-traffic required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in\n the space-port's vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance\n for departure had been granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger\n carrying the\nNadine's\nfuel-block back to that space-yacht. He'd\n knocked the messenger cold and presented himself at the yacht with the\n fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the engine's gate. He duly\n took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then released, and he\n drew a blaster. He'd locked two of the\nNadine's\ncrew in the", "\"It doesn't look too bad, Moran!\"\n\n\n Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He\n heard something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural\n radiation sounds like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.\n\n\n \"Do you hear what I do?\" he asked sardonically.\n\n\n Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the\n speaker. It wasn't a voice-signal. It wasn't an identification beacon,\n such as are placed on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar\n skippers who need to check their courses on extremely long runs. This\n was something else.\n\n\n Burleigh said:\n\n\n \"Hm ... Call the others, Harper.\"", "PLANET of DREAD\nBy MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrator ADKINS\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI.\nMoran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.\n The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.\n He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he\n was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.\nMoran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans\n which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were", "its space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land\n unquestioned at any other space-port and take off again—provided the\n other space-port was one they had clearance for. Without rigid control\n of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of\n any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Moran couldn't\n have bought a ticket, but he'd tried to get off the planet Coryus on the\nNadine\n. The trouble was that the\nNadine\nhad clearance papers\n covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran made six.\n Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and\n its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute" ], [ "Then, instantly he'd said it, he recognized that it could be true. The\n mound was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the\n ash-covered stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. The enigmatic,\n dirty-yellow-dirty-red-dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid\n something. It blurred the shape it covered, very much as enormous\n cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done. But when one looked\n carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking up toward the\n leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of which the\n fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.", "There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground\n looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a\n rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very\n small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter\n on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the\n color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But\n there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and\n there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of\n vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.\n\n\n Harper spoke from the direction-finder;\n\n\n \"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder.\"", "There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which\n now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was\n true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards\n from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound\n shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through\n the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was\n no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four\n feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and\n somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it\n stirred.", "\"What the devil—.\"\n\n\n Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the\n cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in\n obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent\n that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over\n the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels\n under it.\nCarol's voice came over the helmet-phones.\n\n\n \"\nThey're—bugs!\n\" she said incredulously. \"\nThey're beetles! They're\n twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around\n the galaxy, but that's what they are!\n\"", "Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish\n stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The\n thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was\n a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its\n fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like\n growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately\n by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then\n arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its\n hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive\n color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but\n somehow sedate.\n\n\n Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to\n speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;\n\n\n \"\nWhat's the matter? What do you see?\n\"", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs.", "\"We'd better spread out,\" added Moran, \"or else we'll break through that\n skin and be floundering in this mess.\"\n\n\n \"I'm giving the orders, Moran!\" said Burleigh shortly. \"But what you say\n does make sense.\"\nHe and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing\n was uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the\n hillock which was a covered-over wrecked ship.\n\n\n The ground was not as level as it appeared from the\nNadine's\ncontrol-room. There were undulations. But they could not see more than a\n quarter-mile in any direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at\n one end of the uneven line of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood\n staring down at something he had not seen before. The others halted.", "Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.\n\n\n \"What's that stuff there, the ground?\" he demanded. \"We burned it away\n in landing. I've seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the\n place of grass!\"\n\n\n \"That,\" said Moran as if brightly, \"that's what I'm to make a garden in.\n Of evenings I'll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the\n delightful sounds of nature.\"\n\n\n Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.\n\n\n \"The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,\" he said with\n finality.\n\n\n Moran said bitingly;\n\n\n \"That ain't no hillock, that's my home!\"", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air.", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure\n blue-white leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam\n leaped up. He used the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a\n yard deep in the whitish stuff, and then cutting it across and across to\n destroy it. Thick fumes arose, and quiverings and shakings began. Black\n creatures in their labyrinths of tunnels began to panic. Off to the\n right the blanket-like surface ripped and they poured out. They scuttled\n crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By instinct the other\n men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore space-helmets\n but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.", "Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without\n any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time\n to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The\n wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the\n rest of the space-noises together.\nThe yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Watch our height, Carol.\"\n\n\n She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of\n course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five\n thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so\n small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,\n and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the\n surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on\n down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost\n palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.", "animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a\n colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory\n food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet\n before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It\n wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown\n large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the\n ground....", "There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the\nNadine's\ncourse in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was\n the only considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which\n anything could be seen at all.\n\n\n The\nNadine\nchecked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged\n and sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used\n rockets, issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The\n yacht hovered, and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down\n with practically no impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous\n tumult of smoke and steam. When the rockets went off, she lay in a\n burned-out hollow some three or four feet deep with a bottom of solid\n stone. The walls of the hollow were black and scorched. It seemed that\n at some places they quivered persistently.", "\"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt\n around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.\" There was\n an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an\n equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness\n of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing\n everywhere. \"We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century\n at least!\"", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.\n Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin\n and reedy wabbling whine continued. The\nNadine\nwent on toward the\n enlarging cloudy mass ahead.\n\n\n Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I think,\" said Carol, \"that we should land. People have been here. If\n they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.\n Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris.\"", "Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to\n the metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born.\n Sometimes the flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened.\n But above all he raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not\n altogether blame the others. They couldn't land at any colonized world\n with him on board without his being detected as an extra member of the\n crew. His fate would then be sealed. But they also would be\n investigated. Official queries would go across this whole sector of the\n galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such description and\n such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-and-such\n size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as\n fugitives. They would be returned to it. They'd be executed.\n\n\n Then Carol's voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;" ], [ "animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a\n colony was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory\n food. So an elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet\n before native and terrestrial living things settled down together. It\n wasn't impossible that the scuttling things were truly beetles, grown\n large and monstrous under the conditions of a new planet. And the\n ground....", "Moran said with savage precision;\n\n\n \"We're looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so.\n It's not an inch-worm any longer. It's a yard-worm.\" Then he said\n harshly to the men with him; \"It's not a hunting creature on worlds\n where it's smaller. It's not likely to have turned deadly here. Come\n on!\"\n\n\n He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed.\n It was to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless\n creature more widely than most.\nThey reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch.\n He said sardonically;", "\"What the devil—.\"\n\n\n Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the\n cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in\n obvious panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent\n that the top of the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over\n the whitish stuff. The black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels\n under it.\nCarol's voice came over the helmet-phones.\n\n\n \"\nThey're—bugs!\n\" she said incredulously. \"\nThey're beetles! They're\n twenty times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around\n the galaxy, but that's what they are!\n\"", "Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and\n humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects\n and annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of\n checks and balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It\n would not maintain itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably\n illustrated in and on the landscape outside the\nNadine\n. Something had\n been left out of the seeding of this planet. The element—which might be\n a bacterium or a virus or almost anything at all—the element that kept\n creatures at the size called \"normal\" was either missing or inoperable\n here. The results were not desirable.", "They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only\n slightly eroded by the processes which made life possible on this\n planet. They looked dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance\n which had been ground before the\nNadine\nlanded. Moran moved scornfully\n forward. He kicked at the burnt stuff. His foot went through the char.\n The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft matter which seemed riddled with\n small holes.\n\n\n Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings.\n It was eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an\n abdomen. It had wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the\n stone on which the\nNadine\nrested. Agitatedly, it spread its\n wing-covers and flew away, droning loudly. The four men heard the sound\n above even the monstrous cacophony of cries and boomings and grunts and\n squeaks which seemed to fill the air.", "Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the\n outside microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was\n strange, here, the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.\nThere were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings\n that made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and\n honkings. From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded\n very much like a small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only\n much louder. Something hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly\n long time. And persistently, sounding as if they came from far away,\n there were booming noises, unspeakably deep-bass, made by something\n alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion and something else\n still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-whistle....\n\n\n \"This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,\" said Moran with fine\n irony.", "Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew\n what had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be\n discovered. It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets\n and subsist upon the flora and fauna they found there. On some new\n planets life had never gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex\n operation was necessary before humanity could move in. A complete\n ecological complex had to be built up; microbes to break down the rock\n for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the soil fertile; plants to\n grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the plants so they\n would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds planet-wide. On\n most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants and", "\"This ground stuff,\" said Moran distastefully, \"is yeast or some sort of\n toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn't have any life on\n it, so somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for\n plants and animals eventually. But nobody's come back to finish up the\n job.\"\n\n\n Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn't surprising;\n not wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi\n generally, the weird landscape became less than incredible. But it\n remained actively unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.\n\n\n \"Suppose we go look at the ship?\" said Moran unpleasantly. \"Maybe you\n can find out where you are, and I can find out what's ahead of me.\"\n\n\n He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The\n parchment-like top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of\n springs.", "It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should\n painstakingly be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds\n men settled on. But it had been found to be necessary. The ecological\n system in which human beings belonged had turned out to be infinitely\n complicated. It had turned out, in fact, to be the ecological system of\n Earth, and unless all parts of the complex were present, the total was\n subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind distastefully ferried pests as\n well as useful creatures to its new worlds as they were made ready for\n settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes of the Rim Stars.\n Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of the", "Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish\n stuff that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The\n thing that appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was\n a foot thick and ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its\n fore end—where there were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like\n growths—and another set of feet at its tail end. It progressed sedately\n by reaching forward with its fore-part, securing a foothold, and then\n arching its middle portion like a cat arching its back, to bring its\n hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It was of a dark olive\n color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was insane but\n somehow sedate.\n\n\n Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to\n speak. Carol's voice came anxiously;\n\n\n \"\nWhat's the matter? What do you see?\n\"", "There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground\n looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a\n rivulet ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very\n small hills of most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter\n on which one would walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the\n color was not green. Much of it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But\n there were patches of blue, and curious veinings of black, and here and\n there were other colors, all of them unlike the normal color of\n vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.\n\n\n Harper spoke from the direction-finder;\n\n\n \"The signal's coming from that mound, yonder.\"", "There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which\n now was almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was\n true silence. The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards\n from the mound which was the source of the space-signal. That mound\n shared the peculiarity of the ground as far as they could see through\n the haze. It was not vegetation in any ordinary sense. Certainly it was\n no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had burned away three or four\n feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked noisesomely, and\n somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places where it\n stirred.", "Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.\nII.\nThey went back to the\nNadine\nfor weapons more adequate for\n encountering the local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not\n effective against such creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons\n but they killed. Blast-rifles did not. And Harper needed to pull himself\n together again, too. Also, neither Moran nor any of the others wanted to\n go back to the still un-entered wreck while the skinny, somehow\n disgusting legs of the thing still kicked spasmodically—quite\n separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked such creatures\n in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.", "\"This ship won't do anybody any good. It's old-style. That thick belt\n around its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.\" There was\n an abrupt thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an\n equally abrupt thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness\n of the change was blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing\n everywhere. \"We're going to find that this wreck has been here a century\n at least!\"", "rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told\n much. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the\n planet's atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not\n allow the formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or\n hydrochloric-acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too,\n told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would\n have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with\n small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant\n wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the\n thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the", "\"Somebody survived the crash,\" said Burleigh, \"because they set up a\n beacon. I wouldn't count on a boat, Moran.\"\n\n\n \"I don't!\" snapped Moran.\n\n\n He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He\n saw the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had\n seen no moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown\n world. Moran, though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a\n torch. They filed into the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer\n door opened. It was not necessary to check the air specifically. The\n suits would take care of that. Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no\n water-soluble gases in the atmosphere, and a gas can't be an active\n poison if it can't dissolve.", "\"You won't have to live here,\" said Burleigh. \"We'll take you somewhere\n up by the ice-cap. As Carol said, we'll give you everything we can\n spare. And meanwhile we'll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might\n be an indication in it of what solar system this is. There could be\n something in it of use to you, too. You'd better come along when we\n explore.\"\n\n\n \"Aye, aye, sir,\" said Moran with irony. \"Very kind of you, sir. You'll\n go armed, sir?\"\n\n\n Burleigh growled;\n\n\n \"Naturally!\"\n\n\n \"Then since I can't be trusted with a weapon,\" said Moran, \"I suggest\n that I take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff\n to get in the ship.\"", "He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer.\n Cracklings and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin\n and reedy wabbling whine continued. The\nNadine\nwent on toward the\n enlarging cloudy mass ahead.\n\n\n Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"I think,\" said Carol, \"that we should land. People have been here. If\n they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet.\n Then we'd know where we are and how to get to Loris.\"", "Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without\n any visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time\n to time he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The\n wabbling, whining signal was louder now. It became louder than all the\n rest of the space-noises together.\nThe yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;\n\n\n \"Watch our height, Carol.\"\n\n\n She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of\n course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five\n thousand feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so\n small that they floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds,\n and lower ones still. It was not until six thousand feet above the\n surface that the planet-wide cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on\n down it was pure opacity. Anything could exist in that dense, almost\n palpable grayness. There could be jagged peaks.", "PLANET of DREAD\nBy MURRAY LEINSTER\nIllustrator ADKINS\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of\n Imagination May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence\n that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nI.\nMoran cut apart the yard-long monstrosity with a slash of flame.\n The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe senselessly.\n He turned to see other horrors crawling toward him. Then he knew he\n was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors.\nMoran, naturally, did not mean to help in the carrying out of the plans\n which would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were" ] ]
train	27665	[ "What is the Commission?", "Why are the children of Ridgeville so smart?", "How do the children feel about Mr. Henderson?", "How is Hilary's product going to kill the razor industry?", "Why does the group want to buy a hydraulic press?", "Why did Hilary pour detergent into the fountain?", "Why will the group be out of the mouse business by the fall?", "Why does Mr. Henderson want to work for the children?" ]	[ [ "The Commission is a group of elected officials that run the town of Ridgeville.", "The Commission is a metallurgy company and the main employer in Ridgeville. ", "The Commission is a chemical company and the main employer in Ridgeville.", "The Commission is a laboratory and the main employer in Ridgeville." ], [ "An accident that included chemical fallout occurred, around the time that the children were conceived.", "Tommy and Mary have high IQ's and the other three are androids, built by the Commission.", "The children are androids, built by the Commission.", "The children of Ridgeville were genetically engineered by the Commission." ], [ "The children do not like Mr. Henderson.", "The children feel Mr. Henderson is a bit chintzy.", "The children feel Mr. Henderson is holding them back from their true potential.", "The children like Mr. Henderson, but they know they are smarter than he is." ], [ "Before-shave breaks off whiskers, just apply and wipe away. ", "Before-shave dissolves whiskers permanently.", "Before-shave dissolves whiskers for four to six weeks at a time.", "Before-shave will never kill the razor industry. That's just wishful thinking." ], [ "They want to make cages for the mice.", "They want to make ball bearings.", "They want to make kites.", "They want to make detergent." ], [ "He didn't, it was Mary.", "He didn't, it was Tommy.", "He didn't, it was Doris.", "He didn't, it was Peter." ], [ "They are selling the mice to the Commission.", "When the cold weather comes in the fall, the mice won't survive in the cold barn.", "Tommy refused to sell the mice.", "The mice are breeding so fast, they will not be a novelty much longer." ], [ "The parents of the children work for the Commission and Henderson is scared of the Commission.", "He needs the money to pay for his mortgage.", "He does not want to work for the children. The children will work for Mr. Henderson.", "The children are incredibly successful." ] ]	[ 4, 1, 4, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "I should explain, perhaps, that I\n teach a course in general science in\n our Ridgeville Junior High School,\n and another in general physics in the\n Senior High School. It's a privilege\n which I'm sure many educators must\n envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our\n new school is a fine one, and our\n academic standards are high. On the\n other hand, the fathers of most of\n my students work for the Commission\n and a constant awareness of the Commission\n and its work pervades the\n town. It is an uneasy privilege then,\n at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned\n brand of science to these\n children of a new age.\n\n\n \"That's very nice,\" said Marjorie.\n \"What does a junior achievement\n group do?\"", "\"Hi,\" he said. \"You're Donald\n Henderson, right? My name is McCord—Jeff\n McCord—and I work in\n the Patent Section at the Commission's\n downtown office. My boss sent\n me over here, but if he hadn't, I\n think I'd have come anyway. What\n are you doing to get patent protection\n on Ridge Industries' new developments?\"\n\n\n I got my back unkinked and dusted\n off my knees. \"Well, now,\" I said,\n \"I've been wondering whether something\n shouldn't be done, but I know\n very little about such matters—.\"", "\"No.\" She shook her head in mock\n despondency. \"I'm not very technical.\n Just sort of miscellaneous. But if the\n group wanted to raise some mice, I'd\n be willing to turn over a project I've\n had going at home.\"\n\n\n \"You could sell mice?\" Tommy demanded\n incredulously.\n\n\n \"Mice,\" I echoed, then sat back and\n thought about it. \"Are they a pure\n strain? One of the recognized laboratory\n strains? Healthy mice of the\n right strain,\" I explained to Tommy,\n \"might be sold to laboratories. I have\n an idea the Commission buys a supply\n every month.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Doris, \"these aren't laboratory\n mice. They're fancy ones. I\n got the first four pairs from a pet\n shop in Denver, but they're red—sort\n of chipmunk color, you know. I've\n carried them through seventeen generations\n of careful selection.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "\"O.K.,\" I said, \"let's relax. You\n don't need to treat me as a teacher,\n you know. I stopped being a school\n teacher when the final grades went in\n last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My\n job here is only to advise, and I'm\n going to do that as little as possible.\n You're going to decide what to do,\n and if it's safe and legal and possible\n to do with the starting capital we\n have, I'll go along with it and help\n in any way I can. This is your meeting.\"\n\n\n Mr. McCormack had told me, and\n in some detail, about the youngsters\n I'd be dealing with. The three who\n were sitting to my left were the ones\n who had proposed the group in the\n first place.", "\"Perhaps,\" I countered, \"somebody\n should tell me.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you don't know, honestly?\n Oh, it's fabulous. Best story I've\n had for ages. It'll make the city papers.\"\n She led me around the corner\n of the barn to a spot of comparative\n quiet.\n\n\n \"You didn't know that one of your\n junior whatsisnames poured detergent\n in the Memorial Fountain basin\n last night?\"\n\n\n I shook my head numbly.", "\"It has the purpose,\" I told her,\n \"of teaching the members something\n about commerce and industry. They\n manufacture simple compositions\n like polishing waxes and sell them\n from door-to-door. Some groups have\n built up tidy little bank accounts\n which are available for later educational\n expenses.\"\n\n\n \"Gracious, you wouldn't have to\n sell from door-to-door, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'd just tell the\n kids how to do it.\"\n\n\n Marjorie put back her head and\n laughed, and I was forced to join her,\n for we both recognize that my understanding\n and \"feel\" for commercial\n matters—if I may use that expression—is\n almost nonexistent.", "I'd forgotten all about organization,\n and that, according to all the\n articles I had perused, is most important\n to such groups. It's standard practice\n for every member of the group\n to be a company officer. Of course a\n young boy who doesn't know any better,\n may wind up a sales manager.\n\n\n Over the sandwiches, then, I suggested\n nominating company officers,\n but they seemed not to be interested.\n Peter Cope waved it off by remarking\n that they'd each do what came\n naturally. On the other hand, they\n pondered at some length about a\n name for the organization, without\n reaching any conclusions, so we returned\n to the problem of what to\n make.\n\n\n It was Mary, finally, who advanced\n the thought of kites. At first there\n was little enthusiasm, then Peter said,\n \"You know, we could work up something\n new. Has anybody ever seen a\n kite made like a wind sock?\"", "The third event of Wednesday\n came to my ears on Thursday morning.\n\n\n I was a little late arriving at the\n barn, and was taken a bit aback to\n find the roadway leading to it rather\n full of parked automobiles, and the\n barn itself rather full of people, including\n two policemen. Our Ridgeville\n police are quite young men, but\n in uniform they still look ominous\n and I was relieved to see that they\n were laughing and evidently enjoying\n themselves.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I demanded, in my\n best classroom voice. \"What is all\n this?\"\n\n\n \"Are you Henderson?\" the larger\n policeman asked.\n\n\n \"I am indeed,\" I said, and a flash\n bulb went off. A young lady grasped\n my arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come\n outside where it's quieter and tell me\n all about it.\"", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "\"So then I stopped by at Apex\n Stationers,\" Tommy went on, \"and ordered\n some paper and envelopes. We\n hadn't picked a name yesterday, but I\n figured what's to lose, and picked one.\n Ridge Industries, how's that?\" Everybody\n nodded.\n\n\n \"Just three lines on the letterhead,\"\n he explained. \"Ridge Industries—Ridgeville—Montana.\"\n\n\n I got my voice back and said, \"Engraved,\n I trust.\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure,\" he replied. \"You can't\n afford to look chintzy.\"\nMy appetite was not at its best\n that evening, and Marjorie recognized\n that something was concerning\n me, but she asked no questions, and\n I only told her about the success of\n the kite, and the youngsters embarking\n on a shopping trip for paper, glue\n and wood splints. There was no use\n in both of us worrying.", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "It was rather regrettable that, after\n the\nCourier\ngave us most of the third\n page, including photographs, we rarely\n had a day without a few visitors.\n Many of them wanted to buy mice or\n kites, but Tommy refused to sell any\n mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint\n those who wanted kites. The\n Supermarket took all we had—except\n a dozen—and at a dollar fifty\n each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather\n frightened me, but he set the value\n of the mice at ten dollars a pair\n and got it without any arguments.\n\n\n Our beautiful stationery arrived,\n and we had some invoice forms printed\n up in a hurry—not engraved, for\n a wonder.\n\n\n It was on Tuesday—following the\n Thursday—that a lanky young man\n disentangled himself from his car\n and strolled into the barn. I looked\n up from the floor where I was tacking\n squares of screening onto wooden\n frames.", "Hilary had been deep in thought.\n He said suddenly, \"Gosh, I think I\n know how to make a—what do you\n want to call it—a before-shave lotion.\"\n\n\n \"What would that be?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"You'd use it before you shaved.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there might be people\n who'd prefer to use it beforehand,\"\n I conceded.\n\n\n \"There will be people,\" he said\n darkly, and subsided.\n\n\n Mrs. Miller came out to the barn\n after a while, bringing a bucket of\n soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves\n of bread and ingredients for a variety\n of sandwiches. The parents had\n agreed to underwrite lunches at the\n barn and Betty Miller philosophically\n assumed the role of commissary\n officer. She paused only to say hello\n and to ask how we were progressing\n with our organization meeting.", "The day that our application on\n the kite design went to Washington,\n Mary wrote a dozen toy manufacturers\n scattered from New York to Los\n Angeles, sent a kite to each one and\n offered to license the design. Result,\n one licensee with a thousand dollar\n advance against next season's royalties.\nIt was a rainy morning about three\n weeks later that I arrived at the barn.\n Jeff McCord was there, and the whole\n team except Tommy. Jeff lowered his\n feet from the picnic table and said,\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"Hi yourself,\" I told him. \"You\n look pleased.\"", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"" ], [ "I should explain, perhaps, that I\n teach a course in general science in\n our Ridgeville Junior High School,\n and another in general physics in the\n Senior High School. It's a privilege\n which I'm sure many educators must\n envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our\n new school is a fine one, and our\n academic standards are high. On the\n other hand, the fathers of most of\n my students work for the Commission\n and a constant awareness of the Commission\n and its work pervades the\n town. It is an uneasy privilege then,\n at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned\n brand of science to these\n children of a new age.\n\n\n \"That's very nice,\" said Marjorie.\n \"What does a junior achievement\n group do?\"", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "The third event of Wednesday\n came to my ears on Thursday morning.\n\n\n I was a little late arriving at the\n barn, and was taken a bit aback to\n find the roadway leading to it rather\n full of parked automobiles, and the\n barn itself rather full of people, including\n two policemen. Our Ridgeville\n police are quite young men, but\n in uniform they still look ominous\n and I was relieved to see that they\n were laughing and evidently enjoying\n themselves.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I demanded, in my\n best classroom voice. \"What is all\n this?\"\n\n\n \"Are you Henderson?\" the larger\n policeman asked.\n\n\n \"I am indeed,\" I said, and a flash\n bulb went off. A young lady grasped\n my arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come\n outside where it's quieter and tell me\n all about it.\"", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "\"What is it?\" I asked. \"You never\n told us.\"\n\n\n Hilary grinned. \"Lauryl benzyl\n phosphonic acid, dipotassium salt, in\n 20% solution.\"\n\n\n \"Goodness.\" I protested, \"it's been\n twenty-five years since my last course\n in chemistry. Perhaps if I saw the\n formula—.\"\n\n\n He gave me a singularly adult\n smile and jotted down a scrawl of\n symbols and lines. It meant little to\n me.\n\n\n \"Is it good?\"\n\n\n For answer he seized the ice bucket,\n now empty of its soda bottles,\n trickled in a few drops from the bottle\n and swished the contents. Foam\n mounted to the rim and spilled over.\n \"And that's our best grade of Ridgeville\n water,\" he pointed out. \"Hardest\n in the country.\"", "Doris Enright was a grave young\n lady of ten years, who might, I\n thought, be quite a beauty in a few\n more years, but was at the moment\n rather angular—all shoulders and elbows.\n Peter Cope, Jr. and Hilary Matlack\n were skinny kids, too. The three\n were of an age and were all tall for\n ten-year-olds.\n\n\n I had the impression during that\n first meeting that they looked rather\n alike, but this wasn't so. Their features\n were quite different. Perhaps\n from association, for they were close\n friends, they had just come to have\n a certain similarity of restrained gesture\n and of modulated voice. And\n they were all tanned by sun and wind\n to a degree that made their eyes seem\n light and their teeth startlingly white.", "\"So then I stopped by at Apex\n Stationers,\" Tommy went on, \"and ordered\n some paper and envelopes. We\n hadn't picked a name yesterday, but I\n figured what's to lose, and picked one.\n Ridge Industries, how's that?\" Everybody\n nodded.\n\n\n \"Just three lines on the letterhead,\"\n he explained. \"Ridge Industries—Ridgeville—Montana.\"\n\n\n I got my voice back and said, \"Engraved,\n I trust.\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure,\" he replied. \"You can't\n afford to look chintzy.\"\nMy appetite was not at its best\n that evening, and Marjorie recognized\n that something was concerning\n me, but she asked no questions, and\n I only told her about the success of\n the kite, and the youngsters embarking\n on a shopping trip for paper, glue\n and wood splints. There was no use\n in both of us worrying.", "Mary said, \"Why don't we make a\n freckle remover? I'd be our first customer.\"\n\"The thing to do,\" Tommy offered,\n \"is to figure out what people in\n Ridgeville want to buy, then sell it\n to them.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to make something by\n powder metallurgy techniques,\" said\n Pete. He fixed me with a challenging\n eye. \"You should be able to make\n ball bearings by molding, then densify\n them by electroplating.\"\n\n\n \"And all we'd need is a hydraulic\n press,\" I told him, \"which, on a guess,\n might cost ten thousand dollars. Let's\n think of something easier.\"\n\n\n Pete mulled it over and nodded\n reluctantly. \"Then maybe something\n in the electronics field. A hi-fi sub-assembly\n of some kind.\"\n\n\n \"How about a new detergent?\" Hilary\n put in.", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "Nobody had. Pete drew figures in\n the air with his hands. \"How about\n the hole at the small end?\"\n\n\n \"I'll make one tonight,\" said Doris,\n \"and think about the small end.\n It'll work out all right.\"\n\n\n I wished that the youngsters weren't\n starting out by inventing a new\n article to manufacture, and risking an\n almost certain disappointment, but to\n hold my guidance to the minimum, I\n said nothing, knowing that later I\n could help them redesign it along\n standard lines.\nAt supper I reviewed the day's\n happenings with Marjorie and tried\n to recall all of the ideas which had\n been propounded. Most of them were\n impractical, of course, for a group of\n children to attempt, but several of\n them appeared quite attractive.", "I do feel just a little embarrassed\n about the kite, even now. The fact\n that it flew surprised me. That it flew\n so confoundedly well was humiliating.\n Four of them were at the barn\n when I arrived next morning; or\n rather on the rise of ground just beyond\n it, and the kite hung motionless\n and almost out of sight in the pale\n sky. I stood and watched for a moment,\n then they saw me.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Henderson,\" Mary said,\n and proffered the cord which was\n wound on a fishing reel. I played the\n kite up and down for a few minutes,\n then reeled it in. It was, almost exactly,\n a wind sock, but the hole at the\n small end was shaped—by wire—into\n the general form of a kidney bean.\n It was beautifully made, and had a\n sort of professional look about it.\n\n\n \"It flies too well,\" Mary told Doris.\n \"A kite ought to get caught in a tree\n sometimes.\"", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "Those mice! I have always kept\n my enthusiasm for rodents within\n bounds, but I must admit they were\n charming little beasts, with tails as\n bushy as miniature squirrels.\n\n\n \"How many generations?\" I asked\n Doris.\n\n\n \"Seventeen. No, eighteen, now.\n Want to see the genetic charts?\"\n\n\n I won't try to explain it as she did\n to me, but it was quite evident that\n the new mice were breeding true.\n Presently we asked Betty Miller to\n come back down to the barn for a\n conference. She listened and asked\n questions. At last she said, \"Well, all\n right, if you promise me they can't\n get out of their cages. But heaven\n knows what you'll do when fall\n comes. They won't live in an unheated\n barn and you can't bring them\n into the house.\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "\"You're right,\" Doris agreed. \"Let's\n see it.\" She gave the wire at the small\n end the slightest of twists. \"There, it\n ought to swoop.\"\n\n\n Sure enough, in the moderate\n breeze of that morning, the kite\n swooped and yawed to Mary's entire\n satisfaction. As we trailed back to the\n barn I asked Doris, \"How did you\n know that flattening the lower edge\n of the hole would create instability?\"\n She looked doubtful.\n\n\n \"Why it would have to, wouldn't\n it? It changed the pattern of air pressures.\"\n She glanced at me quickly.\n \"Of course, I tried a lot of different\n shapes while I was making it.\"\n\n\n \"Naturally,\" I said, and let it go at\n that. \"Where's Tommy?\"", "\"Yes, of course. Who would ever\n have thought you could breed mice\n with those cute furry tails?\"\nWell, after a while things quieted\n down. They had to. The police left\n after sobering up long enough to\n give me a serious warning against\n letting such a thing happen again.\n Mr. Miller, who had come home to\n see what all the excitement was, went\n back to work and Mrs. Miller went\n back to the house and the reporter\n and photographer drifted off to file\n their story, or whatever it is they do.\n Tommy was jubilant.\n\n\n \"Did you hear what she said? It'll\n make the city papers. I wish we had\n a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh\n boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can\n you make some more of that stuff?\n And Doris, how many mice do you\n have?\"", "\"Perhaps,\" I countered, \"somebody\n should tell me.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you don't know, honestly?\n Oh, it's fabulous. Best story I've\n had for ages. It'll make the city papers.\"\n She led me around the corner\n of the barn to a spot of comparative\n quiet.\n\n\n \"You didn't know that one of your\n junior whatsisnames poured detergent\n in the Memorial Fountain basin\n last night?\"\n\n\n I shook my head numbly.", "\"O.K.,\" I said, \"let's relax. You\n don't need to treat me as a teacher,\n you know. I stopped being a school\n teacher when the final grades went in\n last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My\n job here is only to advise, and I'm\n going to do that as little as possible.\n You're going to decide what to do,\n and if it's safe and legal and possible\n to do with the starting capital we\n have, I'll go along with it and help\n in any way I can. This is your meeting.\"\n\n\n Mr. McCormack had told me, and\n in some detail, about the youngsters\n I'd be dealing with. The three who\n were sitting to my left were the ones\n who had proposed the group in the\n first place." ], [ "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "I do feel just a little embarrassed\n about the kite, even now. The fact\n that it flew surprised me. That it flew\n so confoundedly well was humiliating.\n Four of them were at the barn\n when I arrived next morning; or\n rather on the rise of ground just beyond\n it, and the kite hung motionless\n and almost out of sight in the pale\n sky. I stood and watched for a moment,\n then they saw me.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Henderson,\" Mary said,\n and proffered the cord which was\n wound on a fishing reel. I played the\n kite up and down for a few minutes,\n then reeled it in. It was, almost exactly,\n a wind sock, but the hole at the\n small end was shaped—by wire—into\n the general form of a kidney bean.\n It was beautifully made, and had a\n sort of professional look about it.\n\n\n \"It flies too well,\" Mary told Doris.\n \"A kite ought to get caught in a tree\n sometimes.\"", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "The third event of Wednesday\n came to my ears on Thursday morning.\n\n\n I was a little late arriving at the\n barn, and was taken a bit aback to\n find the roadway leading to it rather\n full of parked automobiles, and the\n barn itself rather full of people, including\n two policemen. Our Ridgeville\n police are quite young men, but\n in uniform they still look ominous\n and I was relieved to see that they\n were laughing and evidently enjoying\n themselves.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I demanded, in my\n best classroom voice. \"What is all\n this?\"\n\n\n \"Are you Henderson?\" the larger\n policeman asked.\n\n\n \"I am indeed,\" I said, and a flash\n bulb went off. A young lady grasped\n my arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come\n outside where it's quieter and tell me\n all about it.\"", "Doris Enright was a grave young\n lady of ten years, who might, I\n thought, be quite a beauty in a few\n more years, but was at the moment\n rather angular—all shoulders and elbows.\n Peter Cope, Jr. and Hilary Matlack\n were skinny kids, too. The three\n were of an age and were all tall for\n ten-year-olds.\n\n\n I had the impression during that\n first meeting that they looked rather\n alike, but this wasn't so. Their features\n were quite different. Perhaps\n from association, for they were close\n friends, they had just come to have\n a certain similarity of restrained gesture\n and of modulated voice. And\n they were all tanned by sun and wind\n to a degree that made their eyes seem\n light and their teeth startlingly white.", "\"O.K.,\" I said, \"let's relax. You\n don't need to treat me as a teacher,\n you know. I stopped being a school\n teacher when the final grades went in\n last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My\n job here is only to advise, and I'm\n going to do that as little as possible.\n You're going to decide what to do,\n and if it's safe and legal and possible\n to do with the starting capital we\n have, I'll go along with it and help\n in any way I can. This is your meeting.\"\n\n\n Mr. McCormack had told me, and\n in some detail, about the youngsters\n I'd be dealing with. The three who\n were sitting to my left were the ones\n who had proposed the group in the\n first place.", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "Nobody had. Pete drew figures in\n the air with his hands. \"How about\n the hole at the small end?\"\n\n\n \"I'll make one tonight,\" said Doris,\n \"and think about the small end.\n It'll work out all right.\"\n\n\n I wished that the youngsters weren't\n starting out by inventing a new\n article to manufacture, and risking an\n almost certain disappointment, but to\n hold my guidance to the minimum, I\n said nothing, knowing that later I\n could help them redesign it along\n standard lines.\nAt supper I reviewed the day's\n happenings with Marjorie and tried\n to recall all of the ideas which had\n been propounded. Most of them were\n impractical, of course, for a group of\n children to attempt, but several of\n them appeared quite attractive.", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "I should explain, perhaps, that I\n teach a course in general science in\n our Ridgeville Junior High School,\n and another in general physics in the\n Senior High School. It's a privilege\n which I'm sure many educators must\n envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our\n new school is a fine one, and our\n academic standards are high. On the\n other hand, the fathers of most of\n my students work for the Commission\n and a constant awareness of the Commission\n and its work pervades the\n town. It is an uneasy privilege then,\n at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned\n brand of science to these\n children of a new age.\n\n\n \"That's very nice,\" said Marjorie.\n \"What does a junior achievement\n group do?\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "By Wednesday of the following\n week we had almost three hundred\n kites finished and packed into flat\n cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't\n care if I never saw another. Tommy,\n who by mutual consent, was our\n authority on sales, didn't want to sell\n any until we had, as he put it, enough\n to meet the demand, but this quantity\n seemed to satisfy him. He said he\n would sell them the next week and\n Mary McCready, with a fine burst of\n confidence, asked him in all seriousness\n to be sure to hold out a dozen.\n\n\n Three other things occurred that\n day, two of which I knew about immediately.\n Mary brought a portable\n typewriter from home and spent part\n of the afternoon banging away at\n what seemed to me, since I use two\n fingers only, a very creditable speed.\n\n\n And Hilary brought in a bottle of\n his new detergent. It was a syrupy\n yellow liquid with a nice collar of\n suds. He'd been busy in his home\n laboratory after all, it seemed.", "\"I got two hundred and fifty,\" he\n volunteered—not without a hint of\n complacency in his voice. \"It didn't\n take long, but they sure made it out\n a big deal. Half the guys in the bank\n had to be called in to listen to the\n proposition. The account's in your\n name, Mr. Henderson, and you'll have\n to make out the checks. And they\n want you to stop in at the bank and\n give them a specimen signature. Oh,\n yes, and cosign the note.\"\n\n\n My heart sank. I'd never had any\n dealings with banks except in the\n matter of mortgages, and bank people\n make me most uneasy. To say\n nothing of finding myself responsible\n for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar\n note—over two weeks salary. I made\n a mental vow to sign very few checks.", "It was rather regrettable that, after\n the\nCourier\ngave us most of the third\n page, including photographs, we rarely\n had a day without a few visitors.\n Many of them wanted to buy mice or\n kites, but Tommy refused to sell any\n mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint\n those who wanted kites. The\n Supermarket took all we had—except\n a dozen—and at a dollar fifty\n each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather\n frightened me, but he set the value\n of the mice at ten dollars a pair\n and got it without any arguments.\n\n\n Our beautiful stationery arrived,\n and we had some invoice forms printed\n up in a hurry—not engraved, for\n a wonder.\n\n\n It was on Tuesday—following the\n Thursday—that a lanky young man\n disentangled himself from his car\n and strolled into the barn. I looked\n up from the floor where I was tacking\n squares of screening onto wooden\n frames.", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "\"Yes, of course. Who would ever\n have thought you could breed mice\n with those cute furry tails?\"\nWell, after a while things quieted\n down. They had to. The police left\n after sobering up long enough to\n give me a serious warning against\n letting such a thing happen again.\n Mr. Miller, who had come home to\n see what all the excitement was, went\n back to work and Mrs. Miller went\n back to the house and the reporter\n and photographer drifted off to file\n their story, or whatever it is they do.\n Tommy was jubilant.\n\n\n \"Did you hear what she said? It'll\n make the city papers. I wish we had\n a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh\n boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can\n you make some more of that stuff?\n And Doris, how many mice do you\n have?\"", "The day that our application on\n the kite design went to Washington,\n Mary wrote a dozen toy manufacturers\n scattered from New York to Los\n Angeles, sent a kite to each one and\n offered to license the design. Result,\n one licensee with a thousand dollar\n advance against next season's royalties.\nIt was a rainy morning about three\n weeks later that I arrived at the barn.\n Jeff McCord was there, and the whole\n team except Tommy. Jeff lowered his\n feet from the picnic table and said,\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"Hi yourself,\" I told him. \"You\n look pleased.\"", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "\"So then I stopped by at Apex\n Stationers,\" Tommy went on, \"and ordered\n some paper and envelopes. We\n hadn't picked a name yesterday, but I\n figured what's to lose, and picked one.\n Ridge Industries, how's that?\" Everybody\n nodded.\n\n\n \"Just three lines on the letterhead,\"\n he explained. \"Ridge Industries—Ridgeville—Montana.\"\n\n\n I got my voice back and said, \"Engraved,\n I trust.\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure,\" he replied. \"You can't\n afford to look chintzy.\"\nMy appetite was not at its best\n that evening, and Marjorie recognized\n that something was concerning\n me, but she asked no questions, and\n I only told her about the success of\n the kite, and the youngsters embarking\n on a shopping trip for paper, glue\n and wood splints. There was no use\n in both of us worrying." ], [ "\"Before-shave lotion,\" Hilary told\n him. \"You've shaved this morning,\n but try some anyway.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked momentarily dubious,\n then puddled some in his palm and\n moistened his jaw line. \"Smells\n good,\" he noted, \"and feels nice and\n cool. Now what?\"\n\n\n \"Wipe your face.\" Jeff located a\n handkerchief and wiped, looked at\n the cloth, wiped again, and stared.\n\n\n \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"A whisker stiffener. It makes each\n hair brittle enough to break off right\n at the surface of your skin.\"\n\n\n \"So I perceive. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, just a mixture of stuff. Cookbook\n chemistry. Cysteine thiolactone\n and a fat-soluble magnesium compound.\"", "Hilary had been deep in thought.\n He said suddenly, \"Gosh, I think I\n know how to make a—what do you\n want to call it—a before-shave lotion.\"\n\n\n \"What would that be?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"You'd use it before you shaved.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there might be people\n who'd prefer to use it beforehand,\"\n I conceded.\n\n\n \"There will be people,\" he said\n darkly, and subsided.\n\n\n Mrs. Miller came out to the barn\n after a while, bringing a bucket of\n soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves\n of bread and ingredients for a variety\n of sandwiches. The parents had\n agreed to underwrite lunches at the\n barn and Betty Miller philosophically\n assumed the role of commissary\n officer. She paused only to say hello\n and to ask how we were progressing\n with our organization meeting.", "\"I am,\" he replied, \"in a cautious\n legal sense, of course. Hilary and I\n were just going over the situation on\n his phosphonate detergent. I've spent\n the last three nights studying the patent\n literature and a few standard\n texts touching on phosphonates.\n There are a zillion patents on synthetic\n detergents and a good round\n fifty on phosphonates, but it looks\"—he\n held up a long admonitory hand—\"it\n just looks as though we had a clear\n spot. If we do get protection, you've\n got a real salable property.\"\n\n\n \"That's fine, Mr. McCord,\" Hilary\n said, \"but it's not very important.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" Jeff tilted an inquiring eyebrow\n at me, and I handed him a small\n bottle. He opened and sniffed at it\n gingerly. \"What gives?\"", "By Wednesday of the following\n week we had almost three hundred\n kites finished and packed into flat\n cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't\n care if I never saw another. Tommy,\n who by mutual consent, was our\n authority on sales, didn't want to sell\n any until we had, as he put it, enough\n to meet the demand, but this quantity\n seemed to satisfy him. He said he\n would sell them the next week and\n Mary McCready, with a fine burst of\n confidence, asked him in all seriousness\n to be sure to hold out a dozen.\n\n\n Three other things occurred that\n day, two of which I knew about immediately.\n Mary brought a portable\n typewriter from home and spent part\n of the afternoon banging away at\n what seemed to me, since I use two\n fingers only, a very creditable speed.\n\n\n And Hilary brought in a bottle of\n his new detergent. It was a syrupy\n yellow liquid with a nice collar of\n suds. He'd been busy in his home\n laboratory after all, it seemed.", "\"What is it?\" I asked. \"You never\n told us.\"\n\n\n Hilary grinned. \"Lauryl benzyl\n phosphonic acid, dipotassium salt, in\n 20% solution.\"\n\n\n \"Goodness.\" I protested, \"it's been\n twenty-five years since my last course\n in chemistry. Perhaps if I saw the\n formula—.\"\n\n\n He gave me a singularly adult\n smile and jotted down a scrawl of\n symbols and lines. It meant little to\n me.\n\n\n \"Is it good?\"\n\n\n For answer he seized the ice bucket,\n now empty of its soda bottles,\n trickled in a few drops from the bottle\n and swished the contents. Foam\n mounted to the rim and spilled over.\n \"And that's our best grade of Ridgeville\n water,\" he pointed out. \"Hardest\n in the country.\"", "\"Well, sure, I suppose we want to,\"\n said Hilary. \"We'll need some money\n to do the things we want to do later.\"\n\n\n \"And what sort of things would\n you like to make and sell?\" I asked.", "Mary said, \"Why don't we make a\n freckle remover? I'd be our first customer.\"\n\"The thing to do,\" Tommy offered,\n \"is to figure out what people in\n Ridgeville want to buy, then sell it\n to them.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to make something by\n powder metallurgy techniques,\" said\n Pete. He fixed me with a challenging\n eye. \"You should be able to make\n ball bearings by molding, then densify\n them by electroplating.\"\n\n\n \"And all we'd need is a hydraulic\n press,\" I told him, \"which, on a guess,\n might cost ten thousand dollars. Let's\n think of something easier.\"\n\n\n Pete mulled it over and nodded\n reluctantly. \"Then maybe something\n in the electronics field. A hi-fi sub-assembly\n of some kind.\"\n\n\n \"How about a new detergent?\" Hilary\n put in.", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "\"Well, now,\" I admitted, \"the market\n for red mice might be rather limited.\n Why don't you consider making\n an after-shave lotion? Denatured alcohol,\n glycerine, water, a little color\n and perfume. You could buy some\n bottles and have some labels printed.\n You'd be in business before you\n knew it.\"\n\n\n There was a pause, then Tommy\n inquired, \"How do you sell it?\"\n\n\n \"Door-to-door.\"\n\n\n He made a face. \"Never build up\n any volume. Unless it did something\n extra. You say we'd put color in it.\n How about enough color to leave\n your face looking tanned. Men won't\n use cosmetics and junk, but if they\n didn't have to admit it, they might\n like the shave lotion.\"", "\"Like the liquid dishwashing detergents?\"\n I asked.\n\n\n He was scornful. \"No, they're formulations—you\n know, mixtures.\n That's cookbook chemistry. I mean a\n brand new synthetic detergent. I've\n got an idea for one that ought to be\n good even in the hard water we've\n got around here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I said, \"organic synthesis\n sounds like another operation\n calling for capital investment. If we\n should keep the achievement group\n going for several summers, it might\n be possible later on to carry out a\n safe synthesis of some sort. You're\n Dr. Matlack's son, aren't you? Been\n dipping into your father's library?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" said Hilary, \"and I've got\n a home laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"How about you, Doris?\" I prompted.\n \"Do you have a special field of interest?\"", "Tommy, for example, wanted to\n put tooth powder into tablets that\n one would chew before brushing the\n teeth. He thought there should be\n two colors in the same bottle—orange\n for morning and blue for night,\n the blue ones designed to leave the\n mouth alkaline at bed time.\n\n\n Pete wanted to make a combination\n nail and wood screw. You'd\n drive it in with a hammer up to the\n threaded part, then send it home with\n a few turns of a screwdriver.\n\n\n Hilary, reluctantly forsaking his\n ideas on detergents, suggested we\n make black plastic discs, like poker\n chips but thinner and as cheap as\n possible, to scatter on a snowy sidewalk\n where they would pick up extra\n heat from the sun and melt the\n snow more rapidly. Afterward one\n would sweep up and collect the discs.", "\"Yes, of course. Who would ever\n have thought you could breed mice\n with those cute furry tails?\"\nWell, after a while things quieted\n down. They had to. The police left\n after sobering up long enough to\n give me a serious warning against\n letting such a thing happen again.\n Mr. Miller, who had come home to\n see what all the excitement was, went\n back to work and Mrs. Miller went\n back to the house and the reporter\n and photographer drifted off to file\n their story, or whatever it is they do.\n Tommy was jubilant.\n\n\n \"Did you hear what she said? It'll\n make the city papers. I wish we had\n a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh\n boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can\n you make some more of that stuff?\n And Doris, how many mice do you\n have?\"", "\"Oh, all right,\" I said, \"laugh at\n my commercial aspirations. But don't\n worry about it, really. Mr. McCormack\n said we could get Mr. Wells from\n Commercial Department to help out\n if he was needed. There is one problem,\n though. Mr. McCormack is going\n to put up fifty dollars to buy any\n raw materials wanted and he rather\n suggested that I might advance another\n fifty. The question is, could we\n do it?\"\n\n\n Marjorie did mental arithmetic.\n \"Yes,\" she said, \"yes, if it's something\n you'd like to do.\"", "\"Hi,\" he said. \"You're Donald\n Henderson, right? My name is McCord—Jeff\n McCord—and I work in\n the Patent Section at the Commission's\n downtown office. My boss sent\n me over here, but if he hadn't, I\n think I'd have come anyway. What\n are you doing to get patent protection\n on Ridge Industries' new developments?\"\n\n\n I got my back unkinked and dusted\n off my knees. \"Well, now,\" I said,\n \"I've been wondering whether something\n shouldn't be done, but I know\n very little about such matters—.\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "The day that our application on\n the kite design went to Washington,\n Mary wrote a dozen toy manufacturers\n scattered from New York to Los\n Angeles, sent a kite to each one and\n offered to license the design. Result,\n one licensee with a thousand dollar\n advance against next season's royalties.\nIt was a rainy morning about three\n weeks later that I arrived at the barn.\n Jeff McCord was there, and the whole\n team except Tommy. Jeff lowered his\n feet from the picnic table and said,\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"Hi yourself,\" I told him. \"You\n look pleased.\"", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"" ], [ "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "Mary said, \"Why don't we make a\n freckle remover? I'd be our first customer.\"\n\"The thing to do,\" Tommy offered,\n \"is to figure out what people in\n Ridgeville want to buy, then sell it\n to them.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to make something by\n powder metallurgy techniques,\" said\n Pete. He fixed me with a challenging\n eye. \"You should be able to make\n ball bearings by molding, then densify\n them by electroplating.\"\n\n\n \"And all we'd need is a hydraulic\n press,\" I told him, \"which, on a guess,\n might cost ten thousand dollars. Let's\n think of something easier.\"\n\n\n Pete mulled it over and nodded\n reluctantly. \"Then maybe something\n in the electronics field. A hi-fi sub-assembly\n of some kind.\"\n\n\n \"How about a new detergent?\" Hilary\n put in.", "I'd forgotten all about organization,\n and that, according to all the\n articles I had perused, is most important\n to such groups. It's standard practice\n for every member of the group\n to be a company officer. Of course a\n young boy who doesn't know any better,\n may wind up a sales manager.\n\n\n Over the sandwiches, then, I suggested\n nominating company officers,\n but they seemed not to be interested.\n Peter Cope waved it off by remarking\n that they'd each do what came\n naturally. On the other hand, they\n pondered at some length about a\n name for the organization, without\n reaching any conclusions, so we returned\n to the problem of what to\n make.\n\n\n It was Mary, finally, who advanced\n the thought of kites. At first there\n was little enthusiasm, then Peter said,\n \"You know, we could work up something\n new. Has anybody ever seen a\n kite made like a wind sock?\"", "Nobody had. Pete drew figures in\n the air with his hands. \"How about\n the hole at the small end?\"\n\n\n \"I'll make one tonight,\" said Doris,\n \"and think about the small end.\n It'll work out all right.\"\n\n\n I wished that the youngsters weren't\n starting out by inventing a new\n article to manufacture, and risking an\n almost certain disappointment, but to\n hold my guidance to the minimum, I\n said nothing, knowing that later I\n could help them redesign it along\n standard lines.\nAt supper I reviewed the day's\n happenings with Marjorie and tried\n to recall all of the ideas which had\n been propounded. Most of them were\n impractical, of course, for a group of\n children to attempt, but several of\n them appeared quite attractive.", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "\"O.K.,\" I said, \"let's relax. You\n don't need to treat me as a teacher,\n you know. I stopped being a school\n teacher when the final grades went in\n last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My\n job here is only to advise, and I'm\n going to do that as little as possible.\n You're going to decide what to do,\n and if it's safe and legal and possible\n to do with the starting capital we\n have, I'll go along with it and help\n in any way I can. This is your meeting.\"\n\n\n Mr. McCormack had told me, and\n in some detail, about the youngsters\n I'd be dealing with. The three who\n were sitting to my left were the ones\n who had proposed the group in the\n first place.", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "On Friday we all got down to work,\n and presently had a regular production\n line under way; stapling the\n wood splints, then wetting them with\n a resin solution and shaping them\n over a mandrel to stiffen, cutting the\n plastic film around a pattern, assembling\n and hanging the finished kites\n from an overhead beam until the cement\n had set. Pete Cope had located\n a big roll of red plastic film from\n somewhere, and it made a wonderful-looking\n kite. Happily, I didn't know\n what the film cost until the first kites\n were sold.", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "\"Well, sure, I suppose we want to,\"\n said Hilary. \"We'll need some money\n to do the things we want to do later.\"\n\n\n \"And what sort of things would\n you like to make and sell?\" I asked.", "Hilary had been deep in thought.\n He said suddenly, \"Gosh, I think I\n know how to make a—what do you\n want to call it—a before-shave lotion.\"\n\n\n \"What would that be?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"You'd use it before you shaved.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there might be people\n who'd prefer to use it beforehand,\"\n I conceded.\n\n\n \"There will be people,\" he said\n darkly, and subsided.\n\n\n Mrs. Miller came out to the barn\n after a while, bringing a bucket of\n soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves\n of bread and ingredients for a variety\n of sandwiches. The parents had\n agreed to underwrite lunches at the\n barn and Betty Miller philosophically\n assumed the role of commissary\n officer. She paused only to say hello\n and to ask how we were progressing\n with our organization meeting.", "By Wednesday of the following\n week we had almost three hundred\n kites finished and packed into flat\n cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't\n care if I never saw another. Tommy,\n who by mutual consent, was our\n authority on sales, didn't want to sell\n any until we had, as he put it, enough\n to meet the demand, but this quantity\n seemed to satisfy him. He said he\n would sell them the next week and\n Mary McCready, with a fine burst of\n confidence, asked him in all seriousness\n to be sure to hold out a dozen.\n\n\n Three other things occurred that\n day, two of which I knew about immediately.\n Mary brought a portable\n typewriter from home and spent part\n of the afternoon banging away at\n what seemed to me, since I use two\n fingers only, a very creditable speed.\n\n\n And Hilary brought in a bottle of\n his new detergent. It was a syrupy\n yellow liquid with a nice collar of\n suds. He'd been busy in his home\n laboratory after all, it seemed.", "\"It has the purpose,\" I told her,\n \"of teaching the members something\n about commerce and industry. They\n manufacture simple compositions\n like polishing waxes and sell them\n from door-to-door. Some groups have\n built up tidy little bank accounts\n which are available for later educational\n expenses.\"\n\n\n \"Gracious, you wouldn't have to\n sell from door-to-door, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'd just tell the\n kids how to do it.\"\n\n\n Marjorie put back her head and\n laughed, and I was forced to join her,\n for we both recognize that my understanding\n and \"feel\" for commercial\n matters—if I may use that expression—is\n almost nonexistent.", "\"No.\" She shook her head in mock\n despondency. \"I'm not very technical.\n Just sort of miscellaneous. But if the\n group wanted to raise some mice, I'd\n be willing to turn over a project I've\n had going at home.\"\n\n\n \"You could sell mice?\" Tommy demanded\n incredulously.\n\n\n \"Mice,\" I echoed, then sat back and\n thought about it. \"Are they a pure\n strain? One of the recognized laboratory\n strains? Healthy mice of the\n right strain,\" I explained to Tommy,\n \"might be sold to laboratories. I have\n an idea the Commission buys a supply\n every month.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Doris, \"these aren't laboratory\n mice. They're fancy ones. I\n got the first four pairs from a pet\n shop in Denver, but they're red—sort\n of chipmunk color, you know. I've\n carried them through seventeen generations\n of careful selection.\"", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "It was rather regrettable that, after\n the\nCourier\ngave us most of the third\n page, including photographs, we rarely\n had a day without a few visitors.\n Many of them wanted to buy mice or\n kites, but Tommy refused to sell any\n mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint\n those who wanted kites. The\n Supermarket took all we had—except\n a dozen—and at a dollar fifty\n each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather\n frightened me, but he set the value\n of the mice at ten dollars a pair\n and got it without any arguments.\n\n\n Our beautiful stationery arrived,\n and we had some invoice forms printed\n up in a hurry—not engraved, for\n a wonder.\n\n\n It was on Tuesday—following the\n Thursday—that a lanky young man\n disentangled himself from his car\n and strolled into the barn. I looked\n up from the floor where I was tacking\n squares of screening onto wooden\n frames.", "\"Oh, all right,\" I said, \"laugh at\n my commercial aspirations. But don't\n worry about it, really. Mr. McCormack\n said we could get Mr. Wells from\n Commercial Department to help out\n if he was needed. There is one problem,\n though. Mr. McCormack is going\n to put up fifty dollars to buy any\n raw materials wanted and he rather\n suggested that I might advance another\n fifty. The question is, could we\n do it?\"\n\n\n Marjorie did mental arithmetic.\n \"Yes,\" she said, \"yes, if it's something\n you'd like to do.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"" ], [ "\"Perhaps,\" I countered, \"somebody\n should tell me.\"\n\n\n \"You mean you don't know, honestly?\n Oh, it's fabulous. Best story I've\n had for ages. It'll make the city papers.\"\n She led me around the corner\n of the barn to a spot of comparative\n quiet.\n\n\n \"You didn't know that one of your\n junior whatsisnames poured detergent\n in the Memorial Fountain basin\n last night?\"\n\n\n I shook my head numbly.", "By Wednesday of the following\n week we had almost three hundred\n kites finished and packed into flat\n cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't\n care if I never saw another. Tommy,\n who by mutual consent, was our\n authority on sales, didn't want to sell\n any until we had, as he put it, enough\n to meet the demand, but this quantity\n seemed to satisfy him. He said he\n would sell them the next week and\n Mary McCready, with a fine burst of\n confidence, asked him in all seriousness\n to be sure to hold out a dozen.\n\n\n Three other things occurred that\n day, two of which I knew about immediately.\n Mary brought a portable\n typewriter from home and spent part\n of the afternoon banging away at\n what seemed to me, since I use two\n fingers only, a very creditable speed.\n\n\n And Hilary brought in a bottle of\n his new detergent. It was a syrupy\n yellow liquid with a nice collar of\n suds. He'd been busy in his home\n laboratory after all, it seemed.", "\"I am,\" he replied, \"in a cautious\n legal sense, of course. Hilary and I\n were just going over the situation on\n his phosphonate detergent. I've spent\n the last three nights studying the patent\n literature and a few standard\n texts touching on phosphonates.\n There are a zillion patents on synthetic\n detergents and a good round\n fifty on phosphonates, but it looks\"—he\n held up a long admonitory hand—\"it\n just looks as though we had a clear\n spot. If we do get protection, you've\n got a real salable property.\"\n\n\n \"That's fine, Mr. McCord,\" Hilary\n said, \"but it's not very important.\"\n\n\n \"No?\" Jeff tilted an inquiring eyebrow\n at me, and I handed him a small\n bottle. He opened and sniffed at it\n gingerly. \"What gives?\"", "\"What is it?\" I asked. \"You never\n told us.\"\n\n\n Hilary grinned. \"Lauryl benzyl\n phosphonic acid, dipotassium salt, in\n 20% solution.\"\n\n\n \"Goodness.\" I protested, \"it's been\n twenty-five years since my last course\n in chemistry. Perhaps if I saw the\n formula—.\"\n\n\n He gave me a singularly adult\n smile and jotted down a scrawl of\n symbols and lines. It meant little to\n me.\n\n\n \"Is it good?\"\n\n\n For answer he seized the ice bucket,\n now empty of its soda bottles,\n trickled in a few drops from the bottle\n and swished the contents. Foam\n mounted to the rim and spilled over.\n \"And that's our best grade of Ridgeville\n water,\" he pointed out. \"Hardest\n in the country.\"", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "Hilary had been deep in thought.\n He said suddenly, \"Gosh, I think I\n know how to make a—what do you\n want to call it—a before-shave lotion.\"\n\n\n \"What would that be?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"You'd use it before you shaved.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there might be people\n who'd prefer to use it beforehand,\"\n I conceded.\n\n\n \"There will be people,\" he said\n darkly, and subsided.\n\n\n Mrs. Miller came out to the barn\n after a while, bringing a bucket of\n soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves\n of bread and ingredients for a variety\n of sandwiches. The parents had\n agreed to underwrite lunches at the\n barn and Betty Miller philosophically\n assumed the role of commissary\n officer. She paused only to say hello\n and to ask how we were progressing\n with our organization meeting.", "\"Like the liquid dishwashing detergents?\"\n I asked.\n\n\n He was scornful. \"No, they're formulations—you\n know, mixtures.\n That's cookbook chemistry. I mean a\n brand new synthetic detergent. I've\n got an idea for one that ought to be\n good even in the hard water we've\n got around here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I said, \"organic synthesis\n sounds like another operation\n calling for capital investment. If we\n should keep the achievement group\n going for several summers, it might\n be possible later on to carry out a\n safe synthesis of some sort. You're\n Dr. Matlack's son, aren't you? Been\n dipping into your father's library?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" said Hilary, \"and I've got\n a home laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"How about you, Doris?\" I prompted.\n \"Do you have a special field of interest?\"", "\"Before-shave lotion,\" Hilary told\n him. \"You've shaved this morning,\n but try some anyway.\"\n\n\n Jeff looked momentarily dubious,\n then puddled some in his palm and\n moistened his jaw line. \"Smells\n good,\" he noted, \"and feels nice and\n cool. Now what?\"\n\n\n \"Wipe your face.\" Jeff located a\n handkerchief and wiped, looked at\n the cloth, wiped again, and stared.\n\n\n \"What is it?\"\n\n\n \"A whisker stiffener. It makes each\n hair brittle enough to break off right\n at the surface of your skin.\"\n\n\n \"So I perceive. What is it?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, just a mixture of stuff. Cookbook\n chemistry. Cysteine thiolactone\n and a fat-soluble magnesium compound.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "\"Well, sure, I suppose we want to,\"\n said Hilary. \"We'll need some money\n to do the things we want to do later.\"\n\n\n \"And what sort of things would\n you like to make and sell?\" I asked.", "\"Yes, of course. Who would ever\n have thought you could breed mice\n with those cute furry tails?\"\nWell, after a while things quieted\n down. They had to. The police left\n after sobering up long enough to\n give me a serious warning against\n letting such a thing happen again.\n Mr. Miller, who had come home to\n see what all the excitement was, went\n back to work and Mrs. Miller went\n back to the house and the reporter\n and photographer drifted off to file\n their story, or whatever it is they do.\n Tommy was jubilant.\n\n\n \"Did you hear what she said? It'll\n make the city papers. I wish we had\n a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh\n boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can\n you make some more of that stuff?\n And Doris, how many mice do you\n have?\"", "Mary said, \"Why don't we make a\n freckle remover? I'd be our first customer.\"\n\"The thing to do,\" Tommy offered,\n \"is to figure out what people in\n Ridgeville want to buy, then sell it\n to them.\"\n\n\n \"I'd like to make something by\n powder metallurgy techniques,\" said\n Pete. He fixed me with a challenging\n eye. \"You should be able to make\n ball bearings by molding, then densify\n them by electroplating.\"\n\n\n \"And all we'd need is a hydraulic\n press,\" I told him, \"which, on a guess,\n might cost ten thousand dollars. Let's\n think of something easier.\"\n\n\n Pete mulled it over and nodded\n reluctantly. \"Then maybe something\n in the electronics field. A hi-fi sub-assembly\n of some kind.\"\n\n\n \"How about a new detergent?\" Hilary\n put in.", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "Tommy, for example, wanted to\n put tooth powder into tablets that\n one would chew before brushing the\n teeth. He thought there should be\n two colors in the same bottle—orange\n for morning and blue for night,\n the blue ones designed to leave the\n mouth alkaline at bed time.\n\n\n Pete wanted to make a combination\n nail and wood screw. You'd\n drive it in with a hammer up to the\n threaded part, then send it home with\n a few turns of a screwdriver.\n\n\n Hilary, reluctantly forsaking his\n ideas on detergents, suggested we\n make black plastic discs, like poker\n chips but thinner and as cheap as\n possible, to scatter on a snowy sidewalk\n where they would pick up extra\n heat from the sun and melt the\n snow more rapidly. Afterward one\n would sweep up and collect the discs.", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "I do feel just a little embarrassed\n about the kite, even now. The fact\n that it flew surprised me. That it flew\n so confoundedly well was humiliating.\n Four of them were at the barn\n when I arrived next morning; or\n rather on the rise of ground just beyond\n it, and the kite hung motionless\n and almost out of sight in the pale\n sky. I stood and watched for a moment,\n then they saw me.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Henderson,\" Mary said,\n and proffered the cord which was\n wound on a fishing reel. I played the\n kite up and down for a few minutes,\n then reeled it in. It was, almost exactly,\n a wind sock, but the hole at the\n small end was shaped—by wire—into\n the general form of a kidney bean.\n It was beautifully made, and had a\n sort of professional look about it.\n\n\n \"It flies too well,\" Mary told Doris.\n \"A kite ought to get caught in a tree\n sometimes.\"", "The third event of Wednesday\n came to my ears on Thursday morning.\n\n\n I was a little late arriving at the\n barn, and was taken a bit aback to\n find the roadway leading to it rather\n full of parked automobiles, and the\n barn itself rather full of people, including\n two policemen. Our Ridgeville\n police are quite young men, but\n in uniform they still look ominous\n and I was relieved to see that they\n were laughing and evidently enjoying\n themselves.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I demanded, in my\n best classroom voice. \"What is all\n this?\"\n\n\n \"Are you Henderson?\" the larger\n policeman asked.\n\n\n \"I am indeed,\" I said, and a flash\n bulb went off. A young lady grasped\n my arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come\n outside where it's quieter and tell me\n all about it.\"", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "On Friday we all got down to work,\n and presently had a regular production\n line under way; stapling the\n wood splints, then wetting them with\n a resin solution and shaping them\n over a mandrel to stiffen, cutting the\n plastic film around a pattern, assembling\n and hanging the finished kites\n from an overhead beam until the cement\n had set. Pete Cope had located\n a big roll of red plastic film from\n somewhere, and it made a wonderful-looking\n kite. Happily, I didn't know\n what the film cost until the first kites\n were sold." ], [ "\"We'll be out of the mouse business\n by then,\" Doris predicted. \"Every pet\n shop in the country will have\n them and they'll be down to nothing\n apiece.\"\n\n\n Doris was right, of course, in spite\n of our efforts to protect the market.\n Anyhow that ushered in our cage\n building phase, and for the next\n week—with a few interruptions—we\n built cages, hundreds of them, a good\n many for breeding, but mostly for\n shipping.", "Those mice! I have always kept\n my enthusiasm for rodents within\n bounds, but I must admit they were\n charming little beasts, with tails as\n bushy as miniature squirrels.\n\n\n \"How many generations?\" I asked\n Doris.\n\n\n \"Seventeen. No, eighteen, now.\n Want to see the genetic charts?\"\n\n\n I won't try to explain it as she did\n to me, but it was quite evident that\n the new mice were breeding true.\n Presently we asked Betty Miller to\n come back down to the barn for a\n conference. She listened and asked\n questions. At last she said, \"Well, all\n right, if you promise me they can't\n get out of their cages. But heaven\n knows what you'll do when fall\n comes. They won't live in an unheated\n barn and you can't bring them\n into the house.\"", "\"No.\" She shook her head in mock\n despondency. \"I'm not very technical.\n Just sort of miscellaneous. But if the\n group wanted to raise some mice, I'd\n be willing to turn over a project I've\n had going at home.\"\n\n\n \"You could sell mice?\" Tommy demanded\n incredulously.\n\n\n \"Mice,\" I echoed, then sat back and\n thought about it. \"Are they a pure\n strain? One of the recognized laboratory\n strains? Healthy mice of the\n right strain,\" I explained to Tommy,\n \"might be sold to laboratories. I have\n an idea the Commission buys a supply\n every month.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" said Doris, \"these aren't laboratory\n mice. They're fancy ones. I\n got the first four pairs from a pet\n shop in Denver, but they're red—sort\n of chipmunk color, you know. I've\n carried them through seventeen generations\n of careful selection.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "\"Yes, of course. Who would ever\n have thought you could breed mice\n with those cute furry tails?\"\nWell, after a while things quieted\n down. They had to. The police left\n after sobering up long enough to\n give me a serious warning against\n letting such a thing happen again.\n Mr. Miller, who had come home to\n see what all the excitement was, went\n back to work and Mrs. Miller went\n back to the house and the reporter\n and photographer drifted off to file\n their story, or whatever it is they do.\n Tommy was jubilant.\n\n\n \"Did you hear what she said? It'll\n make the city papers. I wish we had\n a thousand kites. Ten thousand. Oh\n boy, selling is fun. Hilary, when can\n you make some more of that stuff?\n And Doris, how many mice do you\n have?\"", "It was rather regrettable that, after\n the\nCourier\ngave us most of the third\n page, including photographs, we rarely\n had a day without a few visitors.\n Many of them wanted to buy mice or\n kites, but Tommy refused to sell any\n mice at retail and we soon had to disappoint\n those who wanted kites. The\n Supermarket took all we had—except\n a dozen—and at a dollar fifty\n each. Tommy's ideas of pricing rather\n frightened me, but he set the value\n of the mice at ten dollars a pair\n and got it without any arguments.\n\n\n Our beautiful stationery arrived,\n and we had some invoice forms printed\n up in a hurry—not engraved, for\n a wonder.\n\n\n It was on Tuesday—following the\n Thursday—that a lanky young man\n disentangled himself from his car\n and strolled into the barn. I looked\n up from the floor where I was tacking\n squares of screening onto wooden\n frames.", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "\"It was priceless. Just before rush\n hour. Suds built up in the basin and\n overflowed, and down the library\n steps and covered the whole street.\n And the funniest part was they kept\n right on coming. You couldn't imagine\n so much suds coming from that\n little pool of water. There was a\n three-block traffic jam and Harry got\n us some marvelous pictures—men\n rolling up their trousers to wade\n across the street. And this morning,\"\n she chortled, \"somebody phoned in\n an anonymous tip to the police—of\n course it was the same boy that did\n it—Tommy—Miller?—and so here\n we are. And we just saw a demonstration\n of that fabulous kite and saw\n all those simply captivating mice.\"\n\n\n \"Mice?\"", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "\"Well, now,\" I admitted, \"the market\n for red mice might be rather limited.\n Why don't you consider making\n an after-shave lotion? Denatured alcohol,\n glycerine, water, a little color\n and perfume. You could buy some\n bottles and have some labels printed.\n You'd be in business before you\n knew it.\"\n\n\n There was a pause, then Tommy\n inquired, \"How do you sell it?\"\n\n\n \"Door-to-door.\"\n\n\n He made a face. \"Never build up\n any volume. Unless it did something\n extra. You say we'd put color in it.\n How about enough color to leave\n your face looking tanned. Men won't\n use cosmetics and junk, but if they\n didn't have to admit it, they might\n like the shave lotion.\"", "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "Fallout is, of course, always disastrous—\n \none way or another\nJUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT\nBY WILLIAM LEE\nILLUSTRATED BY SCHOENHERR\n\"What would you think,\" I asked\n Marjorie over supper, \"if I should undertake\n to lead a junior achievement\n group this summer?\"\n\n\n She pondered it while she went to\n the kitchen to bring in the dessert.\n It was dried apricot pie, and very\n tasty, I might add.\n\n\n \"Why, Donald,\" she said, \"it could\n be quite interesting, if I understand\n what a junior achievement group is.\n What gave you the idea?\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't my idea, really,\" I admitted.\n \"Mr. McCormack called me\n to the office today, and told me that\n some of the children in the lower\n grades wanted to start one. They\n need adult guidance of course, and\n one of the group suggested my name.\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "Nobody had. Pete drew figures in\n the air with his hands. \"How about\n the hole at the small end?\"\n\n\n \"I'll make one tonight,\" said Doris,\n \"and think about the small end.\n It'll work out all right.\"\n\n\n I wished that the youngsters weren't\n starting out by inventing a new\n article to manufacture, and risking an\n almost certain disappointment, but to\n hold my guidance to the minimum, I\n said nothing, knowing that later I\n could help them redesign it along\n standard lines.\nAt supper I reviewed the day's\n happenings with Marjorie and tried\n to recall all of the ideas which had\n been propounded. Most of them were\n impractical, of course, for a group of\n children to attempt, but several of\n them appeared quite attractive.", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "I'd forgotten all about organization,\n and that, according to all the\n articles I had perused, is most important\n to such groups. It's standard practice\n for every member of the group\n to be a company officer. Of course a\n young boy who doesn't know any better,\n may wind up a sales manager.\n\n\n Over the sandwiches, then, I suggested\n nominating company officers,\n but they seemed not to be interested.\n Peter Cope waved it off by remarking\n that they'd each do what came\n naturally. On the other hand, they\n pondered at some length about a\n name for the organization, without\n reaching any conclusions, so we returned\n to the problem of what to\n make.\n\n\n It was Mary, finally, who advanced\n the thought of kites. At first there\n was little enthusiasm, then Peter said,\n \"You know, we could work up something\n new. Has anybody ever seen a\n kite made like a wind sock?\"", "By Wednesday of the following\n week we had almost three hundred\n kites finished and packed into flat\n cardboard boxes, and frankly I didn't\n care if I never saw another. Tommy,\n who by mutual consent, was our\n authority on sales, didn't want to sell\n any until we had, as he put it, enough\n to meet the demand, but this quantity\n seemed to satisfy him. He said he\n would sell them the next week and\n Mary McCready, with a fine burst of\n confidence, asked him in all seriousness\n to be sure to hold out a dozen.\n\n\n Three other things occurred that\n day, two of which I knew about immediately.\n Mary brought a portable\n typewriter from home and spent part\n of the afternoon banging away at\n what seemed to me, since I use two\n fingers only, a very creditable speed.\n\n\n And Hilary brought in a bottle of\n his new detergent. It was a syrupy\n yellow liquid with a nice collar of\n suds. He'd been busy in his home\n laboratory after all, it seemed.", "The day that our application on\n the kite design went to Washington,\n Mary wrote a dozen toy manufacturers\n scattered from New York to Los\n Angeles, sent a kite to each one and\n offered to license the design. Result,\n one licensee with a thousand dollar\n advance against next season's royalties.\nIt was a rainy morning about three\n weeks later that I arrived at the barn.\n Jeff McCord was there, and the whole\n team except Tommy. Jeff lowered his\n feet from the picnic table and said,\n \"Hi.\"\n\n\n \"Hi yourself,\" I told him. \"You\n look pleased.\"", "\"So then I stopped by at Apex\n Stationers,\" Tommy went on, \"and ordered\n some paper and envelopes. We\n hadn't picked a name yesterday, but I\n figured what's to lose, and picked one.\n Ridge Industries, how's that?\" Everybody\n nodded.\n\n\n \"Just three lines on the letterhead,\"\n he explained. \"Ridge Industries—Ridgeville—Montana.\"\n\n\n I got my voice back and said, \"Engraved,\n I trust.\"\n\n\n \"Well, sure,\" he replied. \"You can't\n afford to look chintzy.\"\nMy appetite was not at its best\n that evening, and Marjorie recognized\n that something was concerning\n me, but she asked no questions, and\n I only told her about the success of\n the kite, and the youngsters embarking\n on a shopping trip for paper, glue\n and wood splints. There was no use\n in both of us worrying.", "\"It has the purpose,\" I told her,\n \"of teaching the members something\n about commerce and industry. They\n manufacture simple compositions\n like polishing waxes and sell them\n from door-to-door. Some groups have\n built up tidy little bank accounts\n which are available for later educational\n expenses.\"\n\n\n \"Gracious, you wouldn't have to\n sell from door-to-door, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'd just tell the\n kids how to do it.\"\n\n\n Marjorie put back her head and\n laughed, and I was forced to join her,\n for we both recognize that my understanding\n and \"feel\" for commercial\n matters—if I may use that expression—is\n almost nonexistent." ], [ "The two on my right were cast in\n a different mold. Mary McCready\n was a big husky redhead of twelve,\n with a face full of freckles and an\n infectious laugh, and Tommy Miller,\n a few months younger, was just an\n average, extroverted, well adjusted\n youngster, noisy and restless, tee-shirted\n and butch-barbered.\n\n\n The group exchanged looks to see\n who would lead off, and Peter Cope\n seemed to be elected.\n\n\n \"Well, Mr. Henderson, a junior\n achievement group is a bunch of kids\n who get together to manufacture and\n sell things, and maybe make some\n money.\"\n\n\n \"Is that what you want to do,\" I\n asked, \"make money?\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" Tommy asked.\n \"There's something wrong with making\n money?\"", "Doris added to this that if you\n could make the discs light enough to\n float, they might be colored white\n and spread on the surface of a reservoir\n to reduce evaporation.\n\n\n These latter ideas had made unknowing\n use of some basic physics,\n and I'm afraid I relapsed for a few\n minutes into the role of teacher and\n told them a little bit about the laws\n of radiation and absorption of heat.\n\n\n \"My,\" said Marjorie, \"they're really\n smart boys and girls. Tommy Miller\n does sound like a born salesman.\n Somehow I don't think you're going\n to have to call in Mr. Wells.\"", "The usual products, of course, with\n these junior achievement efforts, are\n chemical specialties that can be made\n safely and that people will buy and\n use without misgivings—solvent to\n free up rusty bolts, cleaner to remove\n road tar, mechanic's hand soap—that\n sort of thing. Mr. McCormack had\n told me, though, that I might find\n these youngsters a bit more ambitious.\n \"The Miller boy and Mary McCready,\"\n he had said, \"have exceptionally\n high IQ's—around one forty\n or one fifty. The other three are hard\n to classify. They have some of the\n attributes of exceptional pupils, but\n much of the time they seem to have\n little interest in their studies. The\n junior achievement idea has sparked\n their imaginations. Maybe it'll be just\n what they need.\"", "I do feel just a little embarrassed\n about the kite, even now. The fact\n that it flew surprised me. That it flew\n so confoundedly well was humiliating.\n Four of them were at the barn\n when I arrived next morning; or\n rather on the rise of ground just beyond\n it, and the kite hung motionless\n and almost out of sight in the pale\n sky. I stood and watched for a moment,\n then they saw me.\n\n\n \"Hello, Mr. Henderson,\" Mary said,\n and proffered the cord which was\n wound on a fishing reel. I played the\n kite up and down for a few minutes,\n then reeled it in. It was, almost exactly,\n a wind sock, but the hole at the\n small end was shaped—by wire—into\n the general form of a kidney bean.\n It was beautifully made, and had a\n sort of professional look about it.\n\n\n \"It flies too well,\" Mary told Doris.\n \"A kite ought to get caught in a tree\n sometimes.\"", "\"Winter quarters,\" Marge repeated.\n \"You mean you're going to try to\n keep the group going after school\n starts?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? The kids can sail\n through their courses without thinking\n about them, and actually they\n won't put in more than a few hours\n a week during the school year.\"\n\n\n \"Even so, it's child labor, isn't it?\"\n\n\n \"Child labor nothing. They're the\n employers. Jeff McCord and I will\n be the only employees—just at first,\n anyway.\"\n\n\n Marge choked on something. \"Did\n you say you'd be an employee?\"", "I should explain, perhaps, that I\n teach a course in general science in\n our Ridgeville Junior High School,\n and another in general physics in the\n Senior High School. It's a privilege\n which I'm sure many educators must\n envy, teaching in Ridgeville, for our\n new school is a fine one, and our\n academic standards are high. On the\n other hand, the fathers of most of\n my students work for the Commission\n and a constant awareness of the Commission\n and its work pervades the\n town. It is an uneasy privilege then,\n at least sometimes, to teach my old-fashioned\n brand of science to these\n children of a new age.\n\n\n \"That's very nice,\" said Marjorie.\n \"What does a junior achievement\n group do?\"", "\"O.K.,\" I said, \"let's relax. You\n don't need to treat me as a teacher,\n you know. I stopped being a school\n teacher when the final grades went in\n last Friday. I'm on vacation now. My\n job here is only to advise, and I'm\n going to do that as little as possible.\n You're going to decide what to do,\n and if it's safe and legal and possible\n to do with the starting capital we\n have, I'll go along with it and help\n in any way I can. This is your meeting.\"\n\n\n Mr. McCormack had told me, and\n in some detail, about the youngsters\n I'd be dealing with. The three who\n were sitting to my left were the ones\n who had proposed the group in the\n first place.", "\"Hi,\" he said. \"You're Donald\n Henderson, right? My name is McCord—Jeff\n McCord—and I work in\n the Patent Section at the Commission's\n downtown office. My boss sent\n me over here, but if he hadn't, I\n think I'd have come anyway. What\n are you doing to get patent protection\n on Ridge Industries' new developments?\"\n\n\n I got my back unkinked and dusted\n off my knees. \"Well, now,\" I said,\n \"I've been wondering whether something\n shouldn't be done, but I know\n very little about such matters—.\"", "\"Well, sure, I suppose we want to,\"\n said Hilary. \"We'll need some money\n to do the things we want to do later.\"\n\n\n \"And what sort of things would\n you like to make and sell?\" I asked.", "The third event of Wednesday\n came to my ears on Thursday morning.\n\n\n I was a little late arriving at the\n barn, and was taken a bit aback to\n find the roadway leading to it rather\n full of parked automobiles, and the\n barn itself rather full of people, including\n two policemen. Our Ridgeville\n police are quite young men, but\n in uniform they still look ominous\n and I was relieved to see that they\n were laughing and evidently enjoying\n themselves.\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I demanded, in my\n best classroom voice. \"What is all\n this?\"\n\n\n \"Are you Henderson?\" the larger\n policeman asked.\n\n\n \"I am indeed,\" I said, and a flash\n bulb went off. A young lady grasped\n my arm.\n\n\n \"Oh, please, Mr. Henderson, come\n outside where it's quieter and tell me\n all about it.\"", "\"I see. Just a mixture of stuff. And\n do your whiskers grow back the next\n day?\"\n\n\n \"Right on schedule,\" I said.\n\n\n McCord unfolded his length and\n stood staring out into the rain. Presently\n he said, \"Henderson, Hilary\n and I are heading for my office. We\n can work there better than here, and\n if we're going to break the hearts of\n the razor industry, there's no better\n time to start than now.\"\n\n\n When they had driven off I turned\n and said, \"Let's talk a while. We can\n always clean mouse cages later.\n Where's Tommy?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, he stopped at the bank to get\n a loan.\"\n\n\n \"What on earth for? We have over\n six thousand in the account.\"", "We've had to watch such things\n rather closely for the last ten—no,\n eleven years. Back in the old Ridgeville,\n fifty-odd miles to the south, we\n had our home almost paid for, when\n the accident occurred. It was in the\n path of the heaviest fallout, and we\n couldn't have kept on living there\n even if the town had stayed. When\n Ridgeville moved to its present site,\n so, of course, did we, which meant\n starting mortgage payments all over\n again.\nThus it was that on a Wednesday\n morning about three weeks later, I\n was sitting at one end of a plank picnic\n table with five boys and girls\n lined up along the sides. This was to\n be our headquarters and factory for\n the summer—a roomy unused barn\n belonging to the parents of one of\n the group members, Tommy Miller.", "\"I got two hundred and fifty,\" he\n volunteered—not without a hint of\n complacency in his voice. \"It didn't\n take long, but they sure made it out\n a big deal. Half the guys in the bank\n had to be called in to listen to the\n proposition. The account's in your\n name, Mr. Henderson, and you'll have\n to make out the checks. And they\n want you to stop in at the bank and\n give them a specimen signature. Oh,\n yes, and cosign the note.\"\n\n\n My heart sank. I'd never had any\n dealings with banks except in the\n matter of mortgages, and bank people\n make me most uneasy. To say\n nothing of finding myself responsible\n for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar\n note—over two weeks salary. I made\n a mental vow to sign very few checks.", "Nobody had. Pete drew figures in\n the air with his hands. \"How about\n the hole at the small end?\"\n\n\n \"I'll make one tonight,\" said Doris,\n \"and think about the small end.\n It'll work out all right.\"\n\n\n I wished that the youngsters weren't\n starting out by inventing a new\n article to manufacture, and risking an\n almost certain disappointment, but to\n hold my guidance to the minimum, I\n said nothing, knowing that later I\n could help them redesign it along\n standard lines.\nAt supper I reviewed the day's\n happenings with Marjorie and tried\n to recall all of the ideas which had\n been propounded. Most of them were\n impractical, of course, for a group of\n children to attempt, but several of\n them appeared quite attractive.", "\"It has the purpose,\" I told her,\n \"of teaching the members something\n about commerce and industry. They\n manufacture simple compositions\n like polishing waxes and sell them\n from door-to-door. Some groups have\n built up tidy little bank accounts\n which are available for later educational\n expenses.\"\n\n\n \"Gracious, you wouldn't have to\n sell from door-to-door, would you?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not. I'd just tell the\n kids how to do it.\"\n\n\n Marjorie put back her head and\n laughed, and I was forced to join her,\n for we both recognize that my understanding\n and \"feel\" for commercial\n matters—if I may use that expression—is\n almost nonexistent.", "\"Like the liquid dishwashing detergents?\"\n I asked.\n\n\n He was scornful. \"No, they're formulations—you\n know, mixtures.\n That's cookbook chemistry. I mean a\n brand new synthetic detergent. I've\n got an idea for one that ought to be\n good even in the hard water we've\n got around here.\"\n\n\n \"Well, now,\" I said, \"organic synthesis\n sounds like another operation\n calling for capital investment. If we\n should keep the achievement group\n going for several summers, it might\n be possible later on to carry out a\n safe synthesis of some sort. You're\n Dr. Matlack's son, aren't you? Been\n dipping into your father's library?\"\n\n\n \"Some,\" said Hilary, \"and I've got\n a home laboratory.\"\n\n\n \"How about you, Doris?\" I prompted.\n \"Do you have a special field of interest?\"", "\"Oh, all right,\" I said, \"laugh at\n my commercial aspirations. But don't\n worry about it, really. Mr. McCormack\n said we could get Mr. Wells from\n Commercial Department to help out\n if he was needed. There is one problem,\n though. Mr. McCormack is going\n to put up fifty dollars to buy any\n raw materials wanted and he rather\n suggested that I might advance another\n fifty. The question is, could we\n do it?\"\n\n\n Marjorie did mental arithmetic.\n \"Yes,\" she said, \"yes, if it's something\n you'd like to do.\"", "\"Well,\" Peter said, looking a little\n embarrassed, \"we were planning to\n buy a hydraulic press. You see, Doris\n put some embroidery on that scheme\n of mine for making ball bearings.\"\n He grabbed a sheet of paper. \"Look,\n we make a roller bearing, this shape\n only it's a permanent magnet. Then\n you see—.\" And he was off.\n\n\n \"What did they do today, dear?\"\n Marge asked as she refilled my coffee\n cup.\n\n\n \"Thanks,\" I said. \"Let's see, it was\n a big day. We picked out a hydraulic\n press, Doris read us the first chapter\n of the book she's starting, and we\n found a place over a garage on\n Fourth Street that we can rent for\n winter quarters. Oh, yes, and Jeff is\n starting action to get the company\n incorporated.\"", "Hilary had been deep in thought.\n He said suddenly, \"Gosh, I think I\n know how to make a—what do you\n want to call it—a before-shave lotion.\"\n\n\n \"What would that be?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"You'd use it before you shaved.\"\n\n\n \"I suppose there might be people\n who'd prefer to use it beforehand,\"\n I conceded.\n\n\n \"There will be people,\" he said\n darkly, and subsided.\n\n\n Mrs. Miller came out to the barn\n after a while, bringing a bucket of\n soft drinks and ice, a couple of loaves\n of bread and ingredients for a variety\n of sandwiches. The parents had\n agreed to underwrite lunches at the\n barn and Betty Miller philosophically\n assumed the role of commissary\n officer. She paused only to say hello\n and to ask how we were progressing\n with our organization meeting.", "\"He stopped off at the bank,\" Pete\n Cope told me, \"to borrow some money.\n We'll want to buy materials to\n make some of these kites.\"\n\n\n \"But I said yesterday that Mr. McCormack\n and I were going to advance\n some cash to get started.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, sure, but don't you think it\n would be better to borrow from a\n bank? More businesslike?\"\n\n\n \"Doubtless,\" I said, \"but banks generally\n want some security.\" I would\n have gone on and explained matters\n further, except that Tommy walked\n in and handed me a pocket check\n book." ] ]
train	25627	[ "Why did Val and Ron really decide to go to Mars?", "How did Ledman get to Mars?", "Which of these do Ron and Ledman have in common?", "What would have happened if Ledman had stayed on Earth?", "What likely happens to Ledman after the story ends?", "What likely happens to Val and Ron after the story ends? ", "Which of these was not a consequence of the Great Atomic Wars?", "Why is the Geig Corps important?", "What kind of person is Ron?", "What kind of person is Ledman?" ]	[ [ "They were curious and wanted to help their planet", "They did not want to spend anymore time on earth", "They wanted a more creative way to make money", "Out of obligation to find a job to sustain themselves" ], [ "He saved his money to send himself", "He joined the Corps just as Val and Ron did", "He was part of a uranium company who funded his trip", "He posed as a tourist and stayed behind on a vacation" ], [ "They have both been wrong by the companies that they worked for", "They both want to find an alternative to uranium", "There were both injured in the same accident", "They are both obsessed with finding uranium" ], [ "He would've managed to maintain leadership of his company", "He might not have needed a wheelchair long-term", "He would have joined the Project Sea-Dredge mission", "He would've become more depressed and never found revenge" ], [ "He is given new legs and can start a new life", "He will rejoin the search for uranium", "Even with his wheelchair he must receive mental health treatment", "He will undergo physical and mental health care before starting over" ], [ "They stay on Mars for their contract and then move on to a different project", "They go back to earth to make sure Ledman gets the care he needs", "They decide to stay on Mars forever", "They stay on Mars for a few more weeks before heading back to Earth" ], [ "Limited resources ran out over time", "Multiple planets were settled by various countries in a display of power", "All major types of power sources changed", "Earth decided to run supply missions to Mars" ], [ "Val and Ron worked for them before signing up with UranCo", "It is UranCo's method of acquiring manpower for the resource search", "It is how Ledman got involved in the uranium project in the first place", "They funded the dome that Ledman lives in" ], [ "A curious and determined man who does his best", "An impulsive man who does not pay attention to others' needs", "A doting husband who follows his wife to Mars", "An adventuresome soul but still a timid one" ], [ "He is upset and lashing out because he feels betrayed", "He has violent tendancies and hates his old company", "He has always been a nutcase", "He has been untrustworthy his whole life" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "I looked down at Valerie's\n sleeping form, and thought of\n our warm, comfortable little\n home on Earth. It wasn't\n much, but people in love don't\n need very fancy surroundings.\n\n\n I watched her, sleeping\n peacefully, a wayward lock of\n her soft blonde hair trailing\n down over one eyebrow, and\n it seemed hard to believe that\n we'd exchanged Earth and all\n it held for us for the raw, untamed\n struggle that was Mars.\n But I knew I'd do it again, if\n I had the chance. It's because\n we wanted to keep what we\n had. Heroes? Hell, no. We\n just liked our comforts, and\n wanted to keep them. Which\n took a little work.\nTime to get moving.\nBut\n then Val stirred and rolled\n over in her sleep, and I didn't\n have the heart to wake her. I\n sat there, holding her, staring\n out over the desert, watching\n the wind whip the sand up\n into weird shapes.", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "Which wasn't anywhere\n close to the truth. Now I\n knew she was at the breaking\n point, because Val didn't lie\n unless she was so exhausted\n she didn't know what she was\n doing. She had been just as\n much inflamed by the idea of\n coming to Mars to help in the\n search for uranium as I was.\n We knew the pay was poor,\n but we had felt it a sort of\n obligation, something we\n could do as individuals to\n keep the industries of radioactives-starved\n Earth going.\n And we'd always had a roving\n foot, both of us.\n\n\n No, we had decided together\n to come to Mars—the\n way we decided together on\n everything. Now she was\n turning against me.\nI tried to jolly her. \"Buck\n up, kid,\" I said. I didn't dare\n turn up her oxy pressure any\n higher, but it was obvious she\n couldn't keep going. She was\n almost sleep-walking now.", "And that started the chain\n of events that led Val and me\n to end up as a madman's prisoners,\n on Mars. With every\n source of uranium mined dry\n on Earth, we had tried other\n possibilities. All sorts of\n schemes came forth. Project\n Sea-Dredge was trying to get\n uranium from the oceans. In\n forty or fifty years, they'd\n get some results, we hoped.\n But there wasn't forty or\n fifty years' worth of raw stuff\n to tide us over until then. In a\n decade or so, our power would\n be just about gone. I could\n picture the sort of dog-eat-dog\n world we'd revert back\n to. Millions of starving, freezing\n humans tooth-and-clawing\n in it in the useless shell of\n a great atomic civilization.", "The Geig Corps preferred\n married couples, working in\n teams. That's what had finally\n decided it for us—we were a\n good team. We had no ties on\n Earth that couldn't be broken\n without much difficulty. So\n we volunteered.\nAnd here we are.\nHeroes.\n The wind blasted a mass of\n sand into my face, and I felt\n it tinkle against the oxymask.\n\n\n I glanced at the suit-chronometer.\n Getting late. I decided\n once again to wake Val.\n But she was tired. And I was\n tired too, tired from our\n wearying journey across the\n empty desert.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "It must have been hell for\n her. We had wandered fruitlessly\n over the red sands all\n day, both of us listening for\n the clicks of the counter. And\n the geigers had been obstinately\n hushed all day, except\n for their constant undercurrent\n of meaningless noises.\n\n\n Even though the Martian\n gravity was only a fraction of\n Earth's, I was starting to\n tire, and I knew it must have\n been really rough on Val with\n her lovely but unrugged legs.\n\n\n \"Heroes,\" she said bitterly.\n \"We're not heroes—we're\n suckers! Why did I ever let\n you volunteer for the Geig\n Corps and drag me along?\"", "I stared ahead at the bleak,\n desolate wastes of the Martian\n landscape. Behind us\n somewhere was the comfort\n of the Dome, ahead nothing\n but the mazes and gullies of\n this dead world.\nHe was a cripple in a wheelchair—helpless as a rattlesnake.\n\"Try to keep going, Val.\"\n My gloved hand reached out\n and clumsily enfolded hers.\n \"Come on, kid. Remember—we're\n doing this for Earth.\n We're heroes.\"\n\n\n She glared at me. \"Heroes,\n hell!\" she muttered. \"That's\n the way it looked back home,\n but, out there it doesn't seem\n so glorious. And UranCo's\n pay is stinking.\"\n\n\n \"We didn't come out here\n for the pay, Val.\"\n\n\n \"I know, I know, but just\n the same—\"", "THE\n\n HUNTED\n\n HEROES\nBy ROBERT SILVERBERG\nThe planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate,\n forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and\n dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad\n genius who had a motto:\nDeath to all Terrans!\n\"Let's\n keep moving,\" I told\n Val. \"The surest way to\n die out here on Mars is to\n give up.\" I reached over and\n turned up the pressure on her\n oxymask to make things a\n little easier for her. Through\n the glassite of the mask, I\n could see her face contorted\n in an agony of fatigue.\n\n\n And she probably thought\n the failure of the sandcat was\n all my fault, too. Val's usually\n about the best wife a guy\n could ask for, but when she\n wants to be she can be a real\n flying bother.", "\"Go back?\nGo back?\nIf you\n think I'm backing down now\n and quitting you can find\n yourself another wife! After\n we dump this guy I'm sacking\n in for twenty hours, and then\n we're going back out there to\n finish that search-pattern.\n Earth needs uranium, honey,\n and I know you'd never be\n happy quitting in the middle\n like that.\" She smiled. \"I\n can't wait to get out there\n and start listening for those\n tell-tale clicks.\"\n\n\n I gave a joyful whoop and\n swung her around. When I\n put her down, she squeezed\n my hand, hard.\n\n\n \"Let's get moving, fellow\n hero,\" she said.", "\"Quiet up there!\" our captor\n called, and we stopped\n talking. We trudged along together,\n with him following\n behind; I could hear the\ncrunch-crunch\nof the wheelchair\n as its wheels chewed\n into the sand. I wondered\n where we were going, and\n why. I wondered why we had\n ever left Earth.\n\n\n The answer to that came to\n me quick enough: we had to.\n Earth needed radioactives,\n and the only way to get them\n was to get out and look. The\n great atomic wars of the late\n 20th Century had used up\n much of the supply, but the\n amount used to blow up half\n the great cities of the world\n hardly compared with the\n amount we needed to put\n them back together again.", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "It was beyond her to see\n that some grease monkey back\n at the Dome was at fault—whoever\n it was who had failed\n to fasten down the engine\n hood. Nothing but what had\n stopped us\ncould\nstop a sandcat:\n sand in the delicate\n mechanism of the atomic engine.\n\n\n But no; she blamed it all on\n me somehow: So we were out\n walking on the spongy sand\n of the Martian desert. We'd\n been walking a good eight\n hours.\n\n\n \"Can't we turn back now,\n Ron?\" Val pleaded. \"Maybe\n there isn't any uranium in\n this sector at all. I think\n we're crazy to keep on searching\n out here!\"\n\n\n I started to tell her that the\n UranCo chief had assured me\n we'd hit something out this\n way, but changed my mind.\n When Val's tired and overwrought\n there's no sense in\n arguing with her.", "We pressed on over the\n barren terrain. The geiger\n kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,\n but never broke into\n that sudden explosive tumult\n that meant we had found pay-dirt.\n I started to feel tired\n myself, terribly tired. I longed\n to lie down on the soft,\n spongy Martian sand and\n bury myself.\n\n\n I looked at Val. She was\n dragging along with her eyes\n half-shut. I felt almost guilty\n for having dragged her out to\n Mars, until I recalled that I\n hadn't. In fact, she had come\n up with the idea before I did.\n I wished there was some way\n of turning the weary, bedraggled\n girl at my side back into\n the Val who had so enthusiastically\n suggested we join\n the Geigs.\n\n\n Twelve steps later, I decided\n this was about as far as\n we could go.", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "\"You left Earth too quickly,\"\n Val said.\n\n\n \"It was the only way,\" he\n protested. \"I had to get off—\"\n\n\n \"She's right,\" I told him.\n \"The atom can take away, but\n it can give as well. Soon after\n you left they developed\natomic-powered\nprosthetics—amazing\n things, virtually robot\n legs. All the survivors of\n the Sadlerville Blast were\n given the necessary replacement\n limbs free of charge. All\n except you. You were so sick\n you had to get away from the\n world you despised and come\n here.\"\n\n\n \"You're lying,\" he said.\n \"It's not true!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, but it is,\" Val smiled.", "\"No. That's the difference\n between sane people and insane,\"\n I told him. \"I'm not\n going to kill you at all. I'm\n going to see to it that you're\n sent back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"\nNo!\n\" he shouted. \"No!\n Anything but back there. I\n don't want to face them again—not\n after what they did to\n me—\"\n\n\n \"Not so loud,\" I broke in.\n \"They'll help you on Earth.\n They'll take all the hatred and\n sickness out of you, and turn\n you into a useful member of\n society again.\"\n\n\n \"I hate Earthmen,\" he spat\n out. \"I hate all of them.\"", "\"I know,\" I said sarcastically.\n \"You're just all full of\n hate. You hated us so much\n that you couldn't bear to hang\n around on Earth for as much\n as a year after the Sadlerville\n Blast. You had to take right\n off for Mars without a moment's\n delay, didn't you? You\n hated Earth so much you\nhad\nto leave.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you telling all\n this to me?\"\n\n\n \"Because if you'd stayed\n long enough, you'd have used\n some of your pension money\n to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic\n legs, and then you\n wouldn't need this wheelchair.\"\n\n\n Ledman scowled, and then\n his face went belligerent\n again. \"They told me I was\n paralyzed below the waist.\n That I'd never walk again,\n even with prosthetic legs, because\n I had no muscles to fit\n them to.\"" ], [ "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "\"I know,\" I said sarcastically.\n \"You're just all full of\n hate. You hated us so much\n that you couldn't bear to hang\n around on Earth for as much\n as a year after the Sadlerville\n Blast. You had to take right\n off for Mars without a moment's\n delay, didn't you? You\n hated Earth so much you\nhad\nto leave.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you telling all\n this to me?\"\n\n\n \"Because if you'd stayed\n long enough, you'd have used\n some of your pension money\n to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic\n legs, and then you\n wouldn't need this wheelchair.\"\n\n\n Ledman scowled, and then\n his face went belligerent\n again. \"They told me I was\n paralyzed below the waist.\n That I'd never walk again,\n even with prosthetic legs, because\n I had no muscles to fit\n them to.\"", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "And that started the chain\n of events that led Val and me\n to end up as a madman's prisoners,\n on Mars. With every\n source of uranium mined dry\n on Earth, we had tried other\n possibilities. All sorts of\n schemes came forth. Project\n Sea-Dredge was trying to get\n uranium from the oceans. In\n forty or fifty years, they'd\n get some results, we hoped.\n But there wasn't forty or\n fifty years' worth of raw stuff\n to tide us over until then. In a\n decade or so, our power would\n be just about gone. I could\n picture the sort of dog-eat-dog\n world we'd revert back\n to. Millions of starving, freezing\n humans tooth-and-clawing\n in it in the useless shell of\n a great atomic civilization.", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Quiet up there!\" our captor\n called, and we stopped\n talking. We trudged along together,\n with him following\n behind; I could hear the\ncrunch-crunch\nof the wheelchair\n as its wheels chewed\n into the sand. I wondered\n where we were going, and\n why. I wondered why we had\n ever left Earth.\n\n\n The answer to that came to\n me quick enough: we had to.\n Earth needed radioactives,\n and the only way to get them\n was to get out and look. The\n great atomic wars of the late\n 20th Century had used up\n much of the supply, but the\n amount used to blow up half\n the great cities of the world\n hardly compared with the\n amount we needed to put\n them back together again.", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "\"Teamwork,\" Val said. She\n swivelled around on the floor\n until her head was near my\n boot. \"Push my oxymask off\n with your foot, if you can.\"\n\n\n I searched for the clamp\n and tried to flip it. No luck,\n with my heavy, clumsy boot.\n I tried again, and this time it\n snapped open. I got the tip\n of my boot in and pried upward.\n The oxymask came off,\n slowly, scraping a jagged red\n scratch up the side of Val's\n neck as it came.\n\n\n \"There,\" she breathed.\n \"That's that.\"\n\n\n I looked uneasily at Ledman.\n He was groaning and\n beginning to stir.", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing." ], [ "His eyes blazed. \"Who are\n you to talk of sanity?\"\nUneasily I caught Val's\n glance from a corner of my\n eye. Sweat was rolling down\n her smooth forehead faster\n than the auto-wiper could\n swab it away.\n\n\n \"Why don't you do something?\n What are you waiting\n for, Ron?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, baby,\" I said. I\n knew what our ace in the hole\n was. But I had to get Ledman\n within reach of me first.\n\n\n \"Enough,\" he said. \"I'm going\n to turn you loose outside,\n right after—\"\n\n\n \"\nGet sick!\n\" I hissed to Val,\n low. She began immediately\n to cough violently, emitting\n harsh, choking sobs. \"Can't\n breathe!\" She began to yell,\n writhing in her bonds.", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "\"Teamwork,\" Val said. She\n swivelled around on the floor\n until her head was near my\n boot. \"Push my oxymask off\n with your foot, if you can.\"\n\n\n I searched for the clamp\n and tried to flip it. No luck,\n with my heavy, clumsy boot.\n I tried again, and this time it\n snapped open. I got the tip\n of my boot in and pried upward.\n The oxymask came off,\n slowly, scraping a jagged red\n scratch up the side of Val's\n neck as it came.\n\n\n \"There,\" she breathed.\n \"That's that.\"\n\n\n I looked uneasily at Ledman.\n He was groaning and\n beginning to stir.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "I glimpsed the bulk of an\n outboard atomic rigging behind\n him, strapped to the\n back of the wheelchair. He\n fingered a knob on the arm of\n the chair and the two exhaust\n ducts behind the wheel-housings\n flamed for a moment,\n and the chair began to roll.\n\n\n Obediently, we started\n walking. You don't argue\n with a blaster, even if the\n man pointing it is in a wheelchair.\n\"What's going on, Ron?\"\n Val asked in a low voice as we\n walked. Behind us the wheelchair\n hissed steadily.\n\n\n \"I don't quite know, Val.\n I've never seen this guy before,\n and I thought I knew\n everyone at the Dome.\"", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"", "I rolled my eyes toward\n Val, and saw that she was\n similarly trussed in the sticky\n stuff. The tangle-cord was still\n fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant\n odor like that of drying\n fish. It had been spun on\n us only a short time ago, I\n realized.\n\n\n \"Ron—\"\n\n\n \"Don't try to move, baby.\n This stuff can break your\n neck if you twist it wrong.\"\n She continued for a moment\n to struggle futilely, and I had\n to snap, \"Lie still, Val!\"" ], [ "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "\"I know,\" I said sarcastically.\n \"You're just all full of\n hate. You hated us so much\n that you couldn't bear to hang\n around on Earth for as much\n as a year after the Sadlerville\n Blast. You had to take right\n off for Mars without a moment's\n delay, didn't you? You\n hated Earth so much you\nhad\nto leave.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you telling all\n this to me?\"\n\n\n \"Because if you'd stayed\n long enough, you'd have used\n some of your pension money\n to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic\n legs, and then you\n wouldn't need this wheelchair.\"\n\n\n Ledman scowled, and then\n his face went belligerent\n again. \"They told me I was\n paralyzed below the waist.\n That I'd never walk again,\n even with prosthetic legs, because\n I had no muscles to fit\n them to.\"", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "\"No. That's the difference\n between sane people and insane,\"\n I told him. \"I'm not\n going to kill you at all. I'm\n going to see to it that you're\n sent back to Earth.\"\n\n\n \"\nNo!\n\" he shouted. \"No!\n Anything but back there. I\n don't want to face them again—not\n after what they did to\n me—\"\n\n\n \"Not so loud,\" I broke in.\n \"They'll help you on Earth.\n They'll take all the hatred and\n sickness out of you, and turn\n you into a useful member of\n society again.\"\n\n\n \"I hate Earthmen,\" he spat\n out. \"I hate all of them.\"", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "And that started the chain\n of events that led Val and me\n to end up as a madman's prisoners,\n on Mars. With every\n source of uranium mined dry\n on Earth, we had tried other\n possibilities. All sorts of\n schemes came forth. Project\n Sea-Dredge was trying to get\n uranium from the oceans. In\n forty or fifty years, they'd\n get some results, we hoped.\n But there wasn't forty or\n fifty years' worth of raw stuff\n to tide us over until then. In a\n decade or so, our power would\n be just about gone. I could\n picture the sort of dog-eat-dog\n world we'd revert back\n to. Millions of starving, freezing\n humans tooth-and-clawing\n in it in the useless shell of\n a great atomic civilization.", "\"You left Earth too quickly,\"\n Val said.\n\n\n \"It was the only way,\" he\n protested. \"I had to get off—\"\n\n\n \"She's right,\" I told him.\n \"The atom can take away, but\n it can give as well. Soon after\n you left they developed\natomic-powered\nprosthetics—amazing\n things, virtually robot\n legs. All the survivors of\n the Sadlerville Blast were\n given the necessary replacement\n limbs free of charge. All\n except you. You were so sick\n you had to get away from the\n world you despised and come\n here.\"\n\n\n \"You're lying,\" he said.\n \"It's not true!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, but it is,\" Val smiled.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"", "\"Teamwork,\" Val said. She\n swivelled around on the floor\n until her head was near my\n boot. \"Push my oxymask off\n with your foot, if you can.\"\n\n\n I searched for the clamp\n and tried to flip it. No luck,\n with my heavy, clumsy boot.\n I tried again, and this time it\n snapped open. I got the tip\n of my boot in and pried upward.\n The oxymask came off,\n slowly, scraping a jagged red\n scratch up the side of Val's\n neck as it came.\n\n\n \"There,\" she breathed.\n \"That's that.\"\n\n\n I looked uneasily at Ledman.\n He was groaning and\n beginning to stir." ], [ "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "His eyes blazed. \"Who are\n you to talk of sanity?\"\nUneasily I caught Val's\n glance from a corner of my\n eye. Sweat was rolling down\n her smooth forehead faster\n than the auto-wiper could\n swab it away.\n\n\n \"Why don't you do something?\n What are you waiting\n for, Ron?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, baby,\" I said. I\n knew what our ace in the hole\n was. But I had to get Ledman\n within reach of me first.\n\n\n \"Enough,\" he said. \"I'm going\n to turn you loose outside,\n right after—\"\n\n\n \"\nGet sick!\n\" I hissed to Val,\n low. She began immediately\n to cough violently, emitting\n harsh, choking sobs. \"Can't\n breathe!\" She began to yell,\n writhing in her bonds.", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "\"I know,\" I said sarcastically.\n \"You're just all full of\n hate. You hated us so much\n that you couldn't bear to hang\n around on Earth for as much\n as a year after the Sadlerville\n Blast. You had to take right\n off for Mars without a moment's\n delay, didn't you? You\n hated Earth so much you\nhad\nto leave.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you telling all\n this to me?\"\n\n\n \"Because if you'd stayed\n long enough, you'd have used\n some of your pension money\n to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic\n legs, and then you\n wouldn't need this wheelchair.\"\n\n\n Ledman scowled, and then\n his face went belligerent\n again. \"They told me I was\n paralyzed below the waist.\n That I'd never walk again,\n even with prosthetic legs, because\n I had no muscles to fit\n them to.\"", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"", "\"Teamwork,\" Val said. She\n swivelled around on the floor\n until her head was near my\n boot. \"Push my oxymask off\n with your foot, if you can.\"\n\n\n I searched for the clamp\n and tried to flip it. No luck,\n with my heavy, clumsy boot.\n I tried again, and this time it\n snapped open. I got the tip\n of my boot in and pried upward.\n The oxymask came off,\n slowly, scraping a jagged red\n scratch up the side of Val's\n neck as it came.\n\n\n \"There,\" she breathed.\n \"That's that.\"\n\n\n I looked uneasily at Ledman.\n He was groaning and\n beginning to stir." ], [ "I rolled my eyes toward\n Val, and saw that she was\n similarly trussed in the sticky\n stuff. The tangle-cord was still\n fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant\n odor like that of drying\n fish. It had been spun on\n us only a short time ago, I\n realized.\n\n\n \"Ron—\"\n\n\n \"Don't try to move, baby.\n This stuff can break your\n neck if you twist it wrong.\"\n She continued for a moment\n to struggle futilely, and I had\n to snap, \"Lie still, Val!\"", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "His eyes blazed. \"Who are\n you to talk of sanity?\"\nUneasily I caught Val's\n glance from a corner of my\n eye. Sweat was rolling down\n her smooth forehead faster\n than the auto-wiper could\n swab it away.\n\n\n \"Why don't you do something?\n What are you waiting\n for, Ron?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, baby,\" I said. I\n knew what our ace in the hole\n was. But I had to get Ledman\n within reach of me first.\n\n\n \"Enough,\" he said. \"I'm going\n to turn you loose outside,\n right after—\"\n\n\n \"\nGet sick!\n\" I hissed to Val,\n low. She began immediately\n to cough violently, emitting\n harsh, choking sobs. \"Can't\n breathe!\" She began to yell,\n writhing in her bonds.", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "\"You left Earth too quickly,\"\n Val said.\n\n\n \"It was the only way,\" he\n protested. \"I had to get off—\"\n\n\n \"She's right,\" I told him.\n \"The atom can take away, but\n it can give as well. Soon after\n you left they developed\natomic-powered\nprosthetics—amazing\n things, virtually robot\n legs. All the survivors of\n the Sadlerville Blast were\n given the necessary replacement\n limbs free of charge. All\n except you. You were so sick\n you had to get away from the\n world you despised and come\n here.\"\n\n\n \"You're lying,\" he said.\n \"It's not true!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, but it is,\" Val smiled.", "I looked down at Valerie's\n sleeping form, and thought of\n our warm, comfortable little\n home on Earth. It wasn't\n much, but people in love don't\n need very fancy surroundings.\n\n\n I watched her, sleeping\n peacefully, a wayward lock of\n her soft blonde hair trailing\n down over one eyebrow, and\n it seemed hard to believe that\n we'd exchanged Earth and all\n it held for us for the raw, untamed\n struggle that was Mars.\n But I knew I'd do it again, if\n I had the chance. It's because\n we wanted to keep what we\n had. Heroes? Hell, no. We\n just liked our comforts, and\n wanted to keep them. Which\n took a little work.\nTime to get moving.\nBut\n then Val stirred and rolled\n over in her sleep, and I didn't\n have the heart to wake her. I\n sat there, holding her, staring\n out over the desert, watching\n the wind whip the sand up\n into weird shapes.", "\"Go back?\nGo back?\nIf you\n think I'm backing down now\n and quitting you can find\n yourself another wife! After\n we dump this guy I'm sacking\n in for twenty hours, and then\n we're going back out there to\n finish that search-pattern.\n Earth needs uranium, honey,\n and I know you'd never be\n happy quitting in the middle\n like that.\" She smiled. \"I\n can't wait to get out there\n and start listening for those\n tell-tale clicks.\"\n\n\n I gave a joyful whoop and\n swung her around. When I\n put her down, she squeezed\n my hand, hard.\n\n\n \"Let's get moving, fellow\n hero,\" she said.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "It was beyond her to see\n that some grease monkey back\n at the Dome was at fault—whoever\n it was who had failed\n to fasten down the engine\n hood. Nothing but what had\n stopped us\ncould\nstop a sandcat:\n sand in the delicate\n mechanism of the atomic engine.\n\n\n But no; she blamed it all on\n me somehow: So we were out\n walking on the spongy sand\n of the Martian desert. We'd\n been walking a good eight\n hours.\n\n\n \"Can't we turn back now,\n Ron?\" Val pleaded. \"Maybe\n there isn't any uranium in\n this sector at all. I think\n we're crazy to keep on searching\n out here!\"\n\n\n I started to tell her that the\n UranCo chief had assured me\n we'd hit something out this\n way, but changed my mind.\n When Val's tired and overwrought\n there's no sense in\n arguing with her.", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "Which wasn't anywhere\n close to the truth. Now I\n knew she was at the breaking\n point, because Val didn't lie\n unless she was so exhausted\n she didn't know what she was\n doing. She had been just as\n much inflamed by the idea of\n coming to Mars to help in the\n search for uranium as I was.\n We knew the pay was poor,\n but we had felt it a sort of\n obligation, something we\n could do as individuals to\n keep the industries of radioactives-starved\n Earth going.\n And we'd always had a roving\n foot, both of us.\n\n\n No, we had decided together\n to come to Mars—the\n way we decided together on\n everything. Now she was\n turning against me.\nI tried to jolly her. \"Buck\n up, kid,\" I said. I didn't dare\n turn up her oxy pressure any\n higher, but it was obvious she\n couldn't keep going. She was\n almost sleep-walking now.", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "It must have been hell for\n her. We had wandered fruitlessly\n over the red sands all\n day, both of us listening for\n the clicks of the counter. And\n the geigers had been obstinately\n hushed all day, except\n for their constant undercurrent\n of meaningless noises.\n\n\n Even though the Martian\n gravity was only a fraction of\n Earth's, I was starting to\n tire, and I knew it must have\n been really rough on Val with\n her lovely but unrugged legs.\n\n\n \"Heroes,\" she said bitterly.\n \"We're not heroes—we're\n suckers! Why did I ever let\n you volunteer for the Geig\n Corps and drag me along?\"", "I glimpsed the bulk of an\n outboard atomic rigging behind\n him, strapped to the\n back of the wheelchair. He\n fingered a knob on the arm of\n the chair and the two exhaust\n ducts behind the wheel-housings\n flamed for a moment,\n and the chair began to roll.\n\n\n Obediently, we started\n walking. You don't argue\n with a blaster, even if the\n man pointing it is in a wheelchair.\n\"What's going on, Ron?\"\n Val asked in a low voice as we\n walked. Behind us the wheelchair\n hissed steadily.\n\n\n \"I don't quite know, Val.\n I've never seen this guy before,\n and I thought I knew\n everyone at the Dome.\"", "And that started the chain\n of events that led Val and me\n to end up as a madman's prisoners,\n on Mars. With every\n source of uranium mined dry\n on Earth, we had tried other\n possibilities. All sorts of\n schemes came forth. Project\n Sea-Dredge was trying to get\n uranium from the oceans. In\n forty or fifty years, they'd\n get some results, we hoped.\n But there wasn't forty or\n fifty years' worth of raw stuff\n to tide us over until then. In a\n decade or so, our power would\n be just about gone. I could\n picture the sort of dog-eat-dog\n world we'd revert back\n to. Millions of starving, freezing\n humans tooth-and-clawing\n in it in the useless shell of\n a great atomic civilization.", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing." ], [ "In three centuries the shattered\n world had been completely\n rebuilt. The wreckage\n of New York and Shanghai\n and London and all the other\n ruined cities had been hidden\n by a shining new world of\n gleaming towers and flying\n roadways. We had profited by\n our grandparents' mistakes.\n They had used their atomics\n to make bombs. We used ours\n for fuel.\n\n\n It was an atomic world.\n Everything: power drills,\n printing presses, typewriters,\n can openers, ocean liners,\n powered by the inexhaustible\n energy of the dividing atom.\n\n\n But though the energy is\n inexhaustible, the supply of\n nuclei isn't. After three centuries\n of heavy consumption,\n the supply failed. The mighty\n machine that was Earth's industry\n had started to slow\n down.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "\"You left Earth too quickly,\"\n Val said.\n\n\n \"It was the only way,\" he\n protested. \"I had to get off—\"\n\n\n \"She's right,\" I told him.\n \"The atom can take away, but\n it can give as well. Soon after\n you left they developed\natomic-powered\nprosthetics—amazing\n things, virtually robot\n legs. All the survivors of\n the Sadlerville Blast were\n given the necessary replacement\n limbs free of charge. All\n except you. You were so sick\n you had to get away from the\n world you despised and come\n here.\"\n\n\n \"You're lying,\" he said.\n \"It's not true!\"\n\n\n \"Oh, but it is,\" Val smiled.", "And that started the chain\n of events that led Val and me\n to end up as a madman's prisoners,\n on Mars. With every\n source of uranium mined dry\n on Earth, we had tried other\n possibilities. All sorts of\n schemes came forth. Project\n Sea-Dredge was trying to get\n uranium from the oceans. In\n forty or fifty years, they'd\n get some results, we hoped.\n But there wasn't forty or\n fifty years' worth of raw stuff\n to tide us over until then. In a\n decade or so, our power would\n be just about gone. I could\n picture the sort of dog-eat-dog\n world we'd revert back\n to. Millions of starving, freezing\n humans tooth-and-clawing\n in it in the useless shell of\n a great atomic civilization.", "\"Quiet up there!\" our captor\n called, and we stopped\n talking. We trudged along together,\n with him following\n behind; I could hear the\ncrunch-crunch\nof the wheelchair\n as its wheels chewed\n into the sand. I wondered\n where we were going, and\n why. I wondered why we had\n ever left Earth.\n\n\n The answer to that came to\n me quick enough: we had to.\n Earth needed radioactives,\n and the only way to get them\n was to get out and look. The\n great atomic wars of the late\n 20th Century had used up\n much of the supply, but the\n amount used to blow up half\n the great cities of the world\n hardly compared with the\n amount we needed to put\n them back together again.", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "He gestured through the\n translucent skin of the Dome,\n and I felt sick. There was a\n little heap of bones lying\n there, looking oddly bright\n against the redness of the\n sands. They were the dried,\n parched skeletons of Earthmen.\n Bits of cloth and plastic,\n once oxymasks and suits, still\n clung to them.\n\n\n Suddenly I remembered.\n There had been a pattern\n there all the time. We didn't\n much talk about it; we chalked\n it off as occupational hazards.\n There had been a pattern\n of disappearances on the desert.\n I could think of six, eight\n names now. None of them\n had been particularly close\n friends. You don't get time to\n make close friends out here.\n But we'd vowed it wouldn't\n happen to us.\n\n\n It had.\n\n\n \"You've been hunting\n Geigs?\" I asked. \"\nWhy?\nWhat've they ever done to\n you?\"", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "It was beyond her to see\n that some grease monkey back\n at the Dome was at fault—whoever\n it was who had failed\n to fasten down the engine\n hood. Nothing but what had\n stopped us\ncould\nstop a sandcat:\n sand in the delicate\n mechanism of the atomic engine.\n\n\n But no; she blamed it all on\n me somehow: So we were out\n walking on the spongy sand\n of the Martian desert. We'd\n been walking a good eight\n hours.\n\n\n \"Can't we turn back now,\n Ron?\" Val pleaded. \"Maybe\n there isn't any uranium in\n this sector at all. I think\n we're crazy to keep on searching\n out here!\"\n\n\n I started to tell her that the\n UranCo chief had assured me\n we'd hit something out this\n way, but changed my mind.\n When Val's tired and overwrought\n there's no sense in\n arguing with her.", "It must have been hell for\n her. We had wandered fruitlessly\n over the red sands all\n day, both of us listening for\n the clicks of the counter. And\n the geigers had been obstinately\n hushed all day, except\n for their constant undercurrent\n of meaningless noises.\n\n\n Even though the Martian\n gravity was only a fraction of\n Earth's, I was starting to\n tire, and I knew it must have\n been really rough on Val with\n her lovely but unrugged legs.\n\n\n \"Heroes,\" she said bitterly.\n \"We're not heroes—we're\n suckers! Why did I ever let\n you volunteer for the Geig\n Corps and drag me along?\"", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing.", "So, Mars. There's not much\n uranium on Mars, and it's not\n easy to find or any cinch to\n mine. But what little is there,\n helps. It's a stopgap effort,\n just to keep things moving\n until Project Sea-Dredge\n starts functioning.\n\n\n Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers\n out on the face of\n Mars, combing for its uranium\n deposits.\n\n\n And here we are, I thought.\nAfter we walked on a\n while, a Dome became visible\n up ahead. It slid up over the\n crest of a hill, set back between\n two hummocks on the\n desert. Just out of the way\n enough to escape observation.\n\n\n For a puzzled moment I\n thought it was our Dome, the\n settlement where all of UranCo's\n Geig Corps were located,\n but another look told me that\n this was actually quite near\n us and fairly small. A one-man\n Dome, of all things!", "I glimpsed the bulk of an\n outboard atomic rigging behind\n him, strapped to the\n back of the wheelchair. He\n fingered a knob on the arm of\n the chair and the two exhaust\n ducts behind the wheel-housings\n flamed for a moment,\n and the chair began to roll.\n\n\n Obediently, we started\n walking. You don't argue\n with a blaster, even if the\n man pointing it is in a wheelchair.\n\"What's going on, Ron?\"\n Val asked in a low voice as we\n walked. Behind us the wheelchair\n hissed steadily.\n\n\n \"I don't quite know, Val.\n I've never seen this guy before,\n and I thought I knew\n everyone at the Dome.\"" ], [ "The Geig Corps preferred\n married couples, working in\n teams. That's what had finally\n decided it for us—we were a\n good team. We had no ties on\n Earth that couldn't be broken\n without much difficulty. So\n we volunteered.\nAnd here we are.\nHeroes.\n The wind blasted a mass of\n sand into my face, and I felt\n it tinkle against the oxymask.\n\n\n I glanced at the suit-chronometer.\n Getting late. I decided\n once again to wake Val.\n But she was tired. And I was\n tired too, tired from our\n wearying journey across the\n empty desert.", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "He gestured through the\n translucent skin of the Dome,\n and I felt sick. There was a\n little heap of bones lying\n there, looking oddly bright\n against the redness of the\n sands. They were the dried,\n parched skeletons of Earthmen.\n Bits of cloth and plastic,\n once oxymasks and suits, still\n clung to them.\n\n\n Suddenly I remembered.\n There had been a pattern\n there all the time. We didn't\n much talk about it; we chalked\n it off as occupational hazards.\n There had been a pattern\n of disappearances on the desert.\n I could think of six, eight\n names now. None of them\n had been particularly close\n friends. You don't get time to\n make close friends out here.\n But we'd vowed it wouldn't\n happen to us.\n\n\n It had.\n\n\n \"You've been hunting\n Geigs?\" I asked. \"\nWhy?\nWhat've they ever done to\n you?\"", "So, Mars. There's not much\n uranium on Mars, and it's not\n easy to find or any cinch to\n mine. But what little is there,\n helps. It's a stopgap effort,\n just to keep things moving\n until Project Sea-Dredge\n starts functioning.\n\n\n Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers\n out on the face of\n Mars, combing for its uranium\n deposits.\n\n\n And here we are, I thought.\nAfter we walked on a\n while, a Dome became visible\n up ahead. It slid up over the\n crest of a hill, set back between\n two hummocks on the\n desert. Just out of the way\n enough to escape observation.\n\n\n For a puzzled moment I\n thought it was our Dome, the\n settlement where all of UranCo's\n Geig Corps were located,\n but another look told me that\n this was actually quite near\n us and fairly small. A one-man\n Dome, of all things!", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "It must have been hell for\n her. We had wandered fruitlessly\n over the red sands all\n day, both of us listening for\n the clicks of the counter. And\n the geigers had been obstinately\n hushed all day, except\n for their constant undercurrent\n of meaningless noises.\n\n\n Even though the Martian\n gravity was only a fraction of\n Earth's, I was starting to\n tire, and I knew it must have\n been really rough on Val with\n her lovely but unrugged legs.\n\n\n \"Heroes,\" she said bitterly.\n \"We're not heroes—we're\n suckers! Why did I ever let\n you volunteer for the Geig\n Corps and drag me along?\"", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "We pressed on over the\n barren terrain. The geiger\n kept up a fairly steady click-pattern,\n but never broke into\n that sudden explosive tumult\n that meant we had found pay-dirt.\n I started to feel tired\n myself, terribly tired. I longed\n to lie down on the soft,\n spongy Martian sand and\n bury myself.\n\n\n I looked at Val. She was\n dragging along with her eyes\n half-shut. I felt almost guilty\n for having dragged her out to\n Mars, until I recalled that I\n hadn't. In fact, she had come\n up with the idea before I did.\n I wished there was some way\n of turning the weary, bedraggled\n girl at my side back into\n the Val who had so enthusiastically\n suggested we join\n the Geigs.\n\n\n Twelve steps later, I decided\n this was about as far as\n we could go.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "\"Quiet up there!\" our captor\n called, and we stopped\n talking. We trudged along together,\n with him following\n behind; I could hear the\ncrunch-crunch\nof the wheelchair\n as its wheels chewed\n into the sand. I wondered\n where we were going, and\n why. I wondered why we had\n ever left Earth.\n\n\n The answer to that came to\n me quick enough: we had to.\n Earth needed radioactives,\n and the only way to get them\n was to get out and look. The\n great atomic wars of the late\n 20th Century had used up\n much of the supply, but the\n amount used to blow up half\n the great cities of the world\n hardly compared with the\n amount we needed to put\n them back together again.", "\"You'll find out soon\n enough,\" he said. \"Suppose\n now you come with me.\" He\n reached for the tanglegun,\n flipped the little switch on its\n side to MELT, and shot a\n stream of watery fluid over\n our legs, keeping the blaster\n trained on us all the while.\n Our legs were free.\n\n\n \"You may get up now,\" he\n said. \"Slowly, without trying\n to make trouble.\" Val and I\n helped each other to our feet\n as best we could, considering\n our arms were still tightly\n bound against the sides of our\n oxysuits.\n\n\n \"Walk,\" the stranger said,\n waving the tanglegun to indicate\n the direction. \"I'll be\n right behind you.\" He holstered\n the tanglegun.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "I glimpsed the bulk of an\n outboard atomic rigging behind\n him, strapped to the\n back of the wheelchair. He\n fingered a knob on the arm of\n the chair and the two exhaust\n ducts behind the wheel-housings\n flamed for a moment,\n and the chair began to roll.\n\n\n Obediently, we started\n walking. You don't argue\n with a blaster, even if the\n man pointing it is in a wheelchair.\n\"What's going on, Ron?\"\n Val asked in a low voice as we\n walked. Behind us the wheelchair\n hissed steadily.\n\n\n \"I don't quite know, Val.\n I've never seen this guy before,\n and I thought I knew\n everyone at the Dome.\"", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing.", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare." ], [ "I rolled my eyes toward\n Val, and saw that she was\n similarly trussed in the sticky\n stuff. The tangle-cord was still\n fresh, giving off a faint, repugnant\n odor like that of drying\n fish. It had been spun on\n us only a short time ago, I\n realized.\n\n\n \"Ron—\"\n\n\n \"Don't try to move, baby.\n This stuff can break your\n neck if you twist it wrong.\"\n She continued for a moment\n to struggle futilely, and I had\n to snap, \"Lie still, Val!\"", "I glimpsed the bulk of an\n outboard atomic rigging behind\n him, strapped to the\n back of the wheelchair. He\n fingered a knob on the arm of\n the chair and the two exhaust\n ducts behind the wheel-housings\n flamed for a moment,\n and the chair began to roll.\n\n\n Obediently, we started\n walking. You don't argue\n with a blaster, even if the\n man pointing it is in a wheelchair.\n\"What's going on, Ron?\"\n Val asked in a low voice as we\n walked. Behind us the wheelchair\n hissed steadily.\n\n\n \"I don't quite know, Val.\n I've never seen this guy before,\n and I thought I knew\n everyone at the Dome.\"", "His eyes blazed. \"Who are\n you to talk of sanity?\"\nUneasily I caught Val's\n glance from a corner of my\n eye. Sweat was rolling down\n her smooth forehead faster\n than the auto-wiper could\n swab it away.\n\n\n \"Why don't you do something?\n What are you waiting\n for, Ron?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, baby,\" I said. I\n knew what our ace in the hole\n was. But I had to get Ledman\n within reach of me first.\n\n\n \"Enough,\" he said. \"I'm going\n to turn you loose outside,\n right after—\"\n\n\n \"\nGet sick!\n\" I hissed to Val,\n low. She began immediately\n to cough violently, emitting\n harsh, choking sobs. \"Can't\n breathe!\" She began to yell,\n writhing in her bonds.", "I stopped, slipped out of\n the geiger harness, and lowered\n myself ponderously to\n the ground. \"What'samatter,\n Ron?\" Val asked sleepily.\n \"Something wrong?\"\n\n\n \"No, baby,\" I said, putting\n out a hand and taking hers.\n \"I think we ought to rest a\n little before we go any further.\n It's been a long, hard\n day.\"\n\n\n It didn't take much to persuade\n her. She slid down beside\n me, curled up, and in a\n moment she was fast asleep,\n sprawled out on the sands.\nPoor kid\n, I thought. Maybe\n we shouldn't have come to\n Mars after all. But, I reminded\n myself,\nsomeone\nhad to do\n the job.\n\n\n A second thought appeared,\n but I squelched it:\n\n\n Why the hell me?", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "He was holding in his left\n hand the tanglegun with\n which he had entrapped us,\n and a very efficient-looking\n blaster was in his right.\n\n\n \"I didn't want to disturb\n your sleep,\" he said coldly.\n \"So I've been waiting here\n for you to wake up.\"\n\n\n I could just see it. He might\n have been sitting there for\n hours, complacently waiting\n to see how we'd wake up.\n That was when I realized he\n must be totally insane. I could\n feel my stomach-muscles\n tighten, my throat constrict\n painfully.\n\n\n Then anger ripped through\n me, washing away the terror.\n \"What's going on?\" I demanded,\n staring at the half\n of a man who confronted us\n from the wheelchair. \"Who\n are you?\"", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "\"Go back?\nGo back?\nIf you\n think I'm backing down now\n and quitting you can find\n yourself another wife! After\n we dump this guy I'm sacking\n in for twenty hours, and then\n we're going back out there to\n finish that search-pattern.\n Earth needs uranium, honey,\n and I know you'd never be\n happy quitting in the middle\n like that.\" She smiled. \"I\n can't wait to get out there\n and start listening for those\n tell-tale clicks.\"\n\n\n I gave a joyful whoop and\n swung her around. When I\n put her down, she squeezed\n my hand, hard.\n\n\n \"Let's get moving, fellow\n hero,\" she said.", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "It was beyond her to see\n that some grease monkey back\n at the Dome was at fault—whoever\n it was who had failed\n to fasten down the engine\n hood. Nothing but what had\n stopped us\ncould\nstop a sandcat:\n sand in the delicate\n mechanism of the atomic engine.\n\n\n But no; she blamed it all on\n me somehow: So we were out\n walking on the spongy sand\n of the Martian desert. We'd\n been walking a good eight\n hours.\n\n\n \"Can't we turn back now,\n Ron?\" Val pleaded. \"Maybe\n there isn't any uranium in\n this sector at all. I think\n we're crazy to keep on searching\n out here!\"\n\n\n I started to tell her that the\n UranCo chief had assured me\n we'd hit something out this\n way, but changed my mind.\n When Val's tired and overwrought\n there's no sense in\n arguing with her.", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded." ], [ "\"Okay, Ledman,\" I said.\n Val got him into his suit, and\n brought him the fishbowl helmet.\n \"Get your helmet on and\n let's go. Between the psychs\n and the prosthetics men,\n you'll be a new man inside of\n a year.\"\n\n\n \"But I'm a murderer!\"\n\n\n \"That's right. And you'll be\n sentenced to psych adjustment.\n When they're finished,\n Gregory Ledman the killer\n will be as dead as if they'd\n electrocuted you, but there'll\n be a new—and sane—Gregory\n Ledman.\" I turned to Val.\n\n\n \"Got the geigers, honey?\"", "\"Atomics cost me my legs,\"\n he said. \"You remember the\n Sadlerville Blast?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Of course.\" And I did, too.\n I'd never forget it. No one\n would. How could I forget\n that great accident—killing\n hundreds, injuring thousands\n more, sterilizing forty miles\n of Mississippi land—when\n the Sadlerville pile went up?\n\n\n \"I was there on business at\n the time,\" Ledman said. \"I\n represented Ledman Atomics.\n I was there to sign a new\n contract for my company.\n You know who I am, now?\"\n\n\n I nodded.", "That did it. Ledman hadn't\n much humanity left in him,\n but there was a little. He lowered\n the blaster a bit and\n wheeled one-hand over to see\n what was wrong with Val.\n She continued to retch and\n moan most horribly. It almost\n convinced me. I saw Val's\n pale, frightened face turn to\n me.\n\n\n He approached and peered\n down at her. He opened his\n mouth to say something, and\n at that moment I snapped my\n leg up hard, tearing the tangle-cord\n with a snicking rasp,\n and kicked his wheelchair\n over.", "\"Exactly,\" replied Ledman.\n \"And I have no fears of an\n armed attack. This place is\n well fortified. I've devoted\n years to building it. And I'm\n back against those hills. They\n couldn't pry me out.\" He let\n his pale hand run up into his\n gnarled hair. \"I've devoted\n years to this. Ever since—ever\n since I landed here on\n Mars.\"\n\"What are you going to do\n with us?\" Val finally asked,\n after a long silence.\n\n\n He didn't smile this time.\n \"Kill you,\" he told her. \"Not\n your husband. I want him as\n an envoy, to go back and tell\n the others to clear off.\" He\n rocked back and forth in his\n wheelchair, toying with the\n gleaming, deadly blaster in\n his hand.\n\n\n We stared in horror. It was\n a nightmare—sitting there,\n placidly rocking back and\n forth, a nightmare.", "He rolled over to a wall\n table and fumbled in a container\n among a pile of hypodermics.\n \"There are other injections,\n too. Adrenalin, insulin.\n Others. The Blast turned\n me into a walking pin-cushion.\n But I'll pay it all\n back,\" he said. He plunged\n the needle into his arm.\n\n\n My eyes widened. It was\n too nightmarish to be real. I\n wasn't seriously worried\n about his threat to wipe out\n the entire Geig Corps, since\n it was unlikely that one man\n in a wheelchair could pick us\n all off. No, it wasn't the\n threat that disturbed me, so\n much as the whole concept, so\n strange to me, that the human\n mind could be as warped\n and twisted as Ledman's.\n\n\n I saw the horror on Val's\n face, and I knew she felt the\n same way I did.", "I saw him wilt visibly, and\n for a moment I almost felt\n sorry for him, a pathetic legless\n figure propped up against\n the wall of the Dome at\n blaster-point. But then I remembered\n he'd killed twelve\n Geigs—or more—and would\n have added Val to the number\n had he had the chance.\n\"You're a very sick man,\n Ledman,\" I said. \"All this\n time you could have been\n happy, useful on Earth, instead\n of being holed up here\n nursing your hatred. You\n might have been useful, on\n Earth. But you decided to\n channel everything out as revenge.\"\n\n\n \"I still don't believe it—those\n legs. I might have walked\n again. No—no, it's all a lie.\n They told me I'd never walk,\"\n he said, weakly but stubbornly\n still.\n\n\n I could see his whole structure\n of hate starting to topple,\n and I decided to give it\n the final push.", "\"Welcome to my home,\" he\n said. \"The name is Gregory\n Ledman.\" He herded us off to\n one side of the airlock, uttered\n a few words keyed to his\n voice, and motioned us inside\n when the door slid up. When\n we were inside he reached up,\n clumsily holding the blaster,\n and unscrewed the ancient\n spacesuit fishbowl.\n\n\n His face was a bitter,\n dried-up mask. He was a man\n who hated.\n\n\n The place was spartanly\n furnished. No chairs, no tape-player,\n no decoration of any\n sort. Hard bulkhead walls,\n rivet-studded, glared back\n at us. He had an automatic\n chef, a bed, and a writing-desk,\n and no other furniture.", "His eyes blazed. \"Who are\n you to talk of sanity?\"\nUneasily I caught Val's\n glance from a corner of my\n eye. Sweat was rolling down\n her smooth forehead faster\n than the auto-wiper could\n swab it away.\n\n\n \"Why don't you do something?\n What are you waiting\n for, Ron?\"\n\n\n \"Easy, baby,\" I said. I\n knew what our ace in the hole\n was. But I had to get Ledman\n within reach of me first.\n\n\n \"Enough,\" he said. \"I'm going\n to turn you loose outside,\n right after—\"\n\n\n \"\nGet sick!\n\" I hissed to Val,\n low. She began immediately\n to cough violently, emitting\n harsh, choking sobs. \"Can't\n breathe!\" She began to yell,\n writhing in her bonds.", "He smiled, as calmly as if\n I'd just praised his house-keeping.\n \"Because I hate\n you,\" he said blandly. \"I intend\n to wipe every last one of\n you out, one by one.\"\n\n\n I stared at him. I'd never\n seen a man like this before; I\n thought all his kind had died\n at the time of the atomic\n wars.\n\n\n I heard Val sob, \"He's a\n madman!\"\n\n\n \"No,\" Ledman said evenly.\n \"I'm quite sane, believe me.\n But I'm determined to drive\n the Geigs—and UranCo—off\n Mars. Eventually I'll scare\n you all away.\"\n\n\n \"Just pick us off in the desert?\"", "Suddenly he drew the tanglegun\n and sprayed our legs\n again. We toppled heavily to\n the floor. I looked up angrily.\n\"I imagine you want to\n know the whole story,\" he\n said. \"The others did, too.\"\n\n\n Valerie looked at me anxiously.\n Her pretty face was a\n dead white behind her oxymask.\n \"What others?\"\n\n\n \"I never bothered to find\n out their names,\" Ledman\n said casually. \"They were\n other Geigs I caught unawares,\n like you, out on the\n desert. That's the only sport I\n have left—Geig-hunting. Look\n out there.\"", "\"Do you really think you\n can succeed?\" I taunted him.\n \"Really think you can kill\n every Earthman on Mars? Of\n all the insane, cockeyed—\"\n\n\n Val's quick, worried head-shake\n cut me off. But Ledman\n had felt my words, all right.\n\n\n \"Yes! I'll get even with\n every one of you for taking\n away my legs! If we hadn't\n meddled with the atom in the\n first place, I'd be as tall and\n powerful as you, today—instead\n of a useless cripple in a\n wheelchair.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick, Gregory Ledman,\"\n Val said quietly.\n \"You've conceived an impossible\n scheme of revenge and\n now you're taking it out on\n innocent people who've done\n nothing, nothing at all to you.\n That's not sane!\"", "For the first time since\n Ledman had caught us, I remembered\n how tired Val had\n been out on the desert. I realized\n now that I had been driving\n her mercilessly—me, with\n my chromium legs and atomic-powered\n muscles. No wonder\n she was ready to fold!\n And I'd been too dense to see\n how unfair I had been.\n\n\n She lifted the geiger harnesses,\n and I put Ledman\n back in his wheelchair.\n\n\n Val slipped her oxymask\n back on and fastened it shut.\n\n\n \"Let's get back to the Dome\n in a hurry,\" I said. \"We'll\n turn Ledman over to the authorities.\n Then we can catch\n the next ship for Earth.\"", "I found myself fervently\n wishing I was back out there\n on the infinitely safer desert.\n\n\n \"Do I shock you?\" he asked.\n \"I shouldn't—not when\n you see my motives.\"\n\n\n \"We don't see them,\" I\n snapped.\n\n\n \"Well, let me show you.\n You're on Mars hunting uranium,\n right? To mine and\n ship the radioactives back to\n Earth to keep the atomic engines\n going. Right?\"\n\n\n I nodded over at our geiger\n counters.\n\n\n \"We volunteered to come to\n Mars,\" Val said irrelevantly.\n\n\n \"Ah—two young heroes,\"\n Ledman said acidly. \"How\n sad. I could almost feel sorry\n for you. Almost.\"\n\n\n \"Just what is it you're\n after?\" I said, stalling, stalling.", "Val rolled on the floor and\n her face lay near my right\n arm. I saw what she had in\n mind. She began to nibble the\n vile-tasting tangle-cord, running\n her teeth up and down\n it until it started to give. She\n continued unfailingly.\n\n\n Finally one strand snapped.\n Then another. At last I\n had enough use of my hand\n to reach out and grasp the\n blaster. Then I pulled myself\n across the floor to Ledman,\n removed the tanglegun, and\n melted the remaining tangle-cord\n off.\n\n\n My muscles were stiff and\n bunched, and rising made me\n wince. I turned and freed Val.\n Then I turned and faced Ledman.\n\n\n \"I suppose you'll kill me\n now,\" he said.", "The blaster went off, burning\n a hole through the Dome\n roof. The automatic sealers\n glued-in instantly. Ledman\n went sprawling helplessly out\n into the middle of the floor,\n the wheelchair upended next\n to him, its wheels slowly revolving\n in the air. The blaster\n flew from his hands at the\n impact of landing and spun\n out near me. In one quick motion\n I rolled over and covered\n it with my body.\nLedman clawed his way to\n me with tremendous effort\n and tried wildly to pry the\n blaster out from under me,\n but without success. I twisted\n a bit, reached out with my\n free leg, and booted him\n across the floor. He fetched\n up against the wall of the\n Dome and lay there.\n\n\n Val rolled over to me.\n\n\n \"Now if I could get free of\n this stuff,\" I said, \"I could get\n him covered before he comes\n to. But how?\"", "\"Teamwork,\" Val said. She\n swivelled around on the floor\n until her head was near my\n boot. \"Push my oxymask off\n with your foot, if you can.\"\n\n\n I searched for the clamp\n and tried to flip it. No luck,\n with my heavy, clumsy boot.\n I tried again, and this time it\n snapped open. I got the tip\n of my boot in and pried upward.\n The oxymask came off,\n slowly, scraping a jagged red\n scratch up the side of Val's\n neck as it came.\n\n\n \"There,\" she breathed.\n \"That's that.\"\n\n\n I looked uneasily at Ledman.\n He was groaning and\n beginning to stir.", "\"I know,\" I said sarcastically.\n \"You're just all full of\n hate. You hated us so much\n that you couldn't bear to hang\n around on Earth for as much\n as a year after the Sadlerville\n Blast. You had to take right\n off for Mars without a moment's\n delay, didn't you? You\n hated Earth so much you\nhad\nto leave.\"\n\n\n \"Why are you telling all\n this to me?\"\n\n\n \"Because if you'd stayed\n long enough, you'd have used\n some of your pension money\n to buy yourself a pair of prosthetic\n legs, and then you\n wouldn't need this wheelchair.\"\n\n\n Ledman scowled, and then\n his face went belligerent\n again. \"They told me I was\n paralyzed below the waist.\n That I'd never walk again,\n even with prosthetic legs, because\n I had no muscles to fit\n them to.\"", "\"Haven't you wondered\n how I managed to break the\n tangle-cord when I kicked you\n over?\"\n\n\n \"Yes—human legs aren't\n strong enough to break tangle-cord\n that way.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" I said. I\n gave Val the blaster and slipped\n out of my oxysuit.\n \"Look,\" I said. I pointed to\n my smooth, gleaming metal\n legs. The almost soundless\n purr of their motors was the\n only noise in the room. \"I was\n in the Sadlerville Blast, too,\"\n I said. \"But I didn't go crazy\n with hate when I lost\nmy\nlegs.\"\n\n\n Ledman was sobbing.", "\"I was fairly well shielded\n when it happened. I never got\n the contract, but I got a good\n dose of radiation instead. Not\n enough to kill me,\" he said.\n \"Just enough to necessitate\n the removal of—\" he indicated\n the empty space at his\n thighs. \"So I got off lightly.\"\n He gestured at the wheelchair\n blanket.\n\n\n I still didn't understand.\n \"But why kill us Geigs?\nWe\nhad nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\n \"You're just in this by accident,\"\n he said. \"You see, after\n the explosion and the amputation,\n my fellow-members on\n the board of Ledman Atomics\n decided that a semi-basket\n case like myself was a poor\n risk as Head of the Board,\n and they took my company\n away. All quite legal, I assure\n you. They left me almost a\n pauper!\" Then he snapped\n the punchline at me.", "\"They renamed Ledman\n Atomics. Who did you say you\n worked for?\"\n\n\n I began, \"Uran—\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother. A more inventive\n title than Ledman\n Atomics, but not quite as\n much heart, wouldn't you\n say?\" He grinned. \"I saved\n for years; then I came to\n Mars, lost myself, built this\n Dome, and swore to get even.\n There's not a great deal of\n uranium on this planet, but\n enough to keep me in a style\n to which, unfortunately, I'm\n no longer accustomed.\"\nHe consulted his wrist\n watch. \"Time for my injection.\"\n He pulled out the tanglegun\n and sprayed us again,\n just to make doubly certain.\n \"That's another little souvenir\n of Sadlerville. I'm short\n on red blood corpuscles.\"" ] ]
train	99917	[ "What was the Hanseatic League?", "When did the Hanseatic League begin?", "What is a modern city that is large enough to be a city-state?", "What is a potential risk of cities seceding from their nation-states?", "Why was the Hanseatic League not always accepted by locals?", "What did the Hanseatic League exchange other than commodities?", "Where is the only Hanse House left in Britain?", "What would lead a city like London to seek independence?", "The Global Parliament of Mayors is a..." ]	[ [ "A loose federation of coastal cities that worked together to promote trade.", "A casual federation of cities that worked together to promote trade.", "A league of cities by the sea that agreed to come to each other's aid with armed forces when necessary.", "A leauge of merchants that worked together to promote trade." ], [ "The 1200s", "The 1500s", "The 1400s", "The 1300s" ], [ "Dublin", "London", "Trinidad", "Glasgow" ], [ "Rural areas may see a rapid economic decline.", "Ideological differences between city and rural dwellers could grow farther and farther apart.", "A food shortage could arise if the rural areas refuse to trade with the city that seceded.", "Rural and city dwellers may decide to engage in warfare." ], [ "Hanse traders forced some local traders out of business because they could not compete.", "Hanse merchants were given special privileges.", "Hanse merchants were mostly foreign. No one likes foreigners.", "Hanse merchants were mostly German. No one likes the Germans." ], [ "Animals", "Women", "Weapons", "Knowledge" ], [ "London", "Lincolnshire", "King's Lynn", "Boston" ], [ "They choose modernity over mythology.", "They want to deal with rational thinkers, not people going backward.", "They want to remain in the EU.", "They want free movement of people, capital, goods, and ideas." ], [ "...common platform for action.", "...a monitor of culture and economic status.", "...a kind of Hanse of all cities.", "...a governing body like the UN." ] ]	[ 1, 4, 2, 2, 1, 4, 3, 4, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road." ], [ "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road." ], [ "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s." ], [ "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year." ], [ "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"" ], [ "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road." ], [ "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"" ], [ "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"" ], [ "So how about a new Hanseatic League? I ask Benjamin Barber, senior fellow at New York's Fordham University. \"I believe you will find there is a new Hanse,\" he says, \"that constituted itself about 10 or 11 years ago – including many of the original Hanseatic League cities.\" Barber is founder of the Global Parliament of Mayors, which he describes as a kind of Hanse of all cities, not just European ports, which will give cities a global urban voice and a common platform for action. The parliament convenes for its inaugural session in The Hague in September.", "But could we go further? Could cities like London declare independence from the UK? London's economy is larger than that of Scotland and Wales combined. \"States will not vanish or surrender their waning sovereignty,\" says Benjamin Barber. \"But cities will meet across frontiers and work together to solve problems. The objective is not an independent London or New York, but interdependent cities collaborating globally. And that is happening.\"", "For all its complex beauty, life can ultimately be reduced to a series of binary options: yes or no, stick or twist, in or out, innovation or stagnation, modernity or mythology. The referendum result was disappointing for many progressive observers because it felt like a step backwards. Despite being primarily about trade monopolies and money making, the Hanse was, in its way, an early stab at stepping forwards: it encompassed internationalism, rational thought, free trade, loose democratic institutions and, most crucially of all, movement. \n\n The future, for many observers, can only be understood in terms of the free movement of people, capital, goods and ideas. It is this necessary movement, and its possible curtailment, that could be the spark that leads to cities like London to seek independence and parity with other world cities – rather than with the rural hinterlands of Britain.", "\"Cities both exist within nations and transcend nations. Their power lies not just in the extent of\nde jure\nautonomy ceded or granted by 'higher' levels of government,\" says Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Washington DC thinktank the Brookings Institution. \"Rather, cities have de facto power, the result of larger market and demographic forces and environmental imperatives that value proximity, density, connectivity and quality. Smart nations will see themselves as partners to their cities, setting strong platforms for urban prosperity and devolving powers, where appropriate, to give cities the flexibility to perform… Dumb nations will continue to dictate from above, stifling market activity and urban potential.\"", "\"The Hanseatic League was not always accepted by local citizens,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, \"because the privileges granted to the Hanse merchants were forcing local traders out of competition and many cities took steps to eliminate them. The reasons the countryside is turning to the right [globally] are not independent from cities turning increasingly into speculation machines for the profit of a happy few. It is basically these systemic contradictions that must be addressed before we resort to more isolationist ideas that would intensify the urban-rural political divide. The bottom line is not whether a contemporary Hanse-esque federation is possible, it probably is; but whether it is actually desirable.\"\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "London's voters largely wanted to remain a part of the EU and to maintain the city's status as an entrepôt. There is clearly a widening chasm between urban and rural life at the heart of many nations. Visualisations of Austria's recent presidential election showed the issue clearly: the country's cities voted for the Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, while the the rural districts went for right-wing nationalist Norbert Hofer (whose legal challenge to the close result has resulted in a rerun being announced for October). And in the USA in November, it's likely that Trump voters will also come from rural areas and Clinton voters from the cities. City dwellers are finding ever more in common with the world's other city dwellers than with their countrymen 50 miles down the road.", "We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. Nations come and go. Cities endure. \n\n \"It is often said that great cities survived great empires,\" says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. \"So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong.\"", "The Hanseatic League is not well known, and today it lives on most prominently in the name of the German national airline Lufthansa, literally the 'Hansa of the skies', whose planes you can look out of – and down towards the Hanseatic cities – on the short journeys between mainland Europe and Britain. The letters HH on the number plates of cars in Hamburg stand for Hansestadt Hamburg: another proud little memory of this hidden history. \n\n In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity.", "Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. \n\n The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed.", "What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc\nAs you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. \n\n By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution.", "There was a kind of proto-democracy at work. Professor Rainer Postel, of the Bundeswehr Universität (Germany's equivalent of Sandhurst military academy), has described the Hanse as \"a community of interests without power politics\". As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, \"The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work. Having said that, one should recognise that Lübeck in particular dominated the League for long periods.\"", "The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. Wood, fur, wool, silver, herring, cod and salt were the main items traded. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. There was no maniacal ruler overseeing things – merchants met and talked. They raised armies and waged war against kings who threatened their businesses and their freedoms and their peace.", "Lübeck was where the merchants most often met; and where renewed recent interest in the Hanse eventually led to Angela Merkel cutting the ribbon at the brand new European Hansemuseum in the city last year.", "\"Things change,\" says LSE's Professor Tony Travers. \"[King's Lynn] used to be very highly connected, but the economy moved on and left those trading ports like it in a different situation.\" Take, for example, the pivot towards the New World, with which trade made more sense from the west-coast ports like Bristol and Liverpool. While these boomed between the 1600s and 1800s, the Hanseatic ports declined and then died out. \"One of the things that's interesting about the [referendum] decision is that it begs all sorts of questions about the future of the UK and its relationship with Europe; and of London and Scotland and their relationship with the rest of Europe. When the EU began as the EEC in the mid-20th century some saw it as a modern day Hanse. Now the EU seems to be waning, perhaps its successor will have to ape the Hanse even more.\"", "Of course, cities seceding from their nation states would provide huge headaches for countries whose biggest economic driver had been removed – as well as likely deepening ideological differences between city and rural dwellers. Moreover, cities need the food the countryside provides. \n\n Yet for all the potential pitfalls, city states can thrive. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong, or de facto city states like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. One of the most telling characteristics about these four – all of course former British imperial enclaves – is that they are utterly outward looking. To return to the sky analogy, it's the airlines of each of these (Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Emirates and Etihad) that open up each respective city to the world in the way that the machinery of the Hanse did on the Baltic Sea 600 years ago. And it's the unions each city makes with other places that also look thoroughly Hanseatic in character. A model for modern city states, then. But is it one that we want?", "Back in Britain, one of history's little oddities pops up on the east coast. Boston in Lincolnshire and King's Lynn in Norfolk were both forward-looking Hanseatic League towns that traded with far-flung ports and hosted foreign merchants. King's Lynn contains the only extantHanse House left in Britain (London's was knocked down to build Cannon Street Station in the 1800s). Yet in the EU referendum these two areas polled among the highest Leave votes of anywhere in the country.", "The cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s.", "Germany today – multicultural, economically and culturally motoring, free and fair – seems like the ideal model for a modern European nation state. And part of that success lies in the gravitas the country has given to its Hanseatic history. For Germany is not a top-down country with one city unhealthily dominating as with France and Britain (regional economic inequalities have plagued Britain since the painful de-industrialisation of the 1980s, especially in the north). Germany respects federalism and its cities exist on a much more even keel. The way that Cologne, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart all bring varied economic and cultural character to the party is pure Hanse. The former Hanseatic cities of Hamburg, Berlin and Bremen have city state status within Germany, putting them on the same level as a whole region or 'land' like Bavaria or Brandenburg." ] ]
train	31357	[ "Why did Nancy allow the man claiming to be her brother to take her child?", "Why are Arvid 6 and Tendal 13 attempting to steal Reggie?", "Why didn't the man posing as Dr. Tompkins die?", "Who murdered Nancy and Reggie?", "Why did the driver who killed Nancy and Reggie Laughton pretend to be drunk?", "Where will Arvid 6 and Tendal 13 go after the end of the text?", "Which term best describes the relationship between Arvid 6 and Tendal 13?", "What is the purpose of the Ultroom?", "Which term best describes Tendal 13's perception of Arvid 6's work ethic?", "Arvid 6 and Tendal 13 can perform all of the following abilities EXCEPT:" ]	[ [ "She believes that she can trust her brother with Reggie.", "She knows that Reggie is actually Kanad, and feels no attachment toward him.", "She is hypnotized by Arvid 6, who is posing as her nonexistent brother.", "She is being bribed by Tendal 13 and Arvid 6 to give Reggie away." ], [ "Kanad was accidentally sent transformed to Reggie's body by mistake in the Ultroom.", "They need infants for experiments they are conducting in the Ultroom.", "They are competing to become the next heads of the galactic system.", "There is a bounty for Reggie, who is actually a warlord in a future world.\n" ], [ "He was able to escape and heal back in his time period", "He was wearing a bulletproof vest", "There was never a man named Dr. Tompkins", "The bullet in his leg caused a non-life-threatening injury" ], [ "Tendal 13", "Kanad", "Martin Laughton", "Arvid 6" ], [ "The driver did not have enough time to make up a more convincing story", "To confuse the authorities so it would take longer for them to figure out his identity", "To get a manslaughter charge instead of a murder charge", "The driver was not pretending -- he was actually intoxicated" ], [ "To go back 6,000 years to re-attempt a Kanad recovery mission", "To return to the Laughton's home in order to alter the crime scene", "To travel to the Ultroom for Arvid 6 to face his consequences", "To steal Phullam from his parents and get closer to recovering Kanad." ], [ "compulsory", "symbiotic", "complicated", "predatory" ], [ "It can alter someone's DNA to give them more desirable attributes", "It can change someone's original birth date", "It can relocate someone to a different body", "It can disrupt catastrophic events before they occur" ], [ "reckless", "audacious", "uninspiring", "meritorious" ], [ "hypnosis", "dematerialization", "time travel", "mind-reading" ] ]	[ 3, 1, 1, 4, 1, 4, 1, 3, 1, 4 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set\n it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put\n Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the\n street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just\n gurgled with delight at the change in environment.\nThis peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men\n were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway,\n tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward\n the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up\n to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms\n against her cheeks and shrieked.", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "\"Still thinking about it? I think we'd have heard from them again if\n they were coming back. They probably got somebody else's baby by this\n time.\" Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. \"But\n for safety's sake I guess you'd better keep that gun handy.\"\n\n\n The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds\n moved slowly across the summer sky and a warm breeze rustled the\n trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this,\n Nancy thought.\n\n\n So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor. Mrs. MacDougal\n was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to\n keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first\n sign of trouble.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "\"But there\nmust\nbe! I tell you I shot these men who posed as\n doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this\n afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that.\" The sergeant\n went to the door and opened it. \"Say, Homer, take another look around\n the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with\n a .30-.30.\"\n\n\n He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. \"Ever shoot a\n gun before, Mrs. Laughton?\"\n\n\n \"Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had\n Reggie.\"\n\n\n The sergeant nodded. \"You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a\n guy carrying your baby, don't you think?\"", "The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. \"You'd better keep your dog\n inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and\n windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house.\n Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.\"\n\n\n Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished\n cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the\n stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next\n to the telephone stand.\nThe front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and\n another man.\n\n\n \"I came as soon as I could, Martin,\" the young doctor said, stepping\n inside with the other man. \"This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.\"\n\n\n Martin and Tompkins shook hands.\n\n\n \"The baby—?\" Dr. Stuart asked.\n\n\n \"Upstairs,\" Martin said.", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "The police sergeant looked at the father, at Nancy and then at the\n dog. He scribbled notes in his book.\n\n\n \"Are you a rich man, Mr. Laughton?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Not at all. The bank still owns most of the house. I have a few\n hundred dollars, that's all.\"\n\n\n \"What do you do?\"\n\n\n \"Office work, mostly. I'm a junior executive in an insurance company.\"\n\n\n \"Any enemies?\"\n\n\n \"No ... Oh, I suppose I have a few people I don't get along with, like\n anybody else. Nobody who'd do anything like this, though.\"", "\"The\nmen\n. You'll remember, there were two. No, we never found a\n trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a gunshot wound that\n night. No hospital had a case either—at least not within several\n hundred miles—that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot\n with .30-.30?\"\n\n\n The state attorney shook his head. \"I wouldn't be here if I had.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you wouldn't. The pair must have crawled away to die God\n knows where.\"\n\n\n \"Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs.\n Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?\"\n\n\n It was the chief's turn to shake his head. \"Your guess is as good as\n mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It\n looks deliberate, but where's the motive?\"\n\n\n \"What does the man have to say?\"", "\"I was afraid you'd get to him,\" the chief said, his neck reddening.\n \"It's all been rather embarrassing to the department.\" He coughed\n self-consciously. \"He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his\n name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a\n social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number\n on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for\n a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits\n his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all\n alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It\n gives you the creeps.\"\nThe states attorney leaned back in his chair. \"Maybe it's a case for\n an alienist.\"", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "Illinois, U. S. A. Arrive his 378th day. TB73782.\nNancy Laughton sat on the blanket she had spread on the lawn in her\n front yard, knitting a pair of booties for the PTA bazaar.\n Occasionally she glanced at her son in the play pen, who was getting\n his daily dose of sunshine. He was gurgling happily, examining a ball,\n a cheese grater and a linen baby book, all with perfunctory interest.", "\"I suppose you'd think so.\"\n\n\n \"Who do you tell them you are?\"\n\n\n \"John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I\n manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's\n license—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self.\n Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you\n again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated\n through a million years.\"\n\n\n \"Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?\"", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"" ], [ "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"Arvid!\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the\n shoulders and shook him.\n\n\n The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of\n a violent argument.", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "\"Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient\n Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we\n were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the\n hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we\n were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but\n ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that\n English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609,\n when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart\n piece by piece—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right,\" Arvid 6 said. \"I'll admit I've made some\n mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all.\"", "\"But there\nmust\nbe! I tell you I shot these men who posed as\n doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this\n afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that.\" The sergeant\n went to the door and opened it. \"Say, Homer, take another look around\n the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with\n a .30-.30.\"\n\n\n He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. \"Ever shoot a\n gun before, Mrs. Laughton?\"\n\n\n \"Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had\n Reggie.\"\n\n\n The sergeant nodded. \"You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a\n guy carrying your baby, don't you think?\"", "With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set\n it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put\n Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the\n street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just\n gurgled with delight at the change in environment.\nThis peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men\n were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway,\n tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward\n the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up\n to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms\n against her cheeks and shrieked.", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "\"Still thinking about it? I think we'd have heard from them again if\n they were coming back. They probably got somebody else's baby by this\n time.\" Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. \"But\n for safety's sake I guess you'd better keep that gun handy.\"\n\n\n The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds\n moved slowly across the summer sky and a warm breeze rustled the\n trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this,\n Nancy thought.\n\n\n So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor. Mrs. MacDougal\n was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to\n keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first\n sign of trouble." ], [ "\"You'd better get him, Dr. Tompkins, if we're to take him to the\n hospital. I'll stay here with Mr. Laughton. How've you been, Martin?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n \"How's everything at the office?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n \"And your wife?\"\n\n\n \"She's fine, too.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to hear it, Martin. Mighty glad. Say, by the way, there's that\n bill you owe me. I think it's $32, isn't that right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'd almost forgotten about it.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you be a good fellow and write a check for it? It's been\n over a year, you know.\"", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "\"But there\nmust\nbe! I tell you I shot these men who posed as\n doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this\n afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that.\" The sergeant\n went to the door and opened it. \"Say, Homer, take another look around\n the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with\n a .30-.30.\"\n\n\n He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. \"Ever shoot a\n gun before, Mrs. Laughton?\"\n\n\n \"Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had\n Reggie.\"\n\n\n The sergeant nodded. \"You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a\n guy carrying your baby, don't you think?\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "The prosecutor handed the report over the desk. \"Here's the analysis.\n Not a trace of alcohol. He couldn't have even had a smell of near\n beer. Here's another report. This is his physical exam made not long\n afterwards. The man was in perfect health. Only variations are he had\n a scar on his leg where something, probably a dog, bit him once. And\n then a scar on his chest. It looked like an old gunshot wound, they\n said. Must have happened years ago.\"\n\n\n \"That's odd. The man who accosted Mrs. Laughton in the afternoon was\n bitten by their dog. Later that night she said she shot the same man\n in the chest. Since the scars are healed it obviously couldn't be the\n same man. But there's a real coincidence for you. And speaking of the\n dogbite, the Laughton dog died that night. His menu evidently didn't\n agree with him. Never did figure what killed him, actually.\"\n\n\n \"Any record of treatment on the man she shot?\"", "\"The\nmen\n. You'll remember, there were two. No, we never found a\n trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a gunshot wound that\n night. No hospital had a case either—at least not within several\n hundred miles—that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot\n with .30-.30?\"\n\n\n The state attorney shook his head. \"I wouldn't be here if I had.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you wouldn't. The pair must have crawled away to die God\n knows where.\"\n\n\n \"Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs.\n Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?\"\n\n\n It was the chief's turn to shake his head. \"Your guess is as good as\n mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It\n looks deliberate, but where's the motive?\"\n\n\n \"What does the man have to say?\"", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"I suppose you'd think so.\"\n\n\n \"Who do you tell them you are?\"\n\n\n \"John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I\n manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's\n license—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self.\n Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you\n again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated\n through a million years.\"\n\n\n \"Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?\"", "\"I was afraid you'd get to him,\" the chief said, his neck reddening.\n \"It's all been rather embarrassing to the department.\" He coughed\n self-consciously. \"He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his\n name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a\n social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number\n on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for\n a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits\n his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all\n alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It\n gives you the creeps.\"\nThe states attorney leaned back in his chair. \"Maybe it's a case for\n an alienist.\"", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. \"You'd better keep your dog\n inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and\n windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house.\n Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.\"\n\n\n Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished\n cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the\n stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next\n to the telephone stand.\nThe front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and\n another man.\n\n\n \"I came as soon as I could, Martin,\" the young doctor said, stepping\n inside with the other man. \"This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.\"\n\n\n Martin and Tompkins shook hands.\n\n\n \"The baby—?\" Dr. Stuart asked.\n\n\n \"Upstairs,\" Martin said.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"One jump ahead of you. Dr. Stone thinks he's normal, but won't put\n down any I.Q. Actually, he can't figure him out himself. Smith seems\n to take delight in answering questions—sort of anticipates them and\n has the answer ready before you're half through asking.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if Dr. Stone says he's normal, that's enough for me.\" The\n prosecutor was silent for a moment. Then, \"How about the husband?\"\n\n\n \"Laughton? We're afraid to let him see him. All broken up. No telling\n what kind of a rumpus he'd start—especially if Smith started his\n funny business.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you're right. Well, Mr. Smith won't think it's so funny when we\n hang criminal negligence or manslaughter on him. By the way, you've\n checked possible family connections?\"", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "The car came on, crunched over the play pen, killing the child. The\n mother was hit and instantly killed, force of the blow snapping her\n spine and tossing her against the house. The car plunged on into a\n tree, hitting it a terrible blow, crumbling the car's forward end so\n it looked like an accordion. The men were thrown from the machine.\n\n\n \"We'll never be able to prosecute in this case,\" the states attorney\n said. \"At least not on a drunken driving basis.\"\n\n\n \"I can't get over it,\" the chief of police said. \"I've got at least\n six men who will swear the man was drunk. He staggered, reeled and\n gave the usual drunk talk. He reeked of whiskey.\"", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"" ], [ "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "The police sergeant looked at the father, at Nancy and then at the\n dog. He scribbled notes in his book.\n\n\n \"Are you a rich man, Mr. Laughton?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Not at all. The bank still owns most of the house. I have a few\n hundred dollars, that's all.\"\n\n\n \"What do you do?\"\n\n\n \"Office work, mostly. I'm a junior executive in an insurance company.\"\n\n\n \"Any enemies?\"\n\n\n \"No ... Oh, I suppose I have a few people I don't get along with, like\n anybody else. Nobody who'd do anything like this, though.\"", "\"Still thinking about it? I think we'd have heard from them again if\n they were coming back. They probably got somebody else's baby by this\n time.\" Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. \"But\n for safety's sake I guess you'd better keep that gun handy.\"\n\n\n The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds\n moved slowly across the summer sky and a warm breeze rustled the\n trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this,\n Nancy thought.\n\n\n So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor. Mrs. MacDougal\n was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to\n keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first\n sign of trouble.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"The\nmen\n. You'll remember, there were two. No, we never found a\n trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a gunshot wound that\n night. No hospital had a case either—at least not within several\n hundred miles—that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot\n with .30-.30?\"\n\n\n The state attorney shook his head. \"I wouldn't be here if I had.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you wouldn't. The pair must have crawled away to die God\n knows where.\"\n\n\n \"Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs.\n Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?\"\n\n\n It was the chief's turn to shake his head. \"Your guess is as good as\n mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It\n looks deliberate, but where's the motive?\"\n\n\n \"What does the man have to say?\"", "\"But there\nmust\nbe! I tell you I shot these men who posed as\n doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this\n afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that.\" The sergeant\n went to the door and opened it. \"Say, Homer, take another look around\n the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with\n a .30-.30.\"\n\n\n He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. \"Ever shoot a\n gun before, Mrs. Laughton?\"\n\n\n \"Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had\n Reggie.\"\n\n\n The sergeant nodded. \"You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a\n guy carrying your baby, don't you think?\"", "With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set\n it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put\n Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the\n street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just\n gurgled with delight at the change in environment.\nThis peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men\n were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway,\n tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward\n the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up\n to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms\n against her cheeks and shrieked.", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "The prosecutor handed the report over the desk. \"Here's the analysis.\n Not a trace of alcohol. He couldn't have even had a smell of near\n beer. Here's another report. This is his physical exam made not long\n afterwards. The man was in perfect health. Only variations are he had\n a scar on his leg where something, probably a dog, bit him once. And\n then a scar on his chest. It looked like an old gunshot wound, they\n said. Must have happened years ago.\"\n\n\n \"That's odd. The man who accosted Mrs. Laughton in the afternoon was\n bitten by their dog. Later that night she said she shot the same man\n in the chest. Since the scars are healed it obviously couldn't be the\n same man. But there's a real coincidence for you. And speaking of the\n dogbite, the Laughton dog died that night. His menu evidently didn't\n agree with him. Never did figure what killed him, actually.\"\n\n\n \"Any record of treatment on the man she shot?\"", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"", "The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. \"You'd better keep your dog\n inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and\n windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house.\n Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.\"\n\n\n Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished\n cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the\n stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next\n to the telephone stand.\nThe front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and\n another man.\n\n\n \"I came as soon as I could, Martin,\" the young doctor said, stepping\n inside with the other man. \"This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.\"\n\n\n Martin and Tompkins shook hands.\n\n\n \"The baby—?\" Dr. Stuart asked.\n\n\n \"Upstairs,\" Martin said.", "\"One jump ahead of you. Dr. Stone thinks he's normal, but won't put\n down any I.Q. Actually, he can't figure him out himself. Smith seems\n to take delight in answering questions—sort of anticipates them and\n has the answer ready before you're half through asking.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if Dr. Stone says he's normal, that's enough for me.\" The\n prosecutor was silent for a moment. Then, \"How about the husband?\"\n\n\n \"Laughton? We're afraid to let him see him. All broken up. No telling\n what kind of a rumpus he'd start—especially if Smith started his\n funny business.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you're right. Well, Mr. Smith won't think it's so funny when we\n hang criminal negligence or manslaughter on him. By the way, you've\n checked possible family connections?\"", "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"I was afraid you'd get to him,\" the chief said, his neck reddening.\n \"It's all been rather embarrassing to the department.\" He coughed\n self-consciously. \"He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his\n name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a\n social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number\n on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for\n a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits\n his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all\n alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It\n gives you the creeps.\"\nThe states attorney leaned back in his chair. \"Maybe it's a case for\n an alienist.\"", "Illinois, U. S. A. Arrive his 378th day. TB73782.\nNancy Laughton sat on the blanket she had spread on the lawn in her\n front yard, knitting a pair of booties for the PTA bazaar.\n Occasionally she glanced at her son in the play pen, who was getting\n his daily dose of sunshine. He was gurgling happily, examining a ball,\n a cheese grater and a linen baby book, all with perfunctory interest." ], [ "\"The\nmen\n. You'll remember, there were two. No, we never found a\n trace of either. No doctor ever made a report of a gunshot wound that\n night. No hospital had a case either—at least not within several\n hundred miles—that night or several nights afterwards. Ever been shot\n with .30-.30?\"\n\n\n The state attorney shook his head. \"I wouldn't be here if I had.\"\n\n\n \"I'll say you wouldn't. The pair must have crawled away to die God\n knows where.\"\n\n\n \"Getting back to the man who ran over the child and killed Mrs.\n Laughton. Why did he pretend to be drunk?\"\n\n\n It was the chief's turn to shake his head. \"Your guess is as good as\n mine. There are a lot of angles to this case none of us understand. It\n looks deliberate, but where's the motive?\"\n\n\n \"What does the man have to say?\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "The car came on, crunched over the play pen, killing the child. The\n mother was hit and instantly killed, force of the blow snapping her\n spine and tossing her against the house. The car plunged on into a\n tree, hitting it a terrible blow, crumbling the car's forward end so\n it looked like an accordion. The men were thrown from the machine.\n\n\n \"We'll never be able to prosecute in this case,\" the states attorney\n said. \"At least not on a drunken driving basis.\"\n\n\n \"I can't get over it,\" the chief of police said. \"I've got at least\n six men who will swear the man was drunk. He staggered, reeled and\n gave the usual drunk talk. He reeked of whiskey.\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "The prosecutor handed the report over the desk. \"Here's the analysis.\n Not a trace of alcohol. He couldn't have even had a smell of near\n beer. Here's another report. This is his physical exam made not long\n afterwards. The man was in perfect health. Only variations are he had\n a scar on his leg where something, probably a dog, bit him once. And\n then a scar on his chest. It looked like an old gunshot wound, they\n said. Must have happened years ago.\"\n\n\n \"That's odd. The man who accosted Mrs. Laughton in the afternoon was\n bitten by their dog. Later that night she said she shot the same man\n in the chest. Since the scars are healed it obviously couldn't be the\n same man. But there's a real coincidence for you. And speaking of the\n dogbite, the Laughton dog died that night. His menu evidently didn't\n agree with him. Never did figure what killed him, actually.\"\n\n\n \"Any record of treatment on the man she shot?\"", "\"But there\nmust\nbe! I tell you I shot these men who posed as\n doctors. One of them was the same man who tried to take the baby this\n afternoon. They hypnotized my husband—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I know, Mrs. Laughton. We've been through that.\" The sergeant\n went to the door and opened it. \"Say, Homer, take another look around\n the walk and the bushes. There's supposed to be two of them. Shot with\n a .30-.30.\"\n\n\n He turned and picked up the gun and examined it again. \"Ever shoot a\n gun before, Mrs. Laughton?\"\n\n\n \"Many times. Martin and I used to go hunting together before we had\n Reggie.\"\n\n\n The sergeant nodded. \"You were taking an awful chance, shooting at a\n guy carrying your baby, don't you think?\"", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set\n it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put\n Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the\n street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just\n gurgled with delight at the change in environment.\nThis peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men\n were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway,\n tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward\n the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up\n to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms\n against her cheeks and shrieked.", "The police sergeant looked at the father, at Nancy and then at the\n dog. He scribbled notes in his book.\n\n\n \"Are you a rich man, Mr. Laughton?\" he asked.\n\n\n \"Not at all. The bank still owns most of the house. I have a few\n hundred dollars, that's all.\"\n\n\n \"What do you do?\"\n\n\n \"Office work, mostly. I'm a junior executive in an insurance company.\"\n\n\n \"Any enemies?\"\n\n\n \"No ... Oh, I suppose I have a few people I don't get along with, like\n anybody else. Nobody who'd do anything like this, though.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"Still thinking about it? I think we'd have heard from them again if\n they were coming back. They probably got somebody else's baby by this\n time.\" Martin finished his coffee and rose to kiss her good-bye. \"But\n for safety's sake I guess you'd better keep that gun handy.\"\n\n\n The morning turned into a brilliant, sunshiny day. Puffs of clouds\n moved slowly across the summer sky and a warm breeze rustled the\n trees. It would be a crime to keep Reggie inside on a day like this,\n Nancy thought.\n\n\n So she called Mrs. MacDougal, the next door neighbor. Mrs. MacDougal\n was familiar with what had happened to the Laughtons and she agreed to\n keep an eye on Nancy and Reggie and to call the police at the first\n sign of trouble.", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "\"I was afraid you'd get to him,\" the chief said, his neck reddening.\n \"It's all been rather embarrassing to the department.\" He coughed\n self-consciously. \"He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his\n name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a\n social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number\n on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for\n a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits\n his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all\n alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It\n gives you the creeps.\"\nThe states attorney leaned back in his chair. \"Maybe it's a case for\n an alienist.\"", "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "\"One jump ahead of you. Dr. Stone thinks he's normal, but won't put\n down any I.Q. Actually, he can't figure him out himself. Smith seems\n to take delight in answering questions—sort of anticipates them and\n has the answer ready before you're half through asking.\"\n\n\n \"Well, if Dr. Stone says he's normal, that's enough for me.\" The\n prosecutor was silent for a moment. Then, \"How about the husband?\"\n\n\n \"Laughton? We're afraid to let him see him. All broken up. No telling\n what kind of a rumpus he'd start—especially if Smith started his\n funny business.\"\n\n\n \"Guess you're right. Well, Mr. Smith won't think it's so funny when we\n hang criminal negligence or manslaughter on him. By the way, you've\n checked possible family connections?\"", "The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. \"You'd better keep your dog\n inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and\n windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house.\n Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.\"\n\n\n Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished\n cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the\n stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next\n to the telephone stand.\nThe front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and\n another man.\n\n\n \"I came as soon as I could, Martin,\" the young doctor said, stepping\n inside with the other man. \"This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.\"\n\n\n Martin and Tompkins shook hands.\n\n\n \"The baby—?\" Dr. Stuart asked.\n\n\n \"Upstairs,\" Martin said." ], [ "\"Arvid!\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the\n shoulders and shook him.\n\n\n The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of\n a violent argument.", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "Tendal 13 shook his head. \"I haven't heard. The transfers are getting\n more difficult all the time. In 1609, you'll remember, it was a case\n of pneumonia for the two-year-old. A simple procedure. It wouldn't\n work here. Medicine's too far along.\" He produced a notebook. \"The\n last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to\n be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there,\n probably.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?\"\n\n\n \"How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes,\n to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I didn't think he'd go back so far.\"", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient\n Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we\n were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the\n hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we\n were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but\n ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that\n English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609,\n when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart\n piece by piece—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right,\" Arvid 6 said. \"I'll admit I've made some\n mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all.\"", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "\"I suppose you'd think so.\"\n\n\n \"Who do you tell them you are?\"\n\n\n \"John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I\n manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's\n license—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self.\n Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you\n again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated\n through a million years.\"\n\n\n \"Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?\"", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned." ], [ "\"Arvid!\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the\n shoulders and shook him.\n\n\n The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of\n a violent argument.", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient\n Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we\n were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the\n hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we\n were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but\n ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that\n English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609,\n when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart\n piece by piece—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right,\" Arvid 6 said. \"I'll admit I've made some\n mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all.\"", "Tendal 13 shook his head. \"I haven't heard. The transfers are getting\n more difficult all the time. In 1609, you'll remember, it was a case\n of pneumonia for the two-year-old. A simple procedure. It wouldn't\n work here. Medicine's too far along.\" He produced a notebook. \"The\n last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to\n be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there,\n probably.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?\"\n\n\n \"How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes,\n to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I didn't think he'd go back so far.\"", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "\"You'd better get him, Dr. Tompkins, if we're to take him to the\n hospital. I'll stay here with Mr. Laughton. How've you been, Martin?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n \"How's everything at the office?\"\n\n\n \"Fine.\"\n\n\n \"And your wife?\"\n\n\n \"She's fine, too.\"\n\n\n \"Glad to hear it, Martin. Mighty glad. Say, by the way, there's that\n bill you owe me. I think it's $32, isn't that right?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, I'd almost forgotten about it.\"\n\n\n \"Why don't you be a good fellow and write a check for it? It's been\n over a year, you know.\"", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"" ], [ "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"I suppose you'd think so.\"\n\n\n \"Who do you tell them you are?\"\n\n\n \"John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I\n manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's\n license—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self.\n Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you\n again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated\n through a million years.\"\n\n\n \"Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?\"", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "Transcriber's Note:\nThis etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.\nTHE ULTROOM ERROR\nby\nJERRY SOHL\nSmith admitted he had made an error involving a few\n murders—and a few thousand years. He was entitled to a\n sense of humor, though, even in the Ultroom!\nHB73782. Ultroom error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1609 complete, intact, but too near limit of 1,000\n days. Next Kanad transfer ready. 1951. Reginald, son of Mr.\n and Mrs. Martin Laughton, 3495 Orland Drive, Marionville,", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"I shot him in the legs. The other—the other turned and I shot him in\n the chest. I could even see his eyes when he turned around. If I\n hadn't pulled the trigger then ... I don't want to remember it.\"\n\n\n The patrolman pushed the door open. \"There's no bodies out here but\n there's some blood. Quite a lot of blood. A little to one side of the\n walk.\"\n\n\n The policemen went out.\n\n\n \"Thank God you woke up, Nancy,\" Martin said. \"I'd have let them have\n the baby.\" He reached over and smoothed the sleeping Reggie's hair.\n\n\n Nancy, who was rocking the boy, narrowed her eyes.\n\n\n \"I wonder why they want our baby? He's just like any other baby. We\n don't have any money. We couldn't pay a ransom.\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"That's right. I'll get right at it.\" Martin went over to his desk,\n opened it and started looking for his checkbook. Dr. Stuart stood by\n him, making idle comment until Dr. Tompkins came down the stairs with\n the sleeping baby cuddled against his shoulder.\n\n\n \"Never mind the check, now, Martin. I see we're ready to go.\" He went\n over to his assistant and took the baby. Together they walked out the\n front door.\n\n\n \"Good-bye,\" Martin said, going to the door.\n\n\n Then he was nearly bowled over by the discharge of the .30-.30. Dr.\n Stuart crumpled to the ground, the baby falling to the lawn. Dr.\n Tompkins whirled and there was a second shot. Dr. Tompkins pitched\n forward on his face.", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "With a fearful but determined heart Nancy moved the play pen and set\n it up in the front yard. She spread a blanket for herself and put\n Reggie in the pen. Her heart pounded all the while and she watched the\n street for any strangers, ready to flee inside if need be. Reggie just\n gurgled with delight at the change in environment.\nThis peaceful scene was disturbed by a speeding car in which two men\n were riding. The car roared up the street, swerved toward the parkway,\n tires screaming, bounced over the curb and sidewalk, straight toward\n the child and mother. Reggie, attracted by the sudden noise, looked up\n to see the approaching vehicle. His mother stood up, set her palms\n against her cheeks and shrieked.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "The sergeant flipped his notebook closed. \"You'd better keep your dog\n inside and around the kid as much as possible. Keep your doors and\n windows locked. I'll see that the prowl car keeps an eye on the house.\n Call us if anything seems unusual or out of the way.\"\n\n\n Nancy had taken a sedative and was asleep by the time Martin finished\n cleaning the .30-.30 rifle he used for deer hunting. He put it by the\n stairs, ready for use, fully loaded, leaning it against the wall next\n to the telephone stand.\nThe front door bell rang. He answered it. It was Dr. Stuart and\n another man.\n\n\n \"I came as soon as I could, Martin,\" the young doctor said, stepping\n inside with the other man. \"This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins.\"\n\n\n Martin and Tompkins shook hands.\n\n\n \"The baby—?\" Dr. Stuart asked.\n\n\n \"Upstairs,\" Martin said.", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said." ], [ "\"Arvid!\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the\n shoulders and shook him.\n\n\n The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of\n a violent argument.", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient\n Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we\n were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the\n hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we\n were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but\n ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that\n English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609,\n when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart\n piece by piece—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right,\" Arvid 6 said. \"I'll admit I've made some\n mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all.\"", "Tendal 13 shook his head. \"I haven't heard. The transfers are getting\n more difficult all the time. In 1609, you'll remember, it was a case\n of pneumonia for the two-year-old. A simple procedure. It wouldn't\n work here. Medicine's too far along.\" He produced a notebook. \"The\n last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to\n be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there,\n probably.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?\"\n\n\n \"How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes,\n to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I didn't think he'd go back so far.\"", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "Around the corner and after the man came a snarling mongrel dog, eyes\n bright, teeth glinting in the sunlight. The man did not turn as the\n dog threw himself at him, burying his teeth in his leg. Surprised, the\n man dropped the screaming child on the lawn and turned to the dog. Joe\n seemed off balance and he backed up confusedly in the face of the\n snapping jaws. Then he suddenly turned and walked away, the dog at his\n heels.\n\n\n \"I tell you, the man said he was my brother and he made me think he\n was,\" Nancy told her husband for the tenth time. \"I don't even have a\n brother.\"\n\n\n Martin Laughton sighed. \"I can't understand why you believed him. It's\n just—just plain nuts, Nancy!\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "\"I suppose you'd think so.\"\n\n\n \"Who do you tell them you are?\"\n\n\n \"John Smith. A rather prevalent name here, I understand. I\n manufactured a pasteboard called a social security card and a driver's\n license—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind. It's easy to see you've been your own inimitable self.\n Believe me, if I ever get back to the Ultroom I hope I never see you\n again. And I hope I'll never leave there again though I'm rejuvenated\n through a million years.\"\n\n\n \"Was Kanad's life germ transferred all right this time?\"" ], [ "\"Arvid!\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 walked briskly through the door, snatched Arvid 6 by the\n shoulders and shook him.\n\n\n The jailer watched stupified as the two men vanished in the middle of\n a violent argument.", "\"You never run out of excuses, do you, Arvid? Remember what you said\n in the Ultroom when you pushed the lever clear over and transferred\n Kanad back 6,000 years? 'My hand slipped.' As simple as that. 'My hand\n slipped.' It was so simple everyone believed you. You were given no\n real punishment. In a way it was a reward—at least to you—getting to\n go back and rescue the life germ of Kanad out of each era he'd be born\n in.\"\n\n\n Tendal 13 turned and looked steadily and directly at Arvid 6. \"Do you\n know what I think? I think you deliberately pushed the lever over as\n far as it would go\njust to see what would happen\n. That's how simple\n I think it was.\"\n\n\n Arvid 6 flushed, turned away and looked at the floor.\n\n\n \"What crazy things have you been doing since I've been gone?\" Tendal\n 13 asked.", "\"I guess I have made mistakes. From now on you be the boss. I'll do\n whatever you say.\"\n\n\n \"I hope I can count on that.\" Tendal 13 rang the jail buzzer.\n\n\n The jailer unlocked the cell door.\n\n\n \"You remember the chief said it's all right to take him with me,\n Matthews,\" Tendal 13 told the jailer.\n\n\n \"Yes, I remember,\" the jailer said mechanically, letting them both out\n of the cell.\n\n\n They walked together down the jail corridor. When they came to another\n barred door the jailer fumbled with the keys and clumsily tried\n several with no luck.\n\n\n Arvid 6, an amused set to his mouth and devilment in his eyes, watched\n the jailer's expression as he walked through the bars of the door. He\n laughed as he saw the jailer's eyes bulge.", "\"It was only with the greatest effort I pulled myself back together\n again. I doubt that you could have done it. And then all the while\n you've been sitting here, probably enjoying yourself with your special\n brand of humor I have grown to despise.\"\n\n\n \"You didn't have to come along at all, you know,\" Arvid 6 said.\n\n\n \"How well I know! How sorry I am that I ever did! It was only because\n I was sorry for you, because someone older and more experienced than\n you was needed. I volunteered. Imagine that! I volunteered! Tendal 13\n reaches the height of stupidity and volunteers to help Arvid 6 go back\n 6,000 years to bring Kanad back, to correct a mistake Arvid 6 made!\"\n He snorted. \"I still can't believe I was ever that stupid. I only\n prove it when I pinch myself and here I am.", "\"I just wonder how angry Kanad will be,\" Arvid muttered.\nHB92167. Ultroom Error. Tendal 13. Arvid 6. Kanad transfer\n out of 1951 complete. Next Kanad transfer ready. 2267.\n Phullam 19, son of Orla 39 and Rhoda R, 22H Level M,\n Hemisphere B, Quadrant 3, Sector I. Arrive his 329th Day.\nTB92167\nArvid 6 rose from the cot and the two men faced each other.\n\n\n \"Before we leave, Arvid,\" Tendal 13 started to say.\n\n\n \"I know, I know. You want me to let you handle everything.\"\n\n\n \"Exactly. Is that too much to ask after all you've done?\"", "Eventually there were some sounds from beyond the steel cell and\n doorway. There was a clang when the outer doorway was opened and Arvid\n 6 rose from his cot.\n\n\n \"Your lawyer's here to see you,\" the jailer said, indicating the man\n with the brief case. \"Ring the buzzer when you're through.\" The jailer\n let the man in, locked the cell door and walked away.\n\n\n The man threw the brief case on the jail cot and stood glaring.\n\n\n \"Your damned foolishness has gone far enough. I'm sick and tired of\n it,\" he declared. \"If you carry on any more we'll never get back to\n the Ultroom!\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry, Tendal,\" the man on the cot said. \"I didn't think—\"", "\"Nobody ever saw John Smith before. Even at the address on his\n driver's license. And there's no duplicate of that in Springfield, in\n case you're interested.\"\n\n\n The man who had laughingly told police his name was John Smith lay on\n his cot in the county jail, his eyes closed, his arms folded across\n his chest. This gave him the appearance of being alert despite\n reclining. Even as he lay, his mouth held a hint of a smile.\n\n\n Arvid 6—for John Smith\nwas\nArvid 6—had lain in that position for\n more than four hours, when suddenly he snapped his eyes open and\n appeared to be listening. For a moment a look of concern crossed his\n face and he swung his legs to the floor and sat there expectantly.\n Arvid 6 knew Tendal 13 had materialized and was somewhere in the\n building.", "\"Shut up! For once you're going to listen to me. Our instructions\n specifically stated we were to have as little as possible to do with\n these people. But at every turn you've got us more and more enmeshed\n with them. If that's adventure, you can have it.\" Tendal 13 sat down\n wearily and sank his head in his hands. \"It was you who conceived the\n idea of taking Reggie right out of his play pen. 'Watch me take that\n child right out from under its mother's nose' were your exact words.\n And before I could stop you, you did. Only you forgot an important\n factor in the equation—the dog, Tiger. And you nursed a dogbite most\n of the afternoon before it healed. And then you took your spite out on\n the poor thing by suggesting suffocation to it that night.", "\"You're absolutely right. You didn't think. Crashing that car into\n that tree and killing that woman—that was the last straw. You don't\n even deserve to get back to our era. You ought to be made to rot\n here.\"\n\n\n \"I'm\nreally\nsorry about that,\" Arvid 6 said.\nYou know the instructions. Just because you work in the Ultroom don't\n get to thinking human life doesn't have any value. We wouldn't be here\n if it hadn't. But to unnecessarily kill—\" The older man shook his\n head. \"You could have killed yourself as well and we'd never get the\n job done. As it is, you almost totally obliterated me.\" Tendal 13\n paced the length of the cell and back again, gesturing as he talked.", "Arvid 6 sighed. \"After what you just said I guess it wouldn't amuse\n you, although it has me. They got to me right after the accident\n before I had a chance to collect my wits, dematerialize or\n anything—you said we shouldn't dematerialize in front of anybody.\"\n\n\n \"That's right.\"\n\n\n \"Well, I didn't know what to do. I could see they thought I was drunk,\n so I was. But they had a blood sample before I could manufacture any\n alcohol in my blood, although I implanted a memory in them that I\n reeked of it.\" He laughed. \"I fancy they're thoroughly confused.\"\n\n\n \"And you're thoroughly amused, no doubt. Have they questioned you?\"\n\n\n \"At great length. They had a psychiatrist in to see me. He was a queer\n fellow with the most stupid set of questions and tests I ever saw.\"\n\n\n \"And you amused yourself with him.\"", "\"Oh, you've been a joy to be with! First it was that hunt in ancient\n Mycenae when you let the lion escape the hunters' quaint spears and we\n were partly eaten by the lion in the bargain, although you dazzled the\n hunters, deflecting their spears. And then your zest for drink when we\n were with Octavian in Alexandria that led to everybody's amusement but\n ours when we were ambushed by Anthony's men. And worst of all, that\n English barmaid you became engrossed with at our last stop in 1609,\n when her husband mistook me for you and you let him take me apart\n piece by piece—\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right,\" Arvid 6 said. \"I'll admit I've made some\n mistakes. You're just not adventurous, that's all.\"", "\"And speaking of that night, you remember we agreed I was to do the\n talking. But no, you pulled a switch and captured Martin Laughton's\n attention. 'I came as soon as I could, Martin,' you said. And suddenly\n I played a very minor role. 'This is my new assistant, Dr. Tompkins,'\n you said. And then what happened? I get shot in the legs and you get a\n hole in your back. We were both nearly obliterated that time and we\n didn't even come close to getting the child.\n\n\n \"Still you wanted to run the whole show. 'I'm younger than you,' you\n said. 'I'll take the wheel.' And the next thing I know I'm floating in\n space halfway to nowhere with two broken legs, a spinal injury,\n concussion and some of the finest bruises you ever saw.\"\nThese twentieth century machines aren't what they ought to be,\" Arvid\n 6 said.", "Tendal 13 shook his head. \"I haven't heard. The transfers are getting\n more difficult all the time. In 1609, you'll remember, it was a case\n of pneumonia for the two-year-old. A simple procedure. It wouldn't\n work here. Medicine's too far along.\" He produced a notebook. \"The\n last jump was 342 years, a little more than average. The next ought to\n be around 2250. Things will be more difficult than ever there,\n probably.\"\n\n\n \"Do you think Kanad will be angry about all this?\"\n\n\n \"How would you like to have to go through all those birth processes,\n to have your life germ knocked from one era to the next?\"\n\n\n \"Frankly, I didn't think he'd go back so far.\"", "\"If it had been anybody but Kanad nobody'd ever have thought of going\n back after it. The life germ of the head of the whole galactic system\n who came to the Ultroom to be transplanted to a younger body—and then\n sending him back beyond his original birth date—\" Tendal 13 got up\n and commenced his pacing again. \"Oh, I suppose Kanad's partly to\n blame, wanting rejuvenating at only 300 years. Some have waited a\n thousand or more or until their bones are like paper.\"", "\"I'd better go and make sure Reggie's all right.\" Martin got up out of\n his chair and went to the stairs.\n\n\n \"I'm going with you,\" Nancy said, hurriedly rising and coming over to\n him.\n\n\n \"We'll go up and look at him together.\"\n\n\n They found Reggie peacefully asleep in his crib in his room upstairs.\n They checked the windows and tucked in the blankets. They paused in\n the room for a moment and then Martin stole his arm around his wife\n and led her to the door.\n\n\n \"As I've said, sergeant, this fellow hypnotized my wife. He made her\n think he was her brother. She doesn't even have a brother. Then he\n tried to get away with the baby.\" Martin leaned down and patted the\n dog. \"It was Tiger here who scared him off.\"", "The figure of a woman ran from the house, retrieved the now squalling\n infant and ran back into the house. Once inside, Nancy slammed the\n door, gave the baby to the stunned Martin and headed for the\n telephone.\n\n\n \"One of them was the same man!\" she cried.\n\n\n Martin gasped, sinking into a chair with the baby. \"I believed them,\"\n he said slowly and uncomprehendingly. \"They made me believe them!\"\n\n\n \"Those bodies,\" the sergeant said. \"Would you mind pointing them out\n to me, please?\"\n\n\n \"Aren't they—aren't they on the walk?\" Mrs. Laughton asked.\n\n\n \"There is nothing on the walk, Mrs. Laughton.\"", "\"Reggie's pretty cute, though,\" Martin said. \"You will have to admit\n that.\"\n\n\n Nancy smiled. Then she suddenly stopped rocking.\n\n\n \"Martin!\"\n\n\n He sat up quickly.\n\n\n \"Where's Tiger?\"\n\n\n Together they rose and walked around the room. They found him in a\n corner, eyes open, tongue protruding. He was dead.\nIf we keep Reggie in the house much longer he'll turn out to be a\n hermit,\" Martin said at breakfast a month later. \"He needs fresh air\n and sunshine.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not going to sit on the lawn alone with him, Martin. I just\n can't, that's all. I'd be able to think of nothing but that day.\"", "When she looked up again she noticed a man walking by—except he\n turned up the walk and crossed the lawn to her.\n\n\n He was a little taller than her husband, had piercing blue eyes and a\n rather amused set to his lips.\n\n\n \"Hello, Nancy,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Hello, Joe,\" she answered. It was her brother who lived in Kankakee.\n\n\n \"I'm going to take the baby for a while,\" he said.\n\n\n \"All right, Joe.\"\n\n\n He reached into the pen, picked up the baby. As he did so the baby's\n knees hit the side of the play pen and young Laughton let out a\n scream—half from hurt and half from sudden lack of confidence in his\n new handler. But this did not deter Joe. He started off with the\n child.", "\"Don't you think I know it?\" Nancy said tearfully. \"I feel like I'm\n going crazy. I can't say I dreamt it because there was Reggie with his\n bleeding knees, squalling for all he was worth on the grass—Oh, I\n don't even want to think about it.\"\n\n\n \"We haven't lost Reggie, Nancy, remember that. Now why don't you try\n to get some rest?\"\n\n\n \"You—you don't believe me at all, do you, Martin?\"\n\n\n When her husband did not answer, her head sank to her arms on the\n table and she sobbed.\n\n\n \"Nancy, for heaven's sake, of course I believe you. I'm trying to\n think it out, that's all. We should have called the police.\"\n\n\n Nancy shook her head in her arms. \"They'd—never—believe me either,\"\n she moaned.", "\"I was afraid you'd get to him,\" the chief said, his neck reddening.\n \"It's all been rather embarrassing to the department.\" He coughed\n self-consciously. \"He's proved a strange one, all right. He says his\n name is John Smith and he's got cards to prove it, too—for example, a\n social security card. It looks authentic, yet there's no such number\n on file in Washington, so we've discovered. We've had him in jail for\n a week and we've all taken turns questioning him. He laughs and admits\n his guilt—in fact, he seems amused by most everything. Sometimes all\n alone in his cell he'll start laughing for no apparent reason. It\n gives you the creeps.\"\nThe states attorney leaned back in his chair. \"Maybe it's a case for\n an alienist.\"" ] ]
valid	61285	[ "What is the nature of the relationship between Georges and Retief?", "What is true of the relationship between the Boyars and the Aga Kagan?", "What is the closest estimate to how long have the Boyar been on Flamme?", "What is the highest authority the reader learns of any woman holding on Flamme?", "What is Stanley’s opinion of the Corps?", "What is Georges’ manner with the Aga Kagan?", "What is Stanley’s history within the Aga Kagan?" ]	[ [ "Old friends from their time in the Corps", "Argumentative diplomatic colleagues", "Amicable bridge between Boyar and Corps", "Brotherly from their Boyar childhood together" ], [ "They have been at war for thousands of years", "They are newly engaged in violent conflict", "They are ruled by similar systems of governance", "They have never before been at war" ], [ "Two centuries", "Half a century", "A century", "Quarter of a century" ], [ "Servant", "Under-Secretary", "Secretary of Diplomatic Affairs", "Farmer" ], [ "Their diplomacy is a threat", "They stall instead of act", "They could be useful allies", "They may be exploited for resources" ], [ "Eager curiosity", "Friendly diplomacy", "Indifference", "Condescension" ], [ "He executed the former ruler", "He is an outsider", "He is an Aga Kagan commoner", "He was born an exalted ruler" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 2, 1, 2, 4, 4 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"", "\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.", "Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"", "\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"", "The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"", "\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"", "\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.", "\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"", "The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"", "\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"", "\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"", "\"Will that scrubland support a crop?\" Retief said, eyeing the\n lichen-covered knolls.\n\n\n \"Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you\n see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production\n thirty years ago. One of our finest—\"\n\n\n The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose,\n with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a\n stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's\n arm.\n\n\n \"Keep calm, Georges,\" he said. \"Remember, we're on a diplomatic\n mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of\n goats.\"\n\n\n \"Let me at 'em!\" Georges roared. \"I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!\"" ], [ "The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"", "\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"", "\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.", "\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"", "\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"", "\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"", "The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.", "\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.", "\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"", "\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"", "\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"", "A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"", "\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "\"Go ahead.\" The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor,\n eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses.\n\n\n \"The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his\n Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary\n Sheik, Emir of the—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. Skip the titles.\"\n\n\n Retief flipped over two pages." ], [ "\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"", "\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"", "\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"", "A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"", "\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"", "\"... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the\n jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the\n territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area,\n hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of\n the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as\n referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and\n X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in\n the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume\n Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as\n Flamme—\"", "\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"", "\"Will that scrubland support a crop?\" Retief said, eyeing the\n lichen-covered knolls.\n\n\n \"Sure. We start with legumes and follow up with cereals. Wait until you\n see this next section. It's an old flood plain, came into production\n thirty years ago. One of our finest—\"\n\n\n The air-car topped a rise. The Chef dropped his cigar and half rose,\n with a hoarse yell. A herd of scraggly goats tossed their heads among a\n stand of ripe grain. The car pulled to a stop. Retief held the Boyar's\n arm.\n\n\n \"Keep calm, Georges,\" he said. \"Remember, we're on a diplomatic\n mission. It wouldn't do to come to the conference table smelling of\n goats.\"\n\n\n \"Let me at 'em!\" Georges roared. \"I'll throttle 'em with my bare hands!\"", "\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"", "\"That,\" said Retief, \"should lend just the right note of solidarity to\n our little delegation.\" He hitched his chair closer. \"Now, depending on\n what we run into, here's how we'll play it....\"\nII\n\n\n Eight miles into the rolling granite hills west of the capital, a\n black-painted official air-car flying the twin flags of Chief of State\n and Terrestrial Minister skimmed along a foot above a pot-holed road.\n Slumped in the padded seat, the Boyar Chef d'Regime waved his cigar\n glumly at the surrounding hills.\n\n\n \"Fifty years ago this was bare rock,\" he said. \"We've bred special\n strains of bacteria here to break down the formations into soil, and we\n followed up with a program of broad-spectrum fertilization. We planned\n to put the whole area into crops by next year. Now it looks like the\n goats will get it.\"", "\"At times, your cynicism borders on impudence.\"\n\n\n \"At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note\n through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle.\"\n\n\n \"Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our\n biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join\n in the diplomatic give-and-take.\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild,\n like a dinosaur hunt.\"\n\n\n \"When you get there,\" said Magnan, \"I hope you'll make it quite clear\n that this matter is to be settled without violence.\"", "\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"", "A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"", "\"You sound as though you'd brought off a coup,\" Georges said. \"From the\n expression on the whiskery one's face, we're in for trouble. What was\n he saying?\"\n\n\n \"Just a routine exchange of bluffs,\" Retief said. \"Now when we get\n there, remember to make your flattery sound like insults and your\n insults sound like flattery, and you'll be all right.\"\n\n\n \"These birds are armed. And they don't like strangers,\" Georges said.\n \"Maybe I should have boned up on their habits before I joined this\n expedition.\"\n\n\n \"Just stick to the plan,\" Retief said. \"And remember: a handful of luck\n is better than a camel-load of learning.\"\nThe air car followed the escort down a long slope to a dry river bed\n and across it, through a barren stretch of shifting sand to a green\n oasis set with canopies.", "\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"" ], [ "\"At times, your cynicism borders on impudence.\"\n\n\n \"At other times, it borders on disgust. Now, if you'll run the Note\n through for signature, I'll try to catch the six o'clock shuttle.\"\n\n\n \"Leaving so soon? There's an important reception tonight. Some of our\n biggest names will be there. An excellent opportunity for you to join\n in the diplomatic give-and-take.\"\n\n\n \"No, thanks. I want to get back to Flamme and join in something mild,\n like a dinosaur hunt.\"\n\n\n \"When you get there,\" said Magnan, \"I hope you'll make it quite clear\n that this matter is to be settled without violence.\"", "\"Don't worry. I'll keep the peace, if I have to start a war to do it.\"\nOn the broad verandah at Government House, Retief settled himself\n comfortably in a lounge chair. He accepted a tall glass from a\n white-jacketed waiter and regarded the flamboyant Flamme sunset, a\n gorgeous blaze of vermillion and purple that reflected from a still\n lake, tinged the broad lawn with color, silhouetted tall poplars among\n flower beds.\n\n\n \"You've done great things here in sixty years, Georges,\" said Retief.\n \"Not that natural geological processes wouldn't have produced the same\n results, given a couple of hundred million years.\"\n\n\n \"Don't belabor the point,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime said. \"Since we seem\n to be on the verge of losing it.\"\n\n\n \"You're forgetting the Note.\"", "\"... and with reference to the recent relocation of persons under the\n jurisdiction of his Excellency, has the honor to point out that the\n territories now under settlement comprise a portion of that area,\n hereinafter designated as Sub-sector Alpha, which, under terms of\n the Agreement entered into by his Excellency's predecessor, and as\n referenced in Sector Ministry's Notes numbers G-175846573957-b and\n X-7584736 c-1, with particular pertinence to that body designated in\n the Revised Galactic Catalogue, Tenth Edition, as amended, Volume\n Nine, reel 43, as 54 Cygni Alpha, otherwise referred to hereinafter as\n Flamme—\"", "\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"", "\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"", "\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "The armed escort motioned the car to a halt before an immense tent of\n glistening black. Before the tent armed men lounged under a pennant\n bearing a lion\ncouchant\nin crimson on a field verte.", "A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.", "\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"", "\"To praise a man for what he does not possess is to make him appear\n foolish,\" Retief said. \"These are the lands of the Boyars. But enough\n of these pleasantries. We seek audience with your ruler.\"\n\n\n \"You may address me as 'Exalted One',\" the leader said. \"Now dismount\n from that steed of Shaitan.\"\n\n\n \"It is written, if you need anything from a dog, call him 'sir',\"\n Retief said. \"I must decline to impute canine ancestry to a guest. Now\n you may conduct us to your headquarters.\"\n\n\n \"Enough of your insolence!\" The bearded man cocked his rifle. \"I could\n blow your heads off!\"\n\n\n \"The hen has feathers, but it does not fly,\" Retief said. \"We have\n asked for escort. A slave must be beaten with a stick; for a free man,\n a hint is enough.\"", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.", "\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"", "\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"", "\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"" ], [ "\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"", "\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"", "\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.", "\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"", "\"I'm warning you, Retief!\" the Under-Secretary snapped, leaning\n forward, wattles quivering. \"Corps policy with regard to Flamme\n includes no inflammatory actions based on outmoded concepts. The Boyars\n will have to accommodate themselves to the situation!\"\n\n\n \"That's what I'm afraid of,\" Retief said. \"They're not going to sit\n still and watch it happen. If I don't take back concrete evidence of\n Corps backing, we're going to have a nice hot little shooting war on\n our hands.\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary pushed out his lips and drummed his fingers on the\n desk.\n\n\n \"Confounded hot-heads,\" he muttered. \"Very well, Retief. I'll go along\n to the extent of a Note; but positively no further.\"\n\n\n \"A Note? I was thinking of something more like a squadron of Corps\n Peace Enforcers running through a few routine maneuvers off Flamme.\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"", "\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"", "\"That wouldn't have been good for the oysters, either.\"\n\n\n \"That's what I told 'em. I also said you'd be back here in a few days\n with something from Corps HQ. When I tell 'em all we've got is a piece\n of paper, that'll be the end. There's a strong vigilante organization\n here that's been outfitting for the last four weeks. If I hadn't held\n them back with assurances that the CDT would step in and take care of\n this invasion, they would have hit them before now.\"\n\"That would have been a mistake,\" said Retief. \"The Aga Kagans are\n tough customers. They're active on half a dozen worlds at the moment.\n They've been building up for this push for the last five years. A\n show of resistance by you Boyars without Corps backing would be an\n invitation to slaughter—with the excuse that you started it.\"", "\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "\"Sixty years ago the Corps was encouraging the Boyars to settle\n Flamme,\" Retief said. \"They were assured of Corps support.\"\n\n\n \"I don't believe you'll find that in writing,\" said the Under-Secretary\n blandly. \"In any event, that was sixty years ago. At that time a\n foothold against Neo-Concordiatist elements was deemed desirable. Now\n the situation has changed.\"\n\n\n \"The Boyars have spent sixty years terraforming Flamme,\" Retief said.\n \"They've cleared jungle, descummed the seas, irrigated deserts, set out\n forests. They've just about reached the point where they can begin to\n enjoy it. The Aga Kagans have picked this as a good time to move in.\n They've landed thirty detachments of 'fishermen'—complete with armored\n trawlers mounting 40 mm infinite repeaters—and another two dozen\n parties of 'homesteaders'—all male and toting rocket launchers.\"", "The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"", "\"Surely there's land enough on the world to afford space to both\n groups,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"A spirit of co-operation—\"\n\"The Boyars needed some co-operation sixty years ago,\" Retief said.\n \"They tried to get the Aga Kagans to join in and help them beat\n back some of the saurian wild life that liked to graze on people.\n The Corps didn't like the idea. They wanted to see an undisputed\n anti-Concordiatist enclave. The Aga Kagans didn't want to play, either.\n But now that the world is tamed, they're moving in.\"\n\n\n \"The exigencies of diplomacy require a flexible policy—\"\n\n\n \"I want a firm assurance of Corps support to take back to Flamme,\"\n Retief said. \"The Boyars are a little naive. They don't understand\n diplomatic triple-speak. They just want to hold onto the homes they've\n made out of a wasteland.\"", "A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"", "\"It's pointless to resist,\" he said. \"We have you outgunned and\n outmanned. Your small nation has no chance against us. But we're\n prepared to be generous. You may continue to occupy such areas as we do\n not immediately require until such time as you're able to make other\n arrangements.\"\n\n\n \"And by the time we've got a crop growing out of what was bare rock,\n you'll be ready to move in,\" the Boyar Chef d'Regime snapped. \"But\n you'll find that we aren't alone!\"\n\"Quite alone,\" the Aga said. He nodded sagely. \"Yes, one need but read\n the lesson of history. The Corps Diplomatique will make expostulatory\n noises, but it will accept the\nfait accompli\n. You, my dear sir, are\n but a very small nibble. We won't make the mistake of excessive greed.\n We shall inch our way to empire—and those who stand in our way shall\n be dubbed warmongers.\"", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "\"Out of the question. A stiffly worded Protest Note is the best I can\n do. That's final.\"\n\n\n Back in the corridor, Magnan turned to Retief. \"When will you learn\n not to argue with Under-Secretaries? One would think you actively\n disliked the idea of ever receiving a promotion. I was astonished\n at the Under-Secretary's restraint. Frankly, I was stunned when he\n actually agreed to a Note. I, of course, will have to draft it.\" Magnan\n pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully. \"Now, I wonder, should I view\n with deep concern an act of open aggression, or merely point out an\n apparent violation of technicalities....\"\n\n\n \"Don't bother,\" Retief said. \"I have a draft all ready to go.\"\n\n\n \"But how—?\"\n\n\n \"I had a feeling I'd get paper instead of action,\" Retief said. \"I\n thought I'd save a little time all around.\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple." ], [ "The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"", "\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.", "The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.", "\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"Sorry,\" Retief said firmly. \"My hay-fever, you know.\"\n\n\n The reclining giant waved a hand languidly.\n\n\n \"Never mind the formalities,\" he said. \"Approach.\"\n\n\n Retief and Georges crossed the thick rugs. A cold draft blew toward\n them. The reclining man sneezed violently, wiped his nose on another\n silken scarf and held up a hand.\n\n\n \"Night and the horses and the desert know me,\" he said in resonant\n tones. \"Also the sword and the guest and paper and pen—\" He\n paused, wrinkled his nose and sneezed again. \"Turn off that damned\n air-conditioner,\" he snapped.\n\n\n He settled himself and motioned the bearded man to him. The two\n exchanged muted remarks. Then the bearded man stepped back, ducked his\n head and withdrew to the rear.", "\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "Retief dribbled the ash from his cigar over the side of the car.\n\n\n \"Now I think we'd better be getting on,\" he said briskly. \"I've enjoyed\n our chat, but we do have business to attend to.\"\n\n\n The bearded leader laughed shortly. \"Does the condemned man beg for the\n axe?\" he enquired rhetorically. \"You shall visit the Aga Kaga, then.\n Move on! And make no attempt to escape, else my gun will speak you a\n brief farewell.\"\n\n\n The horsemen glowered, then, at a word from the leader, took positions\n around the car. Georges started the vehicle forward, following the\n leading rider. Retief leaned back and let out a long sigh.\n\n\n \"That was close,\" he said. \"I was about out of proverbs.\"", "\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"", "A hundred yards away, a trio of brown-cloaked horsemen topped a rise,\n paused dramatically against the cloudless pale sky, then galloped\n down the slope toward the car, rifles bobbing at their backs, cloaks\n billowing out behind. Side by side they rode, through the brown-golden\n grain, cutting three narrow swaths that ran in a straight sweep from\n the ridge to the air-car where Retief and the Chef d'Regime hovered,\n waiting.\n\n\n Georges scrambled for the side of the car. \"Just wait 'til I get my\n hands on him!\"\n\n\n Retief pulled him back. \"Sit tight and look pleased, Georges. Never\n give the opposition a hint of your true feelings. Pretend you're a goat\n lover—and hand me one of your cigars.\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.", "\"A Note,\" Georges said, waving his cigar. \"What the purple polluted\n hell is a Note supposed to do? I've got Aga Kagan claim-jumpers camped\n in the middle of what used to be a fine stand of barley, cooking\n sheep's brains over dung fires not ten miles from Government House—and\n upwind at that.\"\n\n\n \"Say, if that's the same barley you distill your whiskey from, I'd\n call that a first-class atrocity.\"\n\n\n \"Retief, on your say-so, I've kept my boys on a short leash. They've\n put up with plenty. Last week, while you were away, these barbarians\n sailed that flotilla of armor-plated junks right through the middle of\n one of our best oyster breeding beds. It was all I could do to keep a\n bunch of our men from going out in private helis and blasting 'em out\n of the water.\"", "\"Go ahead.\" The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor,\n eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses.\n\n\n \"The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his\n Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary\n Sheik, Emir of the—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. Skip the titles.\"\n\n\n Retief flipped over two pages.", "A bearded goat eyed the Boyar Chef sardonically, jaw working. \"Look at\n that long-nosed son!\" The goat gave a derisive bleat and took another\n mouthful of ripe grain.\n\n\n \"Did you see that?\" Georges yelled. \"They've trained the son of a—\"\n\n\n \"Chin up, Georges,\" Retief said. \"We'll take up the goat problem along\n with the rest.\"\n\n\n \"I'll murder 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Hold it, Georges. Look over there.\"", "\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"" ], [ "\"Isn't it the custom?\" the Aga Kaga smiled complacently.\n\n\n \"I have news for you, Stanley. In this instance, neck-wringing seems\n more in order than hand-wringing.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga frowned. \"Your manner—\"\n\n\n \"Never mind our manners!\" Georges blurted, standing. \"We don't need any\n lessons from goat-herding land-thieves!\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga's face darkened. \"You dare to speak thus to me, pig of a\n muck-grubber!\"", "\"Call me Stanley.\" The Aga Kaga munched a grape. \"I merely face the\n realities of popular folk-lore. Let's be pragmatic; it's a matter of\n historical association. Some people can grab land and pass it off\n lightly as a moral duty; others are dubbed imperialist merely for\n holding onto their own. Unfair, you say. But that's life, my friends.\n And I shall continue to take every advantage of it.\"\n\n\n \"We'll fight you!\" Georges bellowed. He took another gulp of whiskey\n and slammed the glass down. \"You won't take this world without a\n struggle!\"\n\n\n \"Another?\" the Aga Kaga said, offering the bottle. Georges glowered as\n his glass was filled. The Aga Kaga held the glass up to the light.\n\n\n \"Excellent color, don't you agree?\" He turned his eyes on Georges.", "\"Come to the point,\" the Aga Kaga cut in. \"You're here to lodge a\n complaint that I'm invading territories to which someone else lays\n claim, is that it?\" He smiled broadly, offered dope-sticks and lit one.\n \"Well, I've been expecting a call. After all, it's what you gentlemen\n are paid for. Cheers.\"\n\n\n \"Your Excellency has a lucid way of putting things,\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"Call me Stanley,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"The other routine is just to\n please some of the old fools—I mean the more conservative members\n of my government. They're still gnawing their beards and kicking\n themselves because their ancestors dropped science in favor of alchemy\n and got themselves stranded in a cultural dead end. This charade is\n supposed to prove they were right all along. However, I've no time\n to waste in neurotic compensations. I have places to go and deeds to\n accomplish.\"", "The Aga Kaga looked startled. \"Soft? I can tie a knot in an iron bar\n as big as your thumb.\" He popped a grape into his mouth. \"As for the\n rest, your pious views about the virtues of hard labor are as childish\n as my advisors' faith in the advantages of primitive plumbing. As for\n myself, I am a realist. If two monkeys want the same banana, in the end\n one will have it, and the other will cry morality. The days of my years\n are numbered, praise be to God. While they last, I hope to eat well,\n hunt well, fight well and take my share of pleasure. I leave to others\n the arid satisfactions of self-denial and other perversions.\"\n\n\n \"You admit you're here to grab our land, then,\" Georges said. \"That's\n the damnedest piece of bare-faced aggression—\"", "\"I shall know when to stop,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n\n\n \"Tell me, Stanley,\" Retief said, rising. \"Are we quite private here?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, perfectly so,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"None would dare to intrude in\n my council.\" He cocked an eyebrow at Retief. \"You have a proposal to\n make in confidence? But what of our dear friend Georges? One would not\n like to see him disillusioned.\"\n\n\n \"Don't worry about Georges. He's a realist, like you. He's prepared to\n deal in facts. Hard facts, in this case.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga nodded thoughtfully. \"What are you getting at?\"\n\n\n \"You're basing your plan of action on the certainty that the Corps will\n sit by, wringing its hands, while you embark on a career of planetary\n piracy.\"", "\"Get out,\" Blackbeard ordered. The guards eyed the visitors, their\n drawn sabers catching sunlight. Retief and Georges stepped from the\n car onto rich rugs spread on the grass. They followed the ferocious\n gesture of the bearded man through the opening into a perfumed interior\n of luminous shadows. A heavy odor of incense hung in the air, and the\n strumming of stringed instruments laid a muted pattern of sound behind\n the decorations of gold and blue, silver and green. At the far end of\n the room, among a bevy of female slaves, a large and resplendently clad\n man with blue-black hair and a clean-shaven chin popped a grape into\n his mouth. He wiped his fingers negligently on a wisp of silk offered\n by a handmaiden, belched loudly and looked the callers over.\n\n\n Blackbeard cleared his throat. \"Down on your faces in the presence of\n the Exalted One, the Aga Kaga, ruler of East and West.\"", "\"I've had some unhappy experiences with strangers,\" the Aga Kaga said.\n \"It is written in the sands that all strangers are kin. Still, he who\n visits rarely is a welcome guest. Be seated.\"\nIII\n\n\n Handmaidens brought cushions, giggled and fled. Retief and Georges\n settled themselves comfortably. The Aga Kaga eyed them in silence.\n\"We have come to bear tidings from the Corps Diplomatique\n Terrestrienne,\" Retief said solemnly. A perfumed slave girl offered\n grapes.\n\n\n \"Modest ignorance is better than boastful knowledge,\" the Aga Kaga\n said. \"What brings the CDT into the picture?\"\n\n\n \"The essay of the drunkard will be read in the tavern,\" Retief said.\n \"Whereas the words of kings....\"", "\"I see you're quite a student of history, Stanley,\" Retief said. \"I\n wonder if you recall the eventual fate of most of the would-be empire\n nibblers of the past?\"\n\n\n \"Ah, but they grew incautious. They went too far, too fast.\"\n\n\n \"The confounded impudence,\" Georges rasped. \"Tells us to our face what\n he has in mind!\"\n\n\n \"An ancient and honorable custom, from the time of\nMein Kampf\nand\n the\nCommunist Manifesto\nthrough the\nPorcelain Wall\nof Leung. Such\n declarations have a legendary quality. It's traditional that they're\n never taken at face value.\"\n\n\n \"But always,\" Retief said, \"there was a critical point at which the man\n on horseback could have been pulled from the saddle.\"", "\"\nCould\nhave been,\" the Aga Kaga chuckled. He finished the grapes and\n began peeling an orange. \"But they never were. Hitler could have been\n stopped by the Czech Air Force in 1938; Stalin was at the mercy of the\n primitive atomics of the west in 1946; Leung was grossly over-extended\n at Rangoon. But the onus of that historic role could not be overcome.\n It has been the fate of your spiritual forebears to carve civilization\n from the wilderness and then, amid tearing of garments and the heaping\n of ashes of self-accusation on your own confused heads, to withdraw,\n leaving the spoils for local political opportunists and mob leaders,\n clothed in the mystical virtue of native birth. Have a banana.\"\n\n\n \"You're stretching your analogy a little too far,\" Retief said. \"You're\n banking on the inaction of the Corps. You could be wrong.\"", "\"You mock me, pale one. I warn you—\"\n\n\n \"Only love makes me weep,\" Retief said. \"I laugh at hatred.\"\n\n\n \"Get out of the car!\"\n\n\n Retief puffed at his cigar, eyeing the Aga Kagan cheerfully. The youth\n in the rear moved forward, teeth bared.\n\n\n \"Never give in to the fool, lest he say, 'He fears me,'\" Retief said.\n\n\n \"I cannot restrain my men in the face of your insults,\" the bearded Aga\n Kagan roared. \"These hens of mine have feathers—and talons as well!\"\n\n\n \"When God would destroy an ant, he gives him wings,\" Retief said.\n \"Distress in misfortune is another misfortune.\"\n\n\n The bearded man's face grew purple.", "\"At first glance,\" Retief said, \"it looks as though the places are\n already occupied, and the deeds are illegal.\"\nThe Aga Kaga guffawed. \"For a diplomat, you speak plainly, Retief. Have\n another drink.\" He poured, eyeing Georges. \"What of M. Duror? How does\n he feel about it?\"\n\n\n Georges took a thoughtful swallow of whiskey. \"Not bad,\" he said. \"But\n not quite good enough to cover the odor of goats.\"\n\n\n The Aga Kaga snorted. \"I thought the goats were overdoing it a bit\n myself,\" he said. \"Still, the graybeards insisted. And I need their\n support.\"\n\n\n \"Also,\" Georges said distinctly, \"I think you're soft. You lie around\n letting women wait on you, while your betters are out doing an honest\n day's work.\"", "\"Go ahead.\" The Aga Kaga kicked a couple of cushions onto the floor,\n eased a bottle from under the couch and reached for glasses.\n\n\n \"The Under-Secretary for Sector Affairs presents his compliments to his\n Excellency, the Aga Kaga of the Aga Kaga, Primary Potentate, Hereditary\n Sheik, Emir of the—\"\n\n\n \"Yes, yes. Skip the titles.\"\n\n\n Retief flipped over two pages.", "\"Excellency,\" Retief said, \"I have the honor to present M. Georges\n Duror, Chef d'Regime of the Planetary government.\"\n\n\n \"Planetary government?\" The Aga Kaga spat grape seeds on the rug. \"My\n men have observed a few squatters along the shore. If they're in\n distress, I'll see about a distribution of goat-meat.\"\n\n\n \"It is the punishment of the envious to grieve at anothers' plenty,\"\n Retief said. \"No goat-meat will be required.\"\n\n\n \"Ralph told me you talk like a page out of Mustapha ben Abdallah Katib\n Jelebi,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"I know a few old sayings myself. For\n example, 'A Bedouin is only cheated once.'\"\n\n\n \"We have no such intentions, Excellency,\" Retief said. \"Is it not\n written, 'Have no faith in the Prince whose minister cheats you'?\"", "\"Eh?\"\n\n\n \"Why, ah, there were a number of dispatches,\" Deputy Under-Secretary\n Magnan put in. \"Unfortunately, this being end-of-the-fiscal-year time,\n we found ourselves quite inundated with reports. Reports, reports,\n reports—\"\n\n\n \"Not criticizing the reporting system, are you, Mr. Magnan?\" the\n Under-Secretary barked.\n\n\n \"Gracious, no,\" Magnan said. \"I love reports.\"\n\n\n \"It seems nobody's told the Aga Kagans about fiscal years,\" Retief\n said. \"They're going right ahead with their program of land-grabbing on\n Flamme. So far, I've persuaded the Boyars that this is a matter for the\n Corps, and not to take matters into their own hands.\"", "The Under-Secretary nodded. \"Quite right. Carry on along the same\n lines. Now, if there's nothing further—\"\n\n\n \"Thank you, Mr. Secretary,\" Magnan said, rising. \"We certainly\n appreciate your guidance.\"\n\n\n \"There is a little something further,\" said Retief, sitting solidly in\n his chair. \"What's the Corps going to do about the Aga Kagans?\"\n\n\n The Under-Secretary turned a liverish eye on Retief. \"As Minister\n to Flamme, you should know that the function of a diplomatic\n representative is merely to ... what shall I say...?\"\n\n\n \"String them along?\" Magnan suggested.\n\n\n \"An unfortunate choice of phrase,\" the Under-Secretary said. \"However,\n it embodies certain realities of Galactic politics. The Corps must\n concern itself with matters of broad policy.\"", "\"Ah, ah!\" The Aga Kaga held up a hand. \"Watch your vocabulary, my\n dear sir. I'm sure that 'justifiable yearnings for territorial\n self-realization' would be more appropriate to the situation. Or\n possibly 'legitimate aspirations, for self-determination of formerly\n exploited peoples' might fit the case. Aggression is, by definition,\n an activity carried on only by those who have inherited the mantle of\n Colonial Imperialism.\"\n\n\n \"Imperialism! Why, you Aga Kagans have been the most notorious\n planet-grabbers in Sector history, you—you—\"", "The three horsemen pulled up in a churn of chaff and a clatter of\n pebbles. Georges coughed, batting a hand at the settling dust. Retief\n peeled the cigar unhurriedly, sniffed, at it and thumbed it alight. He\n drew at it, puffed out a cloud of smoke and glanced casually at the\n trio of Aga Kagan cavaliers.\n\n\n \"Peace be with you,\" he intoned in accent-free Kagan. \"May your shadows\n never grow less.\"\nThe leader of the three, a hawk-faced man with a heavy beard,\n unlimbered his rifle. He fingered it, frowning ferociously.\n\n\n \"Have no fear,\" Retief said, smiling graciously. \"He who comes as a\n guest enjoys perfect safety.\"\n\n\n A smooth-faced member of the threesome barked an oath and leveled his\n rifle at Retief.", "The Chef d'Regime frowned, blew out a cloud of smoke. \"I wasn't kidding\n about these Aga Kagans,\" he said. \"I hear they have some nasty habits.\n I don't want to see you operated on with the same knives they use to\n skin out the goats.\"\n\n\n \"I'd be against that myself. Still, the mail must go through.\"\n\n\n \"Strong-arm lads, eh? What have you got in mind, Retief?\"\n\n\n \"A little muscle in the background is an old diplomatic custom,\" Retief\n said.\n\n\n The Chef d'Regime stubbed out his cigar thoughtfully. \"I used to be a\n pretty fair elbow-wrestler myself,\" he said. \"Suppose I go along...?\"", "\"Very well, I concede the point.\" The Aga Kaga waved a hand at the\n serving maids. \"Depart, my dears. Attend me later. You too, Ralph.\n These are mere diplomats. They are men of words, not deeds.\"\n\n\n The bearded man glared and departed. The girls hurried after him.\n\n\n \"Now,\" the Aga Kaga said. \"Let's drop the wisdom of the ages and\n get down to the issues. Not that I don't admire your repertoire of\n platitudes. How do you remember them all?\"\n\n\n \"Diplomats and other liars require good memories,\" said Retief. \"But\n as you point out, small wisdom to small minds. I'm here to effect a\n settlement of certain differences between yourself and the planetary\n authorities. I have here a Note, which I'm conveying on behalf of the\n Sector Under-Secretary. With your permission, I'll read it.\"", "\"Youth is the steed of folly,\" Retief said. \"Take care that the\n beardless one does not disgrace his house.\"\n\n\n The leader whirled on the youth and snarled an order. He lowered the\n rifle, muttering. Blackbeard turned back to Retief.\n\n\n \"Begone, interlopers,\" he said. \"You disturb the goats.\"\n\n\n \"Provision is not taken to the houses of the generous,\" Retief said.\n \"May the creatures dine well ere they move on.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! The goats of the Aga Kaga graze on the lands of the Aga Kaga.\"\n The leader edged his horse close, eyed Retief fiercely. \"We welcome no\n intruders on our lands.\"" ] ]
valid	63633	[ "Who is the murderer for which Bo listens for footsteps?", "Why was the murderer trying to kill Bo?", "How was Bo unusual compared to his colleagues?", "What is Achilles?", "What was the dog?", "Why did Johnny like the Last Chance?", "Why did Johnny say Dr. McKittrick wasn't sociable?", "Why did Bo not want to get drunk at first but later the same night he chose to get drunk?", "Why did Lundgard not ride home on his original ship?" ]	[ [ "Johnny Malone", "A Venusian", "An unknown person", "A crewmember from Fireball" ], [ "We never find out", "He was a rival of the Sirius Transportation Company", "He was in love with Valeria ", "To get revenge for Johnny's death" ], [ "He was fastidious", "He was a frugal man", "He was a large man", "He loved to learn" ], [ "A rowdy bar", "An asteroid near Jupiter", "An asteroid near Mars", "A dense cluster" ], [ "Dr. McKittrick's pet", "A tramp ship", "A transport ship", "A Venusian pet" ], [ "He was from Luna City", "The Guardsmen came in trios", "He could find an empty booth", "He liked wild places" ], [ "She was very intelligent", "She wasn't beautiful", "She was young", "She was too focused on her work" ], [ "At first, he didn't want the cost of hangover medication but later he was mourning Johnny's death", "At first, he wanted to find a woman but later he decided to drink beer", "At first, he didn't want to pay for alcohol but later he was mourning Johnny's death", "At first, he was focused on his work but later he was feeling lonesome" ], [ "He wanted to settle down and try farming", "He wanted to stay for another 6 months", "He offered to stay behind because he felt responsible for their problems", "He was left behind because he was careless about inspections" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 3, 2, 3, 4, 4, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was\n too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own\n blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the\n Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily\n off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque\n bowsprit.\n\n\n There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp\n of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit.\n Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a\n granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.\n\n\n Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic\n of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the\n insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his\n murderer conducted through the ground.", "Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air\n and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close,\n catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when\n gravity was feeble enough.\n\n\n The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around\n him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He\n had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends.\n Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or\n Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the\n remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To\n them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he\n was gone into night.\n\n\n He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid\n with him, hunting him down.", "OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!\nBy POUL ANDERSON\nBehind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the\n \narch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of\n \nthose who needlessly had strewn Malone blood\n \nacross the heavens from Saturn to the sun.\n \nNow—on distant Trojan asteroids—the\n \nrendezvous for death was plainly marked.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men,\n but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds.\n\n\n Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a\n whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill\n him.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "As he neared, he caught words: \"—my girl, dammit.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell I am!\" said the girl. \"I never saw you before—\"\n\n\n \"Run along and play, son,\" said Johnny. \"Or do you want me to change\n that diaper of yours?\"\n\n\n That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the\n Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at\n the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a\n nightmare slowness.\n\n\n The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a\n kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond.\nA spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee.\nIt was the\n only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head.", "Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is\n doing at any given time. The\nDrake\nhad come to Achilles to pick up\n a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had\n somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked\n gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen\n were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have\n for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the\nSirius\nwas already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of\n shop talk.\n\n\n \"I thought she went back anyway,\" he said.", "He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take\n much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his\n helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next\n million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely\n as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him.\n Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot,\n reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge.\n\n\n He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off\n the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man\n near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to\n fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there\n could be so much stillness.", "He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard\n no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a\n soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off\n for outer space. No meteor gravel, that!\n\n\n Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was\n a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if\n he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat\n was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had\n come from.\n\n\n Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest\n edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny\n heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes.", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "\"Hadn't you heard?\" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could\n be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.\n \"Johnny's dead. We can't leave.\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab\n all the time, packing my things, and didn't know.\" A frown crossed her\n clear brow. \"But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to\n Luna with you.\"\n\n\n \"Your ticket will be refunded, of course,\" said Bo heavily. \"But you\n aren't certified, and the\nSirius\nis licensed for no less than two\n operators.\"\n\n\n \"Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've\ngot\nto get home. Can't you find somebody?\"\n\n\n Bo shrugged, not caring much. \"I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—\"", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him." ], [ "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!\nBy POUL ANDERSON\nBehind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the\n \narch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of\n \nthose who needlessly had strewn Malone blood\n \nacross the heavens from Saturn to the sun.\n \nNow—on distant Trojan asteroids—the\n \nrendezvous for death was plainly marked.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men,\n but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds.\n\n\n Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a\n whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill\n him.", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was\n too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own\n blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the\n Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily\n off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque\n bowsprit.\n\n\n There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp\n of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit.\n Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a\n granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.\n\n\n Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic\n of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the\n insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his\n murderer conducted through the ground.", "As he neared, he caught words: \"—my girl, dammit.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell I am!\" said the girl. \"I never saw you before—\"\n\n\n \"Run along and play, son,\" said Johnny. \"Or do you want me to change\n that diaper of yours?\"\n\n\n That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the\n Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at\n the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a\n nightmare slowness.\n\n\n The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a\n kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond.\nA spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee.\nIt was the\n only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard\n no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a\n soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off\n for outer space. No meteor gravel, that!\n\n\n Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was\n a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if\n he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat\n was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had\n come from.\n\n\n Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest\n edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny\n heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes.", "Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air\n and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close,\n catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when\n gravity was feeble enough.\n\n\n The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around\n him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He\n had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends.\n Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or\n Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the\n remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To\n them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he\n was gone into night.\n\n\n He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid\n with him, hunting him down.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is\n doing at any given time. The\nDrake\nhad come to Achilles to pick up\n a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had\n somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked\n gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen\n were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have\n for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the\nSirius\nwas already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of\n shop talk.\n\n\n \"I thought she went back anyway,\" he said.", "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna." ], [ "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "The certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing Einar\n Lundgard to be a Spacetech 1/cl with eight years' experience,\n qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand\n professions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook\n hands on it. \"Call me Bo. It really is my name ... Swedish.\"\n\n\n \"Another squarehead, eh?\" grinned Lundgard. \"I'm from South America\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Notice a year's gap here,\" said Bo, pointing to the service record.\n \"On Venus.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. I had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better.\n I tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of\n howling desert—Well, let's start some math, shall we?\"", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through\n fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos\n shouted beneath.\nTheoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two\n or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an\n emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone\n might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be\n allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed\n spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian\n snowfall.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which\n appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow\n neat even without clothes. \"Jonsson,\" said Bo. \"Sorry to get you up,\n but I understood—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm\n available.\"\n\n\n Bo felt his mouth gape open. \"Huh? I never thought—\"\n\n\n \"We're both lucky, I guess.\" Lundgard chuckled. His English had only\n the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. \"I thought I was stashed\n here too for the next several months.\"\n\n\n \"How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?\"\n\n\n \"I'm with Fireball, was on the\nDrake\n—heard of what happened to her?\"", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "\"Hadn't you heard?\" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could\n be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.\n \"Johnny's dead. We can't leave.\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab\n all the time, packing my things, and didn't know.\" A frown crossed her\n clear brow. \"But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to\n Luna with you.\"\n\n\n \"Your ticket will be refunded, of course,\" said Bo heavily. \"But you\n aren't certified, and the\nSirius\nis licensed for no less than two\n operators.\"\n\n\n \"Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've\ngot\nto get home. Can't you find somebody?\"\n\n\n Bo shrugged, not caring much. \"I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—\"", "They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer;\n no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and\n requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements,\n acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be\n modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be\n done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator.\n\n\n Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking\n before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it\n and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks\n with the tech. He had some good ones.\n\n\n The\nSirius\nwas loaded, inspected, and cleared. A \"scooter\" brought\n her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and\n waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder\n of rockets.", "He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard\n no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a\n soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off\n for outer space. No meteor gravel, that!\n\n\n Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was\n a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if\n he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat\n was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had\n come from.\n\n\n Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest\n edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny\n heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes.", "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "\"Do so, please. Let me know.\" She switched off.\n\n\n Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth\n considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was\n tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned\n face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains,\n too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation\n labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on\n Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now\n ready to go home.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners,\n so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a\n permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment\n represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of\n genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the\n rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to\n start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and\n jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.\n\n\n The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an\n \"r\" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar\n where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked\n Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and\n departure. \"Nothing to compare,\" he insisted. \"Every place else is\n getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy\n Venus.\"" ], [ "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Fire crashed at his back. Thunder and darkness exploded before him. He\n lurched forward, driven by the impact. Something was roaring, echoes\n clamorous in his helmet. He grew dimly aware that it was himself. Then\n he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars.\n\n\n There was a knife in his back, it was white-hot and twisting between\n the ribs. He stumbled over the edge of the plain and fell, waking when\n his armor bounced a little against stone.\n\n\n Breath rattled in his throat as he turned his head. There was a white\n plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole\n and freezing its moisture. The knife in him was not hot, it was cold\n with an ultimate cold.", "Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through\n fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos\n shouted beneath.\nTheoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two\n or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an\n emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone\n might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be\n allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed\n spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian\n snowfall.", "Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners,\n so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a\n permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment\n represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of\n genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the\n rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to\n start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and\n jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.\n\n\n The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an\n \"r\" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar\n where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked\n Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and\n departure. \"Nothing to compare,\" he insisted. \"Every place else is\n getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy\n Venus.\"", "Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is\n doing at any given time. The\nDrake\nhad come to Achilles to pick up\n a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had\n somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked\n gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen\n were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have\n for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the\nSirius\nwas already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of\n shop talk.\n\n\n \"I thought she went back anyway,\" he said.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "\"Do so, please. Let me know.\" She switched off.\n\n\n Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth\n considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was\n tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned\n face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains,\n too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation\n labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on\n Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now\n ready to go home.", "OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!\nBy POUL ANDERSON\nBehind a pale Venusian mask lay hidden the\n \narch-humanist, the anti-tech killer ... one of\n \nthose who needlessly had strewn Malone blood\n \nacross the heavens from Saturn to the sun.\n \nNow—on distant Trojan asteroids—the\n \nrendezvous for death was plainly marked.\n[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Summer 1955.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe most dangerous is not the outlawed murderer, who only slays men,\n but the rebellious philosopher: for he destroys worlds.\n\n\n Darkness and the chill glitter of stars. Bo Jonsson crouched on a\n whirling speck of stone and waited for the man who was coming to kill\n him.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air\n and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close,\n catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when\n gravity was feeble enough.\n\n\n The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around\n him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He\n had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends.\n Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or\n Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the\n remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To\n them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he\n was gone into night.\n\n\n He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid\n with him, hunting him down.", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was\n too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own\n blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the\n Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily\n off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque\n bowsprit.\n\n\n There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp\n of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit.\n Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a\n granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.\n\n\n Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic\n of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the\n insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his\n murderer conducted through the ground.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars\n and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping\n back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and\n sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on\n an asteroid.\n\n\n He wanted terribly to sleep." ], [ "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Fire crashed at his back. Thunder and darkness exploded before him. He\n lurched forward, driven by the impact. Something was roaring, echoes\n clamorous in his helmet. He grew dimly aware that it was himself. Then\n he was falling, whirling down into the black between the stars.\n\n\n There was a knife in his back, it was white-hot and twisting between\n the ribs. He stumbled over the edge of the plain and fell, waking when\n his armor bounced a little against stone.\n\n\n Breath rattled in his throat as he turned his head. There was a white\n plume standing over his shoulder, air streaming out through the hole\n and freezing its moisture. The knife in him was not hot, it was cold\n with an ultimate cold.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take\n much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his\n helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next\n million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely\n as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him.\n Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot,\n reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge.\n\n\n He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off\n the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man\n near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to\n fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there\n could be so much stillness.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air\n and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close,\n catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when\n gravity was feeble enough.\n\n\n The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around\n him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He\n had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends.\n Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or\n Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the\n remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To\n them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he\n was gone into night.\n\n\n He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid\n with him, hunting him down.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "There was no horizon. The flying mountain on which he stood was\n too small. At his back rose a cliff of jagged rock, losing its own\n blackness in the loom of shadows; its teeth ate raggedly across the\n Milky Way. Before him, a tumbled igneous wilderness slanted crazily\n off, with one long thin crag sticking into the sky like a grotesque\n bowsprit.\n\n\n There was no sound except the thudding of his own heart, the harsh rasp\n of his own breath, locked inside the stinking metal skin of his suit.\n Otherwise ... no air, no heat, no water or life or work of man, only a\n granite nakedness spinning through space out beyond Mars.\n\n\n Stooping, awkward in the clumsy armor, he put the transparent plastic\n of his helmet to the ground. Its cold bit at him even through the\n insulating material. He might be able to hear the footsteps of his\n murderer conducted through the ground.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard\n no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a\n soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off\n for outer space. No meteor gravel, that!\n\n\n Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was\n a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if\n he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat\n was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had\n come from.\n\n\n Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest\n edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny\n heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer;\n no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and\n requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements,\n acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be\n modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be\n done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator.\n\n\n Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking\n before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it\n and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks\n with the tech. He had some good ones.\n\n\n The\nSirius\nwas loaded, inspected, and cleared. A \"scooter\" brought\n her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and\n waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder\n of rockets.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "\"Hadn't you heard?\" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could\n be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.\n \"Johnny's dead. We can't leave.\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab\n all the time, packing my things, and didn't know.\" A frown crossed her\n clear brow. \"But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to\n Luna with you.\"\n\n\n \"Your ticket will be refunded, of course,\" said Bo heavily. \"But you\n aren't certified, and the\nSirius\nis licensed for no less than two\n operators.\"\n\n\n \"Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've\ngot\nto get home. Can't you find somebody?\"\n\n\n Bo shrugged, not caring much. \"I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—\"" ], [ "Johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. Alcohol cost plenty,\n but it was also more effective in low-gee. \"'Scuse me,\" he said. \"I see\n a target. Sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?\"\n\n\n Bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny\n gravity—the Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker\n places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight\n to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his\n highest-powered smile. There were several other men standing around\n her, but Johnny had The Touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few\n minutes.", "Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners,\n so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a\n permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment\n represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of\n genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the\n rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to\n start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and\n jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.\n\n\n The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an\n \"r\" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar\n where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked\n Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and\n departure. \"Nothing to compare,\" he insisted. \"Every place else is\n getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy\n Venus.\"", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "Maybe that was what had started it all—the death of Johnny Malone.\nThere are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but\n the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put\n in Jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only\n minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body\n which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed\n to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian\n planets, the leading group for the inner worlds—that way, their own\n revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost,\n while minimizing the effects of Jupiter's drag.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "\"Suit yourself. If you don't want to uphold the honor of the Sirius\n Transportation Company—\"\n\n\n Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the\nSirius\n; (b) her crew,\n himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners\n back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally\n stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere\n else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved.\n Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a\n space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy\n another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be\n getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a\n little.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "As he neared, he caught words: \"—my girl, dammit.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell I am!\" said the girl. \"I never saw you before—\"\n\n\n \"Run along and play, son,\" said Johnny. \"Or do you want me to change\n that diaper of yours?\"\n\n\n That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the\n Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at\n the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a\n nightmare slowness.\n\n\n The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a\n kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond.\nA spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee.\nIt was the\n only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head.", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "He was halfway across when the bullet came. He saw no flash, heard\n no crack, but suddenly the fissured land before him exploded in a\n soundless shower of chips. The bullet ricocheted flatly, heading off\n for outer space. No meteor gravel, that!\n\n\n Bo stood unmoving an instant, fighting the impulse to leap away. He was\n a spaceman, not a rockhound; he wasn't used to this environment, and if\n he jumped high he could be riddled as he fell slowly down again. Sweat\n was cold on his body. He squinted, trying to see where the shot had\n come from.\n\n\n Suddenly he was zigzagging off across the plain toward the nearest\n edge. Another bullet pocked the ground near him. The sun rose, a tiny\n heatless dazzle blinding in his eyes.", "He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take\n much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his\n helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next\n million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely\n as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him.\n Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot,\n reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge.\n\n\n He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off\n the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man\n near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to\n fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there\n could be so much stillness.", "Stillness answered him. He gulped a heavy lungful of tainted air\n and rose. The other might be miles away yet, or perhaps very close,\n catfooting too softly to set up vibrations. A man could do that when\n gravity was feeble enough.\n\n\n The stars blazed with a cruel wintry brilliance, over him, around\n him, light-years to fall through emptiness before he reached one. He\n had been alone among them before; he had almost thought them friends.\n Sometimes, on a long watch, a man found himself talking to Vega or\n Spica or dear old Beetle Juice, murmuring what was in him as if the\n remote sun could understand. But they didn't care, he saw that now. To\n them, he did not exist, and they would shine carelessly long after he\n was gone into night.\n\n\n He had never felt so alone as now, when another man was on the asteroid\n with him, hunting him down." ], [ "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. Alcohol cost plenty,\n but it was also more effective in low-gee. \"'Scuse me,\" he said. \"I see\n a target. Sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?\"\n\n\n Bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny\n gravity—the Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker\n places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight\n to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his\n highest-powered smile. There were several other men standing around\n her, but Johnny had The Touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few\n minutes.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "\"Do so, please. Let me know.\" She switched off.\n\n\n Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth\n considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was\n tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned\n face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains,\n too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation\n labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on\n Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now\n ready to go home.", "\"Hadn't you heard?\" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could\n be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.\n \"Johnny's dead. We can't leave.\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab\n all the time, packing my things, and didn't know.\" A frown crossed her\n clear brow. \"But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to\n Luna with you.\"\n\n\n \"Your ticket will be refunded, of course,\" said Bo heavily. \"But you\n aren't certified, and the\nSirius\nis licensed for no less than two\n operators.\"\n\n\n \"Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've\ngot\nto get home. Can't you find somebody?\"\n\n\n Bo shrugged, not caring much. \"I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—\"", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Moreover, being dense clusters, they have attracted swarms of miners,\n so that Achilles among the leaders and Patroclus in the trailers have a\n permanent boom town atmosphere. Even though a spaceship and equipment\n represent a large investment, this is one of the last strongholds of\n genuinely private enterprise: the prospector, the mine owner, the\n rockhound dreaming of the day when his stake is big enough for him to\n start out on his own—a race of individualists, rough and noisy and\n jealous, but living under iron rules of hospitality and rescue.\n\n\n The Last Chance on Achilles has another name, which simply sticks an\n \"r\" in the official one; even for that planetoid, it is a rowdy bar\n where Guardsmen come in trios. But Johnny Malone liked it, and talked\n Bo Jonsson into going there for a final spree before checkoff and\n departure. \"Nothing to compare,\" he insisted. \"Every place else is\n getting too fantangling civilized, except Venus, and I don't enjoy\n Venus.\"", "It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which\n appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow\n neat even without clothes. \"Jonsson,\" said Bo. \"Sorry to get you up,\n but I understood—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm\n available.\"\n\n\n Bo felt his mouth gape open. \"Huh? I never thought—\"\n\n\n \"We're both lucky, I guess.\" Lundgard chuckled. His English had only\n the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. \"I thought I was stashed\n here too for the next several months.\"\n\n\n \"How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?\"\n\n\n \"I'm with Fireball, was on the\nDrake\n—heard of what happened to her?\"", "Maybe that was what had started it all—the death of Johnny Malone.\nThere are numerous reasons for basing on the Trojan asteroids, but\n the main one can be given in a single word: stability. They stay put\n in Jupiter's orbit, about sixty degrees ahead and behind, with only\n minor oscillations; spaceships need not waste fuel coming up to a body\n which has been perturbed a goodly distance from where it was supposed\n to be. The trailing group is the jumping-off place for trans-Jovian\n planets, the leading group for the inner worlds—that way, their own\n revolution about the sun gives the departing ship a welcome boost,\n while minimizing the effects of Jupiter's drag.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "\"Suit yourself. If you don't want to uphold the honor of the Sirius\n Transportation Company—\"\n\n\n Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the\nSirius\n; (b) her crew,\n himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners\n back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally\n stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere\n else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved.\n Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a\n space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy\n another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be\n getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a\n little.", "He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take\n much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his\n helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next\n million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely\n as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him.\n Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot,\n reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge.\n\n\n He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off\n the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man\n near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to\n fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there\n could be so much stillness.", "As he neared, he caught words: \"—my girl, dammit.\"\n\n\n \"Like hell I am!\" said the girl. \"I never saw you before—\"\n\n\n \"Run along and play, son,\" said Johnny. \"Or do you want me to change\n that diaper of yours?\"\n\n\n That was when it happened. Bo saw the little needler spit from the\n Venusian's fingers. Johnny stood there a moment, looking foolishly at\n the dart in his stomach. Then his knees buckled and he fell with a\n nightmare slowness.\n\n\n The Venusian was already on the move. He sprang straight up, slammed a\n kick at the wall, and arced out the door into the dome corridor beyond.\nA spaceman, that. Knows how to handle himself in low-gee.\nIt was the\n only clear thought which ran in the sudden storm of Bo's head." ], [ "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "Johnny gulped his drink and winced. \"Whiskey, they call it yet! Water,\n synthetic alcohol, and a dash of caramel they have the gall to label\n whiskey and charge for!\"\n\n\n \"Everything's expensive here,\" said Bo mildly. \"That's why so few\n rockhounds get rich. They make a lot of money, but they have to spend\n it just as fast to stay alive.\"\n\n\n \"Yeh ... yeh ... wish they'd spend some of it on us.\" Johnny grinned\n and fed the dispenser another coin. It muttered to itself and slid\n forth a tray with a glass. \"C'mon, drink up, man. It's a long way home,\n and we've got to fortify ourselves for the trip. A bottle, a battle,\n and a wench is what I need. Most especially the wench, because I don't\n think the eminent Dr. McKittrick is gonna be interested in sociability,\n and it's close quarters aboard the\nDog\n.\"", "Bo relaxed against the thrust, thinking of Achilles falling away behind\n them. \"So long,\" he whispered. \"So long, Johnny.\"\nIII\n\n\n In another minute, he would be knotted and screaming from the bends,\n and a couple of minutes later he would be dead.\n\n\n Bo clamped his teeth together, as if he would grip consciousness in\n his jaws. His hands felt cold and heavy, the hands of a stranger, as\n he fumbled for the supply pouch. It seemed to recede from him, down a\n hollow infinite corridor where echoes talked in a language he did not\n know.\n\n\n \"Damn,\" he gasped. \"Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.\"\n\n\n He got the pouch open somehow. The stars wheeled around him. There\n were stars buzzing in his head, like cold white fireflies, buzzing and\n buzzing in the enormous ringing emptiness of his skull. Pain jagged\n through him, he felt his eardrums popping as pressure dropped.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "The girl screamed. A man cursed and tried to follow the Venusian.\n He tangled with another. \"Get outta my way!\" A roar lifted, someone\n slugged, someone else coolly smashed a bottle against the bar and\n lifted the jagged end. There was the noise of a fist meeting flesh.\n\n\n Bo had seen death before. That needle wasn't anesthetic, it was poison.\n He knelt in the riot with Johnny's body in his arms.\nII\n\n\n Suddenly the world came to an end. There was a sheer drop-off onto the\n next face of the rough cube which was the asteroid. Bo lay on his belly\n and peered down the cliff, it ran for a couple of miles and beyond it\n were the deeps of space and the cold stars. He could dimly see the\n tortured swirl of crystallization patterns in the smooth bareness. No\n place to hide; his enemy was not there.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "Johnny put away another couple of shots and rose. Alcohol cost plenty,\n but it was also more effective in low-gee. \"'Scuse me,\" he said. \"I see\n a target. Sure you don't want me to ask if she has a friend?\"\n\n\n Bo shook his head and watched his partner move off, swift in the puny\n gravity—the Last Chance didn't centrifuge like some of the tommicker\n places downtown. It was hard to push through the crowd without weight\n to help, but Johnny faded along and edged up to the girl with his\n highest-powered smile. There were several other men standing around\n her, but Johnny had The Touch. He'd be bringing her back here in a few\n minutes.", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "It would be easy to die. He lay on his back, staring up at the stars\n and the spilling cloudy glory of the Milky Way. A warmth was creeping\n back into numbed hands and feet; soon he would be warm all over, and\n sleepy. His eyelids felt heavy, strange that they should be so heavy on\n an asteroid.\n\n\n He wanted terribly to sleep.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead.", "Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through\n fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos\n shouted beneath.\nTheoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two\n or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an\n emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone\n might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be\n allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed\n spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian\n snowfall.", "Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is\n doing at any given time. The\nDrake\nhad come to Achilles to pick up\n a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had\n somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked\n gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen\n were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have\n for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the\nSirius\nwas already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of\n shop talk.\n\n\n \"I thought she went back anyway,\" he said.", "It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which\n appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow\n neat even without clothes. \"Jonsson,\" said Bo. \"Sorry to get you up,\n but I understood—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm\n available.\"\n\n\n Bo felt his mouth gape open. \"Huh? I never thought—\"\n\n\n \"We're both lucky, I guess.\" Lundgard chuckled. His English had only\n the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. \"I thought I was stashed\n here too for the next several months.\"\n\n\n \"How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?\"\n\n\n \"I'm with Fireball, was on the\nDrake\n—heard of what happened to her?\"", "\"Do so, please. Let me know.\" She switched off.\n\n\n Bo sat for a moment thinking about her. Valeria McKittrick was worth\n considering. She wasn't beautiful in any conventional sense but she was\n tall and well built; there were good lines in the strong high boned\n face, and her hair was a cataract of spectacular red. And brains,\n too ... you didn't get to be a physicist with the Union's radiation\n labs for nothing. He knew she was still young, and that she had been on\n Achilles for about a year working on some special project and was now\n ready to go home." ], [ "Lundgard nodded. \"She did. It was the usual question of economics.\n You know what refined fuel water costs in the Belt; also, the delay\n while we got it would have carried Earth and Achilles past optimum\n position, which'd make the trip home that much more expensive. Since we\n had one more man aboard than really required, it was cheaper to leave\n him behind; the difference in mass would make up for the fuel loss. I\n volunteered, even suggested the idea, because ... well, it happened\n during my watch, and even if nobody blamed me I couldn't help feeling\n guilty.\"\n\n\n Bo understood that kind of loyalty. You couldn't travel space without\n men who had it.", "He placed his ad on the radinews circuit and then went out to get\n drunk. It was all he could do for Johnny now, drink him a final\n wassail. Already his friend was cold under the stars. In the course of\n the evening he found himself weeping.\n\n\n He woke up many hours later. Achilles ran on Earth time but did not\n rotate on it; officially, it was late at night, actually the shrunken\n sun was high over the domes. The man in the upper bunk said there was a\n message for him; he was to call one Einar Lundgard at the Comet Hotel\n soonest.\n\n\n The Comet! Anyone who could afford a room to himself here, rather than\n a kip in the public barracks, was well fueled. Bo swallowed a tablet\n and made his way to the visi and dialed. The robo-clerk summoned\n Lundgard down to the desk.", "\"The Company beamed a message: I'd stay here till their schedule\n permitted an undermanned ship to come by, but that wouldn't be for\n maybe months,\" went on Lundgard. \"I can't see sitting on this lump that\n long without so much as a chance at planetfall bonus. If you'll take me\n on, I'm sure the Company will agree; I'll get a message to them on the\n beam right away.\"\n\n\n \"Take us a while to get back,\" warned Bo. \"We're going to stop off at\n another asteroid to pick up some automatic equipment, and won't go into\n hyperbolic orbit till after that. About six weeks from here to Earth,\n all told.\"\n\n\n \"Against six months here?\" Lundgard laughed; it emphasized the bright\n charm of his manner. \"Sunblaze. I'll work for free.\"\n\n\n \"No need to. Bring your papers over tomorrow, huh?\"", "Born, spewed out of an iron womb into a hollowness of stars and cold,\n to lie on naked rock while the enemy hunted him. Bo shuddered and\n wanted to scream again.\n\n\n Slowly he groped back toward awareness. His frostbitten back tingled\n as it warmed up again, soon it would be afire. He could feel a hot\n trickling of blood, but it was along his right side. The bullet must\n have spent most of its force punching through the armor, caromed off\n the inside, scratched his ribs, and fallen dead. Next time he probably\n wouldn't be so lucky. A magnetic-driven .30 slug would go through\n a helmet, splashing brains as it passed.\n\n\n He turned his head, feeling a great weariness, and looked at the\n gauges. This had cost him a lot of air. There was only about three\n hours worth left. Lundgard could kill him simply by waiting.", "It was a lean, muscular face under close cropped brown hair which\n appeared in the screen. Lundgard was a tall and supple man, somehow\n neat even without clothes. \"Jonsson,\" said Bo. \"Sorry to get you up,\n but I understood—\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. Are you looking for a spaceman? I heard your ad and I'm\n available.\"\n\n\n Bo felt his mouth gape open. \"Huh? I never thought—\"\n\n\n \"We're both lucky, I guess.\" Lundgard chuckled. His English had only\n the slightest trace of accent, less than Bo's. \"I thought I was stashed\n here too for the next several months.\"\n\n\n \"How does a qualified spaceman happen to be marooned?\"\n\n\n \"I'm with Fireball, was on the\nDrake\n—heard of what happened to her?\"", "He turned the thought over in a mind which seemed stiff and slow. By\n crossing that little plain he was exposing himself to a shot from one\n of its edges. On the other hand, he could just as well be bushwhacked\n from a ravine as he jumped over. And this route was the fastest for\n completing his search scheme.\n\n\n The Great Bear slid into sight, down under the world as it turned. He\n had often stood on winter nights, back in Sweden, and seen its immense\n sprawl across the weird flicker of aurora; but even then he wanted the\n spaceman's experience of seeing it from above. Well, now he had his\n wish, and much good it had done him.", "They were lucky, not having to wait their turn at the station computer;\n no other ship was leaving immediately. They fed it the data and\n requirements, and got back columns of numbers: fuel requirements,\n acceleration times, orbital elements. The figures always had to be\n modified, no trip ever turned out just as predicted, but that could be\n done when needed with a slipstick and the little ship's calculator.\n\n\n Bo went at his share of the job doggedly, checking and re-checking\n before giving the problem to the machine; Lundgard breezed through it\n and spent his time while waiting for Bo in swapping dirty limericks\n with the tech. He had some good ones.\n\n\n The\nSirius\nwas loaded, inspected, and cleared. A \"scooter\" brought\n her three passengers up to her orbit, they embarked, settled down, and\n waited. At the proper time, acceleration jammed them back in a thunder\n of rockets.", "\"Hadn't you heard?\" asked Bo. He found it hard to believe she could\n be ignorant, here where everybody's life was known to everybody else.\n \"Johnny's dead. We can't leave.\"\n\n\n \"Oh ... I'm sorry. He was such a nice little man—I've been in the lab\n all the time, packing my things, and didn't know.\" A frown crossed her\n clear brow. \"But you've got to get me back. I've engaged passage to\n Luna with you.\"\n\n\n \"Your ticket will be refunded, of course,\" said Bo heavily. \"But you\n aren't certified, and the\nSirius\nis licensed for no less than two\n operators.\"\n\n\n \"Well ... damn! There won't be another berth for weeks, and I've\ngot\nto get home. Can't you find somebody?\"\n\n\n Bo shrugged, not caring much. \"I'll circulate an ad if you want, but—\"", "\"Suit yourself. If you don't want to uphold the honor of the Sirius\n Transportation Company—\"\n\n\n Bo chuckled. The Company consisted of (a) the\nSirius\n; (b) her crew,\n himself and Johnny; (c) a warehouse, berth, and three other part owners\n back in Luna City. Not exactly a tramp ship, because you can't normally\n stop in the middle of an interplanetary voyage and head for somewhere\n else; but she went wherever there was cargo or people to be moved.\n Her margin of profit was not great in spite of the charges, for a\n space trip is expensive; but in a few more years they'd be able to buy\n another ship or two, and eventually Fireball and Triplanetary would be\n getting some competition. Even the public lines might have to worry a\n little.", "Bo kept on sipping slowly. \"Johnny,\" he said, raising his voice to cut\n through the din, \"you're an educated man. I never could figure out why\n you want to talk like a jumper.\"\n\n\n \"Because I am one at heart. Look, Bo, why don't you get over that\n inferiority complex of yours? A man can't run a spaceship without\n knowing more math and physical science than the average professor on\n Earth. So you had to work your way through the Academy and never had a\n chance to fan yourself with a lily white hand while somebody tootled\n Mozart through a horn. So what?\" Johnny's head darted around, birdlike.\n \"If we want some women we'd better make our reservations now.\"\n\n\n \"I don't, Johnny,\" said Bo. \"I'll just nurse a beer.\" It wasn't morals\n so much as fastidiousness; he'd wait till they hit Luna.", "Bo sighed, feeling a bit lonesome. If he wasn't going to make a night\n of it, there was no point in drinking heavily. He had to make the final\n inspection of the ship tomorrow, and grudged the cost of anti-hangover\n tablets. Besides what he was putting back into the business, he was\n trying to build a private hoard; some day, he'd retire and get married\n and build a house. He already had the site picked out, on Kullen\n overlooking the Sound, back on Earth. Man, but it was a long time since\n he'd been on Earth!\n\n\n A sharp noise slashed through the haze of talk and music Bo looked up.\n There was a tall black haired man, Venusian to judge by his kilts,\n arguing with Johnny. His face was ugly with anger.\n\n\n Johnny made some reply. Bo heaved up his form and strode toward the\n discussion, casually picking up anyone in the way and setting him\n aside. Johnny liked a fight, but this Venusian was big.", "She was human enough, had been to most of the officers' parties and\n danced and laughed and flirted mildly, but even the dullest rockhound\n gossip knew she was too lost in her work to do more. Out here a woman\n was rare, and a virtuous woman unheard-of; as a result, unknown to\n herself, Dr. McKittrick's fame had spread through more thousands of\n people and millions of miles than her professional achievements were\n ever likely to reach.\n\n\n Since coming here, on commission from the Lunar lab, to bring her\n home, Bo Jonsson had given her an occasional wistful thought. He liked\n intelligent women, and he was getting tired of rootlessness. But of\n course it would be a catastrophe if he fell in love with her because\n she wouldn't look twice at a big dumb slob like him. He had sweated out\n a couple of similar affairs in the past and didn't want to go through\n another.", "Bo nodded, for every spaceman knows exactly what every spaceship is\n doing at any given time. The\nDrake\nhad come to Achilles to pick up\n a cargo of refined thorium for Earth; while she lay in orbit, she had\n somehow lost a few hundred pounds of reaction-mass water from a cracked\n gasket. Why the accident should have occurred, nobody knew ... spacemen\n were not careless about inspections, and what reason would anyone have\n for sabotage? The event had taken place about a month ago, when the\nSirius\nwas already enroute here; Bo had heard of it in the course of\n shop talk.\n\n\n \"I thought she went back anyway,\" he said.", "Bo didn't care the first day. He had taken Johnny out to Helmet Hill\n and laid him in the barren ground to wait, unchanging now, till\n Judgement Day. He felt empty then, drained of grief and hope alike,\n his main thought a dull dread of having to tell Johnny's father when\n he reached Luna. He was too slow and clumsy with words; his comforting\n hand would only break the old man's back. Old Malone had given six sons\n to space, Johnny was the last; from Saturn to the sun, his blood was\n strewn for nothing.\n\n\n It hardly seemed to matter that the Guards office reported itself\n unable to find the murderer. A single Venusian should have been easy to\n trace on Achilles, but he seemed to have vanished completely.\n\n\n Bo returned to the transient quarters and dialed Valeria McKittrick.\n She looked impatiently at him out of the screen. \"Well,\" she said,\n \"what's the matter? I thought we were blasting today.\"", "The certificate and record were perfectly in order, showing Einar\n Lundgard to be a Spacetech 1/cl with eight years' experience,\n qualified as engineer, astronaut, pilot, and any other of the thousand\n professions which have run into one. They registered articles and shook\n hands on it. \"Call me Bo. It really is my name ... Swedish.\"\n\n\n \"Another squarehead, eh?\" grinned Lundgard. \"I'm from South America\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Notice a year's gap here,\" said Bo, pointing to the service record.\n \"On Venus.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, yes. I had some fool idea about settling but soon learned better.\n I tried to farm, but when you have to carve your own land out of\n howling desert—Well, let's start some math, shall we?\"", "Around him, world and stars rippled as if seen through heat, through\n fever. He hung on the edge of creation by his fingertips, while chaos\n shouted beneath.\nTheoretically, one man can run a spaceship, but in practice two\n or three are required for non-military craft. This is not only an\n emergency reserve, but a preventive of emergencies, for one man alone\n might get too tired at the critical moments. Bo knew he wouldn't be\n allowed to leave Achilles without a certified partner, and unemployed\n spacemen available for immediate hiring are found once in a Venusian\n snowfall.", "Johnny was from Luna City himself: a small, dark man with the quick\n nervous movements and dipped accent of that roaring commercial\n metropolis. He affected the latest styles, brilliant colors in the\n flowing tunic and slacks, a beret cocked on his sleek head. But somehow\n he didn't grate on Bo, they had been partners for several years now.\n\n\n They pushed through a milling crowd at the bar, rockhounds who watched\n one of Achilles' three live ecdysiasts with hungry eyes, and by some\n miracle found an empty booth. Bo squeezed his bulk into one side of the\n cubicle while Johnny, squinting through a reeking smoke-haze, dialed\n drinks. Bo was larger and heavier than most spacemen—he'd never have\n gotten his certificate before the ion drive came in—and was usually\n content to let others talk while he listened. A placid blond giant,\n with amiable blue eyes in a battered brown face, he did not consider\n himself bright, and always wanted to learn.", "He went over the edge of the cliff, cautiously, for it wouldn't take\n much of an impetus to throw him off this rock entirely. Then his\n helpless and soon frozen body would be just another meteor for the next\n million years. The vague downward sensation of gravity shifted insanely\n as he moved; he had the feeling that the world was tilting around him.\n Now it was the precipice which was a scarred black plain underfoot,\n reaching to a saw-toothed bluff at its farther edge.\n\n\n He moved with flat low-gee bounds. Besides the danger of springing off\n the asteroid entirely, there was its low acceleration to keep a man\n near the ground; jump up a few feet and it would take you a while to\n fall back. It was utterly silent around him. He had never thought there\n could be so much stillness.", "Bo Jonsson looked at the wrench in his hand. It was long and massive,\n it would have been heavy on Earth, but it was hardly enough to unscrew\n the stars and reset the machinery of a universe gone awry. He smiled\n stiffly at the thought. He wanted to laugh too, but checked himself for\n fear he wouldn't be able to stop.\nLet's face it\n, he told himself.\nYou're scared. You're scared\n sweatless.\nHe wondered if he had spoken it aloud.\n\n\n There was plenty of room on the asteroid. At least two hundred square\n miles, probably more if you allowed for the rough surface. He could\n skulk around, hide ... and suffocate when his tanked air gave out. He\n had to be a hunter, too, and track down the other man, before he died.\n And if he found his enemy, he would probably die anyway.", "He looked about him. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing but the\n streaming of the constellations as the asteroid spun. Nothing had ever\n moved here, since the beginning of time when moltenness congealed into\n death. Not till men came and hunted each other.\n\n\n Slowly he forced himself to move. The thrust of his foot sent him\n up, looping over the cliff to drift down like a dead leaf in Earth's\n October. Suit, equipment, and his own body, all together, weighed only\n a couple of pounds here. It was ghostly, this soundless progress over\n fields which had never known life. It was like being dead already.\n\n\n Bo Jonsson's tongue was dry and thick in his mouth. He wanted to\n find his enemy and give up, buy existence at whatever price it would\n command. But he couldn't do that. Even if the other man let him do it,\n which was doubtful, he couldn't. Johnny Malone was dead." ] ]
valid	63862	[ "Of the following options, which best describes Evelyn Kane?", "Does the story have a good ending?", "Which of the following best describes the tone of the story?", "Of the following situations, what was the toughest for Evelyn to handle?", "Why was it so difficult for Evelyn to kill the prisoner?", "Do you think it would be fun to live in the universe in which this story takes place?", "Of the characters the reader sees directly in the story, how many would the reader consider to be \"honorable?\"", "Why don't we see Evelyn interact with more of her people?", "Of the following options, who would most likely enjoy this story and why?" ]	[ [ "competent and brave", "generous and funny", "selfless and pretty", "careful and considerate" ], [ "Unclear, the story ends as Evelyn enters a dangerous situation", "Yes, Evelyn successfully infiltrates the enemy's ranks", "Unclear, Evelyn will likely succeed but the ending fails to confirm this", "No, Evelyn gets caught" ], [ "Humorous", "Intense", "Hopeful", "Calm" ], [ "Having to kill the soldier", "Having to trick the administrator", "Having to shoot the prisoner", "Having to dance for her boss" ], [ "He's one of her people and she has lingering loyalty", "She wants him to escape but can't let him", "He's her uncle", "He's her father" ], [ "No, the universe has fairly limited economic opportunities and prospects", "Yes, most of the individuals Evelyn interacts with are kindhearted", "Yes, the spaceships and universe are expansive and filled with opportunities", "No, the parts of the universe Evelyn interacts with have a decent amount of hazards and danger" ], [ "Two", "Three", "Zero", "One" ], [ "Most of them are live prisoners", "Most of them escaped to another galaxy", "Most of them were killed", "Most of them don't want to get involved with her adventure" ], [ "Readers of war and espionage novels, because of the elements of deceit in the story", "Mystery fans, because the story unravels slowly and answers questions along the way", "Sci-fi nerds, because of the battleship and space components of the story", "Romance fans, because of her relationship with her superior" ] ]	[ 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 1, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the\n cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a\n rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of\n knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it.\n For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n\n\n \"\nDie now—die now—die now\n—\"\n\n\n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and\n it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great\n battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this\n tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain\n her countrymen had either definitely won—or lost.\n\n\n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had\n expected nothing else.", "Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib\n gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He\n would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut\n short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind\n greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the\n recorder.\n\n\n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked\n tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n\n\n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n\n\n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n\n\n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles\n radius.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for\n passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"", "The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n\n\n \"Name?\"\n\n\n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n\n\n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name.\n Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply\n lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry\n corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally,\n where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n\n\n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have\n the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a\n way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran\n class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford\n another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with\n this cool murderess.", "Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously,\n hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With\n satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind\n of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up\n behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first.\n He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards,\n he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on.\n Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn\n frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under\n certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n\n\n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some\n sort, who was studying her visa.\n\n\n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—\"—he looked at the visa\n suspiciously—\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to\n S'ria Gerek, here\"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—\"I\n wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether\n they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to\n H.Q.?\"", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was\n certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The\n chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length\n of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all\n possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen\n personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in\n the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n\n\n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns,\n sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He\n pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other\n wing.\"", "\"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n\n\n \"To the personnel office.\"\n\n\n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group—two\n stories high, reasonably intact.\n\n\n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there\n with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and\n was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed\n her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene\n coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n\n\n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered\n something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple\nterif\nand following the\n thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated\n from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club\n somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on\n tiptoe.\n\n\n For the last thirty \"nights\"—the hours allotted to rest and sleep—it\n had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the\n office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official\n messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews.\n By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor\n his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to\n elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted\n out memory and knowledge.\n\n\n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"" ], [ "\"No. I shall die here.\"\n\n\n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then\n die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will\n destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are\n successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the\n battle.\"\n\n\n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're\n also working on a means for your escape—not only because you are\n Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent\n radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with\n our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n\n\n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle\n finality.\n\n\n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched\n herself back to the present.\n\n\n That time had come.", "She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would\n set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe,\n and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless\n grave of space.\n\n\n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon\n immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily\n over the memories of her past.\n\n\n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched\nThe Defender\ngrow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized\n battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian\n globe,\nThe Invader\n, sprang out of black space to enslave the budding\n Terran Confederacy,\nThe Defender\nwas unfinished, half-equipped, and\n undermanned.", "In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her\n appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe\n was there awaiting it.\n\n\n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n \"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n\n\n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n\n\n He had not as yet looked at her.\n\n\n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered\n her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly\n twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n\n\n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing.\n His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the\n killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their\n eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\nThe Defender\n, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled\n itself from its orbit around Procyon and met\nThe Invader\nwith giant\n fission torpedoes.\n\n\n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic\n Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men\n poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken\nDefender\n.\n\n\n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal\n and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the\n Scythians nine years to conquer\nThe Defender's\nouter shell. Then had\n come that final interview with her father.\n\n\n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had\n telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave\nThe\n Defender\n. Be on it.\"", "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—", "With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on\n the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with\n both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo\n fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the\n ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing\n would she die.\n\n\n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in\n dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds\n and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle\n had been terrific.\n\n\n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined\n the interior of the box.", "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "\"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at\n her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and\n the others have gone.\"\n\n\n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n\n\n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly,\n and then followed him out.\n\n\n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of\n perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n\n\n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "It was a shattered ruin.\nOnce the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing\n hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best,\n finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the\n interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that\n clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis.\n\n\n She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space.\n\n\n Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still\n intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself,\n set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were\n unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian\n enemies." ], [ "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would\n set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe,\n and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless\n grave of space.\n\n\n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon\n immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily\n over the memories of her past.\n\n\n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched\nThe Defender\ngrow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized\n battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian\n globe,\nThe Invader\n, sprang out of black space to enslave the budding\n Terran Confederacy,\nThe Defender\nwas unfinished, half-equipped, and\n undermanned.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her\n appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe\n was there awaiting it.\n\n\n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n \"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n\n\n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n\n\n He had not as yet looked at her.\n\n\n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered\n her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly\n twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n\n\n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing.\n His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the\n killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their\n eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.", "The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\nThe Defender\n, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled\n itself from its orbit around Procyon and met\nThe Invader\nwith giant\n fission torpedoes.\n\n\n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic\n Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men\n poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken\nDefender\n.\n\n\n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal\n and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the\n Scythians nine years to conquer\nThe Defender's\nouter shell. Then had\n come that final interview with her father.\n\n\n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had\n telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave\nThe\n Defender\n. Be on it.\"", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber.", "\"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the\n corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n\n\n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The\n guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was\n their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n\n\n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the\n inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n\n\n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the\n guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I\n have interesting information.\"\n\n\n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he\n could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the\n guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one\n another.", "\"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at\n her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and\n the others have gone.\"\n\n\n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n\n\n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly,\n and then followed him out.\n\n\n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of\n perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n\n\n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born\n Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that\n of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black\n stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had\n supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n\n\n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and\n evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question:\n Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two\n months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot.\n Yes, he would shoot.", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on\n the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with\n both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo\n fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the\n ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing\n would she die.\n\n\n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in\n dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds\n and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle\n had been terrific.\n\n\n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined\n the interior of the box.", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—" ], [ "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously,\n hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With\n satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind\n of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up\n behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first.\n He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards,\n he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on.\n Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.", "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn\n frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under\n certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n\n\n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some\n sort, who was studying her visa.\n\n\n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—\"—he looked at the visa\n suspiciously—\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to\n S'ria Gerek, here\"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—\"I\n wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether\n they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to\n H.Q.?\"", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "\"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n\n\n \"To the personnel office.\"\n\n\n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group—two\n stories high, reasonably intact.\n\n\n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there\n with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and\n was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed\n her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene\n coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n\n\n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered\n something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was\n certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The\n chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length\n of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all\n possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen\n personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in\n the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n\n\n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns,\n sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He\n pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other\n wing.\"", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the\n cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a\n rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of\n knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it.\n For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n\n\n \"\nDie now—die now—die now\n—\"\n\n\n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and\n it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great\n battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this\n tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain\n her countrymen had either definitely won—or lost.\n\n\n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had\n expected nothing else.", "\"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar\n identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n\n\n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but\n her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled\n in her plan for destruction. She\nmust\nmake it a known quantity.\n\n\n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of\n course.\"\n\n\n \"What did he say about it?\"\n\n\n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and\n accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and\n that—well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all he said?\"", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber.", "When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any\n memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the\n recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully,\n and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for\n auditing.\nEvelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended\n from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly\n be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a\n similar ability in a mere clerk.\n\n\n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings\n were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either\n shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of\n radiation-remover was everywhere.\n\n\n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n\n\n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—" ], [ "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "\"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n\n\n \"To the personnel office.\"\n\n\n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group—two\n stories high, reasonably intact.\n\n\n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there\n with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and\n was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed\n her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene\n coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n\n\n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered\n something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.", "Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously,\n hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With\n satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind\n of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up\n behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first.\n He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards,\n he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on.\n Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn\n frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under\n certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n\n\n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some\n sort, who was studying her visa.\n\n\n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—\"—he looked at the visa\n suspiciously—\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to\n S'ria Gerek, here\"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—\"I\n wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether\n they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to\n H.Q.?\"", "The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n\n\n \"Name?\"\n\n\n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n\n\n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name.\n Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply\n lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry\n corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally,\n where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n\n\n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have\n the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a\n way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran\n class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford\n another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with\n this cool murderess.", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the\n cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a\n rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of\n knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it.\n For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n\n\n \"\nDie now—die now—die now\n—\"\n\n\n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and\n it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great\n battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this\n tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain\n her countrymen had either definitely won—or lost.\n\n\n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had\n expected nothing else.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib\n gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He\n would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut\n short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind\n greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the\n recorder.\n\n\n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked\n tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n\n\n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n\n\n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n\n\n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles\n radius.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for\n passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her\n appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe\n was there awaiting it.\n\n\n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n \"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n\n\n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n\n\n He had not as yet looked at her.\n\n\n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered\n her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly\n twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n\n\n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing.\n His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the\n killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their\n eyes met, and he started imperceptibly." ], [ "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would\n set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe,\n and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless\n grave of space.\n\n\n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon\n immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily\n over the memories of her past.\n\n\n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched\nThe Defender\ngrow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized\n battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian\n globe,\nThe Invader\n, sprang out of black space to enslave the budding\n Terran Confederacy,\nThe Defender\nwas unfinished, half-equipped, and\n undermanned.", "\"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the\n corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n\n\n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The\n guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was\n their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n\n\n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the\n inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n\n\n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the\n guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I\n have interesting information.\"\n\n\n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he\n could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the\n guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one\n another.", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber.", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born\n Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that\n of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black\n stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had\n supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n\n\n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and\n evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question:\n Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two\n months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot.\n Yes, he would shoot.", "Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly.\n The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the\n chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform.\n Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the\n sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on\n the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly\n to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve\n of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring\n the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she\n was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the\n cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling\n from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle\n to come would be her apparent harmlessness.", "As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and\n calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could\n feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that\n the Faeg had ceased firing.\nHer heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a\n very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild\n interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers\n in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception\n of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he\n would let her dance for him.\n\n\n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed\n a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath\n for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor.\n He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false\n memories.", "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n\n\n \"Name?\"\n\n\n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n\n\n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name.\n Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply\n lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry\n corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally,\n where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n\n\n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have\n the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a\n way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran\n class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford\n another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with\n this cool murderess.", "In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn\n frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under\n certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n\n\n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some\n sort, who was studying her visa.\n\n\n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—\"—he looked at the visa\n suspiciously—\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to\n S'ria Gerek, here\"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—\"I\n wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether\n they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to\n H.Q.?\"", "When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any\n memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the\n recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully,\n and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for\n auditing.\nEvelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended\n from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly\n be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a\n similar ability in a mere clerk.\n\n\n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings\n were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either\n shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of\n radiation-remover was everywhere.\n\n\n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n\n\n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.", "Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously,\n hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With\n satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind\n of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up\n behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first.\n He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards,\n he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on.\n Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.", "The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\nThe Defender\n, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled\n itself from its orbit around Procyon and met\nThe Invader\nwith giant\n fission torpedoes.\n\n\n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic\n Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men\n poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken\nDefender\n.\n\n\n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal\n and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the\n Scythians nine years to conquer\nThe Defender's\nouter shell. Then had\n come that final interview with her father.\n\n\n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had\n telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave\nThe\n Defender\n. Be on it.\"", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "\"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the\n duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n \"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my\n majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of\n its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak,\n but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n\n\n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n\n\n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n \"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient\n phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old\n count was right.\"\n\n\n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple\nterif\nand following the\n thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated\n from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club\n somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on\n tiptoe.\n\n\n For the last thirty \"nights\"—the hours allotted to rest and sleep—it\n had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the\n office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official\n messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews.\n By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor\n his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to\n elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted\n out memory and knowledge.\n\n\n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"", "\"No. I shall die here.\"\n\n\n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then\n die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will\n destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are\n successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the\n battle.\"\n\n\n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're\n also working on a means for your escape—not only because you are\n Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent\n radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with\n our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n\n\n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle\n finality.\n\n\n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched\n herself back to the present.\n\n\n That time had come.", "\"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n\n\n \"To the personnel office.\"\n\n\n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group—two\n stories high, reasonably intact.\n\n\n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there\n with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and\n was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed\n her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene\n coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n\n\n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered\n something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her." ], [ "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her\n appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe\n was there awaiting it.\n\n\n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n \"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n\n\n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n\n\n He had not as yet looked at her.\n\n\n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered\n her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly\n twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n\n\n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing.\n His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the\n killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their\n eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber.", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born\n Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that\n of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black\n stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had\n supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n\n\n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and\n evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question:\n Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two\n months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot.\n Yes, he would shoot.", "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and\n calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could\n feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that\n the Faeg had ceased firing.\nHer heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a\n very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild\n interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers\n in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception\n of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he\n would let her dance for him.\n\n\n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed\n a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath\n for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor.\n He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false\n memories.", "The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\nThe Defender\n, commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled\n itself from its orbit around Procyon and met\nThe Invader\nwith giant\n fission torpedoes.\n\n\n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic\n Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men\n poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken\nDefender\n.\n\n\n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal\n and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the\n Scythians nine years to conquer\nThe Defender's\nouter shell. Then had\n come that final interview with her father.\n\n\n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had\n telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave\nThe\n Defender\n. Be on it.\"", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n\n\n \"Name?\"\n\n\n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n\n\n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name.\n Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply\n lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry\n corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally,\n where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n\n\n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have\n the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a\n way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran\n class. No—he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford\n another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with\n this cool murderess.", "Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was\n certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The\n chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length\n of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all\n possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen\n personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in\n the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n\n\n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns,\n sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He\n pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other\n wing.\"", "\"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the\n corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n\n\n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The\n guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was\n their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n\n\n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the\n inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n\n\n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the\n guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I\n have interesting information.\"\n\n\n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he\n could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the\n guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one\n another.", "\"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at\n her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and\n the others have gone.\"\n\n\n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n\n\n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly,\n and then followed him out.\n\n\n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of\n perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n\n\n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.", "\"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the\n duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n \"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my\n majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of\n its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak,\n but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n\n\n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n\n\n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n \"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient\n phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old\n count was right.\"\n\n\n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—", "He dropped his hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said with a quiet weariness. \"I\n shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke.\"\n Then: \"Have you ever seen me before?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact.\n\n\n \"Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n \"Do you have a son?\"\n\n\n \"No.\"\n\n\n His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back,\n surveying the courtyard and the dead. \"Gorph will be wondering what\n happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight.\"\n\n\n Apparently he suspected nothing.\nFather. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon.\nIII" ], [ "Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort,\n managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier\n working for—working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n\n\n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet,\n you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we\n cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"—winking\n artfully—\"and I'll see that—\"\n\n\n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and\n anxiety. He appeared to listen.", "In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn\n frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under\n certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n\n\n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some\n sort, who was studying her visa.\n\n\n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria—ah—\"—he looked at the visa\n suspiciously—\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to\n S'ria Gerek, here\"—he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back—\"I\n wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether\n they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to\n H.Q.?\"", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "\"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n\n\n \"Oh.\"\n\n\n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n\n\n \"To the personnel office.\"\n\n\n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group—two\n stories high, reasonably intact.\n\n\n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there\n with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and\n was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed\n her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene\n coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n\n\n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered\n something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.", "Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was\n certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The\n chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length\n of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all\n possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen\n personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in\n the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n\n\n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns,\n sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He\n pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other\n wing.\"", "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously,\n hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With\n satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind\n of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up\n behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first.\n He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards,\n he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on.\n Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any\n memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the\n recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully,\n and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for\n auditing.\nEvelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended\n from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly\n be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a\n similar ability in a mere clerk.\n\n\n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings\n were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either\n shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of\n radiation-remover was everywhere.\n\n\n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n\n\n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.", "Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple\nterif\nand following the\n thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated\n from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club\n somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on\n tiptoe.\n\n\n For the last thirty \"nights\"—the hours allotted to rest and sleep—it\n had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the\n office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official\n messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews.\n By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor\n his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to\n elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted\n out memory and knowledge.\n\n\n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"", "Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib\n gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He\n would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut\n short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind\n greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the\n recorder.\n\n\n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked\n tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n\n\n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n\n\n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n\n\n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles\n radius.\"\n\n\n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for\n passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"", "\"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar\n identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n\n\n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but\n her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled\n in her plan for destruction. She\nmust\nmake it a known quantity.\n\n\n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of\n course.\"\n\n\n \"What did he say about it?\"\n\n\n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and\n accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and\n that—well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about\n them.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all he said?\"", "As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and\n calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could\n feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that\n the Faeg had ceased firing.\nHer heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a\n very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild\n interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers\n in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception\n of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he\n would let her dance for him.\n\n\n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed\n a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath\n for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor.\n He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false\n memories.", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber." ], [ "She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would\n set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe,\n and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless\n grave of space.\n\n\n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon\n immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily\n over the memories of her past.\n\n\n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched\nThe Defender\ngrow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized\n battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian\n globe,\nThe Invader\n, sprang out of black space to enslave the budding\n Terran Confederacy,\nThe Defender\nwas unfinished, half-equipped, and\n undermanned.", "\"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about\n the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in\n the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained,\n provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin\n slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood\n pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there\n could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had\n pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly\n with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed\n over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened\n persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n\n\n The question remained—who would be the more frightened, she or the\n condemned inquisitor?", "Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved\n faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in\n the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He\n was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly\n onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches,\n thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards\n in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and\n the dull light in his brain went out.\nShe fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\nBreathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from\n behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man.", "\"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the\n corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n\n\n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The\n guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was\n their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n\n\n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the\n inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n\n\n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the\n guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I\n have interesting information.\"\n\n\n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he\n could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the\n guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one\n another.", "When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first\n night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed\n floor, and of falling.\n\n\n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own\n couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel\n of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur\n stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been\n installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them\n waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n\n\n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some\n two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a\n woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through\n a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.", "Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was\n explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because\n all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own\n men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not\n relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his\n underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of\n that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n\n\n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill\n them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n\n\n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped\n from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the\n Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the\n problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved\n more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the\n contrary if she could get him interested in her—", "Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was\n white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could\n be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n\n\n Her father.\n\n\n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment\n that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream.\n A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his\n eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read\n bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n\n\n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all\n prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It\n warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"", "For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite\n effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped\n the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam\n power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While\n he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the\n beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at\n least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of\n a woman.\nII", "In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her\n appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe\n was there awaiting it.\n\n\n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n \"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n\n\n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n\n\n He had not as yet looked at her.\n\n\n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered\n her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly\n twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n\n\n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank—was left standing.\n His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the\n killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their\n eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.", "\"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at\n her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and\n the others have gone.\"\n\n\n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n\n\n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly,\n and then followed him out.\n\n\n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of\n perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n\n\n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.", "Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born\n Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that\n of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black\n stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had\n supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n\n\n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and\n evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question:\n Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two\n months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot.\n Yes, he would shoot.", "She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given\n some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It\n would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in\n his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had\n combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring\n the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided\n yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n\n\n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said\n simply. \"I was told that\nyou\n, that is, I mean—\"\n\n\n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate\n loudly into her mechanical transcriber.", "\"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there\n is the last living Terran within\nThe Defender\n. It occurred to me that\n our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The\n Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's\n eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other\n nights—\"\n\n\n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted\n the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully,\n without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n\n\n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised\n the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed\n the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran\n officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground,\n face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.", "\"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight—an appeal\n from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and\n poured another glass of\nterif\n. \"Some fool inquisitor can't show\n proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n\n\n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n\n\n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him\n alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who\n tries for a little extra profit.\"\n\n\n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The\n stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n\n\n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in\n a languorous yawn.", "She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the\n balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n\n\n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were\n most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be\n seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner\n of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his\n abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely\n cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings—apparently\n identical—on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness\n and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an\n unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic\n of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel\n pleasures.", "Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy\n were complete strangers.\nBut the woman—!\n\"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home\n because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on\n Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general\n resemblance to the Tharn line.\n\n\n \"But—\ncan you deny that you are the woman\n?\"\n\n\n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n\n\n \"There seemed to be some similarity—\" she admitted. Her throat was\n suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know\n the woman.\n\n\n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the\n room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling\n scowl.", "The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a\n seal at its bottom.\n\n\n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n 'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n\n\n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n\n\n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor.\n She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n \"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n\n\n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n\n\n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n \"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of\n Zone One.\"", "As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and\n calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could\n feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that\n the Faeg had ceased firing.\nHer heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a\n very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild\n interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers\n in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception\n of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he\n would let her dance for him.\n\n\n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed\n a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath\n for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor.\n He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false\n memories.", "The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first\n with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n\n\n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n\n\n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her\n legs and walked toward him.\n\n\n He was studying her face very carefully.\n\n\n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she\n had to lean on the coping.\n\n\n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung\n over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the\n mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created\n for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be\n thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar\n completely.", "\"No. I shall die here.\"\n\n\n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then\n die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will\n destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are\n successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the\n battle.\"\n\n\n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're\n also working on a means for your escape—not only because you are\n Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent\n radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with\n our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n\n\n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle\n finality.\n\n\n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched\n herself back to the present.\n\n\n That time had come." ] ]
valid	51687	[ "Why did his girlfriend put such an emphasis on promptness?", "What did he want to ask his girlfriend?", "About how long did it take the elevator to travel one floor?", "Why didn't he just take the express elevator when the local did not arrive?", "Why didn't he take the stairs immediately when the elevator did not arrive?", "Why was he not able to call his girlfriend to say he would be late?", "Who was in the elevator?", "Why does the man never leave his apartment building?", "How many treaties were broken during the last war?", "How did living under a state of siege affect the project inhabitants?" ]	[ [ "She thought being late was rude", "She was a perfectionist", "She was conditioned by her work", "She was a controlling person" ], [ "To marry him forever", "If she loved him as much as he loved her", "To live with him forever", "To live with him for awhile" ], [ "half a minute", "1 minute", "2 to 3 minutes", "less than a quarter of a minute" ], [ "It didn't occur to him", "No one had used the express in many years", "The express did not stop at the 153rd floor", "The express did not stop at the 167th floor" ], [ "He had never been on the stairs before", "It didn't occur to him as an option", "He was not allowed to go on the stairs", "The door to the stairs was locked" ], [ "The phone system was down", "She refused to take his call", "Her phone was off the hook", "Her phone was busy" ], [ "A spy", "An ore-sled dispatcher", "A soldier", "An engineer" ], [ "He is locked in", "There is no way down to ground level", "He is afraid of radiation", "He doesn't want to be caught as a spy" ], [ "The treaty of Oslo plus many others", "Many of them", "All of them", "Only the treaty of Oslo" ], [ "They rarely thought about it", "They thought about it daily", "They all had to actively help with vigilance", "They never thought about it" ] ]	[ 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a\n harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a\n fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job,\n of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots,\n were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one\n waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other\n Project and had blown itself up.", "Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days.", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're\n lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n\n\n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been\n building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my\n mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this\n morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her\n place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the\n phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten\n o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"", "the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.", "\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun." ], [ "It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're\n lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n\n\n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been\n building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my\n mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this\n morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her\n place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the\n phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten\n o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.", "I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie,\n of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda\n to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about\n it.\n\n\n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included\n wrestling, judo and karati—talents I would prefer to disclose to him\n in my own fashion, when the time came.\n\n\n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the\n ore-sleds?\"\n\n\n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n\n\n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up?\n Don't you people ever test them?\"", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "\"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with\n boiling water.\"\n\n\n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two\n cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n\n\n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\nAnd now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which\n reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't\never\ngoing to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me\n and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n\n\n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n \"What do you do for a living?\"", "\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"", "the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.", "\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all", "\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.", "He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we\n came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us\n open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n\n\n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n\n\n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun\n stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't\n move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n\n\n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound.\n Which left me quite free to study him.", "\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"", "\"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with\n a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n\n\n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of\n course not!\"\n\n\n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same\n stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out\n of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia,\n before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n\n\n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.", "\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.", "Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days." ], [ "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.", "She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"", "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.", "She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "\"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with\n a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n\n\n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of\n course not!\"\n\n\n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same\n stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out\n of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia,\n before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n\n\n \"I have no idea,\" I told him." ], [ "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY", "It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.", "THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.", "She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.", "She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft." ], [ "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.", "THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.", "It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.", "She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we\n came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us\n open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n\n\n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n\n\n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun\n stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't\n move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n\n\n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound.\n Which left me quite free to study him.", "KEEP LOCKED\n\n\n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly\n guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible\n answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply\n have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed\n shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already.\n Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n\n\n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and\n the spy came out, waving a gun.\nIII\n\n\n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first\n place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous,\n in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the\n elevator shaft." ], [ "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days.", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're\n lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n\n\n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been\n building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my\n mind to do it—to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this\n morning—right after the egg yolk—and invited myself down to her\n place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the\n phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten\n o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.", "I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"", "\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"", "\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.", "\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.", "\"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked\n on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the\n radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly\n how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted\n to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed\n public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the\n Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job,\n and they knew it." ], [ "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY", "THE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n\n\n Illustrated by WEST\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Magazine October 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nHe was dangerously insane. He threatened\n \nto destroy everything that was noble and\n \ndecent—including my date with my girl!\nWhen the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken\n egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window\n sticking at full transparency—well, I won't go through the whole sorry\n list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put\n the roof on the city, as they say.", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean\n disconnected? Elevators don't\nget\ndisconnected!\" I told her.\n\n\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing\n was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n\n\n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it,\n giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as\n rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me\nwhy\nthe elevator is disconnected?\"\n\n\n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that——\"\n\n\n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her\n looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly\n at her screen and parroted her responses.", "She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.", "\"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection,\n a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten\n o'clock.\nI'm late!\n\" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize\n what you've\ndone\n, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she\n marry me, she won't even\nspeak\nto me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n\n\n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your—\"\n\n\n \"You\nunderstand\n?\" I trembled with speechless fury.", "Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we\n came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us\n open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n\n\n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n\n\n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun\n stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't\n move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n\n\n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound.\n Which left me quite free to study him." ], [ "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n\n\n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the\n door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n\n\n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs\n except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and\n down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of\n stairs since I was twelve years old.\n\n\n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators,\n didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was\n the use of stairs?", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time\n came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more\n than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and\n malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment\n at five minutes to ten.\n\n\n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away.\n It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I\n was giving myself plenty of time.\n\n\n But then the elevator didn't come.\n\n\n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't\n understand it.", "It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since\n last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and\n finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing,\n took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight\n steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n\n\n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a\n smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one\n time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked\n away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered\n the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with\n difficulty.\n\n\n I read them. They said:\nEMERGENCY ENTRANCE\n\n ELEVATOR SHAFT\n\n AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL\n\n ONLY", "\"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with\n a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n\n\n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of\n course not!\"\n\n\n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same\n stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out\n of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia,\n before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n\n\n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.", "The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of\n the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator\n that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred\n sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for\n either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than\n twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n\n\n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my\n watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If\n it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n\n\n It didn't arrive.\n\n\n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator\n would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to\n give her advance warning that I would be late?", "\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.", "He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony\n high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He\n wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked\n exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he\ndidn't\nlook like a\n spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he\n reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to\n my parents' apartment.\n\n\n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand\n at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n\n\n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I\n said.", "And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at\n the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back,\n and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one\n false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're\n friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n\n\n I nodded.\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as\n it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one\n emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I\n thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n\n\n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against\n the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile\n playing across his lips.", "\"Good,\" he said—just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from\n perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the\n opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending\n boots. The Army!\n\n\n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He\n said, \"Where do you live?\"\n\n\n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man.\n I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions\n promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to\n either escape or capture him.\n\n\n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility\n piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day\n was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door\n three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was\n hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the\n door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of\n the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud\n they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n\n\n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\nIt took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female\n receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the\n hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and——\"\n\n\n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she\n were growing very used to saying it.", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.", "Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second\n alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my\n apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white\n letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n\n\n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted\n to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to\n keep us from being interrupted.\n\n\n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the\n elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if\n the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute\n late.\n\n\n No matter. It didn't arrive.", "But now she was actually looking at\nme\n.\n\n\n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I\n would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just\n what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have\n ruined my life.\"\n\n\n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n\n\n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly\n than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom\n I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you\n understand me?\"\n\n\n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too\n preoccupied to notice it at the time.", "\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all", "She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen,\n revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay\n any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out,\n sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll\n understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it\n had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—\"\n she leaned even closer to the screen—\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\nII\n\n\n It was my turn to be stunned.\n\n\n I just gaped at her. \"A—a what?\"\n\n\n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and\n managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He\n jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think\n of to get him out.\"", "\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"" ], [ "Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical\n atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole\n world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or\n at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens\n which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected\n radioactive particles.\n\n\n However, what with all of the\nother\ntreaties which were broken during\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody\n was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there\n on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since\n they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to\n ask.", "And the Treaty of Oslo.\n\n\n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing\n nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of\n vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty\n of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added\n that just in case anyone happened to think of it only\ntactical\natomic\n weapons could be used. No\nstrategic\natomic weapons. (A tactical\n weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is\n something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody\n did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which\n meant that no Projects were bombed.", "Dr. Kilbillie—Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years\n old—had private names for every major war of the twentieth century.\n There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as\n World Wars One, Two, and Three.", "Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.", "\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "\"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as\n low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been\n that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He\n leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there\n now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building\n the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has\n the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the\n pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n\n\n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I\n didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.", "He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"", "\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.", "\"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked\n on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the\n radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly\n how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted\n to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed\n public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the\n Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job,\n and they knew it.", "\"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n \"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first\n giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little\n hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned\n around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his\n tail between his legs.\nThat's\nwhat he did!\"\n\n\n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme\n understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by\n saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n\n\n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac\n to watchful spy.\n\n\n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the\n room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and\n suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"", "\"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had\n adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy\n spy.\n\n\n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Well, of course.\"\n\n\n \"And what are\nthey\nsupposed to spy on?\"\n\n\n \"Well—\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even\n answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by\n one of the other projects.\"\n\n\n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n\n\n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified\n information.\"", "\"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with\n a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n\n\n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of\n course not!\"\n\n\n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same\n stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out\n of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia,\n before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n\n\n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.", "The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of\n many many factors, but two of the most important were the population\n explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course,\n meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any\n more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one\n century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to\n vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in\n tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000,\neverybody\nlived in\n Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make\n these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n (also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants,", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "the time. He was planning to tackle\nspace\n! The moon first, and then\n the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there,\n waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching\n out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\nI decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy,\n he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded\n politely.", "I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all", "\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.", "Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three\n years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time,\n shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five\n minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been\n killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from\n arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had\n happened—I'd broken a shoe lace—she refused to speak to me for four\n days." ], [ "Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had\n no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and\n completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our\n roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present\n threat of other projects had never been more for me—or for most other\n people either, I suspected—than occasional ore-sleds that didn't\n return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the\n building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny\n radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and\n bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might\n be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And\n within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers\n merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external\n dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr.\n Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.", "The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of\n many many factors, but two of the most important were the population\n explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course,\n meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any\n more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one\n century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to\n vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in\n tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000,\neverybody\nlived in\n Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make\n these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n (also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants,", "shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of\n other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely\n self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements,\n separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot\n ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the\n Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things,\n the population explosion.", "Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical\n atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole\n world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or\n at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens\n which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected\n radioactive particles.\n\n\n However, what with all of the\nother\ntreaties which were broken during\n the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody\n was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there\n on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since\n they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to\n ask.", "\"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked\n on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the\n radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly\n how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted\n to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed\n public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the\n Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job,\n and they knew it.", "\"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as\n low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been\n that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He\n leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there\n now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building\n the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has\n the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the\n pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n\n\n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I\n didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.", "\"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger\n again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for\n this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should\n you think\nthey\nmight see some advantage in attacking\nyou\n?\"\n\n\n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I\n said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n\n\n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like\n all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n\n\n \"Now, wait a minute—\"", "I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could\n leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have\n read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He\n said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill\n anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until\n the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able\n to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any\n silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n\n\n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n\n\n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got\n any chico coffee?\"\n\n\n \"Yes.\"", "Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary\n information), the Project had been built when there still had been such\n things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which\n were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government\n had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which\n required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the\n city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n\n\n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after\n all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a\n flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n\n\n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could.\n If the door would open.", "And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking\n Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness\n was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it\n go at that.\nBut now there was a spy in the elevator.\n\n\n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how\n many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls\n were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the\n other side of them.\n\n\n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n\n\n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen.\n I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the\n elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda\n would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient\n reason for me to be late.", "He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped\n back into the chair.\n\n\n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then\n looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that\n I\nhad\nfound indications that you people were planning to attack my\n Project?\"\n\n\n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to\n attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n\n\n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"", "\"Of course,\" I said.\n\n\n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn\n fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n\n\n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to\n answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I—I wouldn't\n know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n\n\n \"Military equipment?\nWhat\nmilitary equipment? Your Army is supplied\n with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n\n\n \"The defenses—\" I started.\n\n\n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the\n rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what\n other defenses are there? None.\"", "\"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's\n information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and\n their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n\n\n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them\n before de-radiating them?\"\n\"No. Why should we?\"\n\n\n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n\n\n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n\n\n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself\n than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into\n your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n\n\n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told\n him.", "\"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You\n think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That\n fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm\nnot\na spy, and I'm\n going to tell you what I am.\"\n\n\n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n\n\n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here.\n I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to\n protect me.\"\n\n\n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the\n violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.", "\"Well—but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n\n\n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from\n outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims\n the elevator at them.\"\n\n\n That sounded impossible. \"He\naims\nthe elevator?\"\n\n\n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush\n anybody who goes after him.\"\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n\n\n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could\n hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're\n afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, no!\"", "She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she\n glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n\n\n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been\n told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all\n the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n\n\n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting\n that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many\n more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?", "And then the elevator didn't come.\nUntil then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from\n ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg—I couldn't very\n well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment\n and I was hungry—and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that\n gaspingly transparent window—one hundred and fifty-three stories\n straight down to slag—I kept going over and over my prepared proposal\n speeches, trying to select the most effective one.", "Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a\n harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a\n fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job,\n of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots,\n were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one\n waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other\n Project and had blown itself up.", "\"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it\n took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He\n started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion\n as he talked. \"Is this the\nnatural\nlife of man? It is not. Is this\n even a\ndesirable\nlife for man? It is\ndefinitely\nnot.\" He spun back\n to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed\n it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n \"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was\n growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all", "\"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's\n what\nyour\nspies are doing, and if\nI'm\na spy, then it follows that\n I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n\n\n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n\n\n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for\n indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n\n\n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's\nnot\nmy\n job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I\nwere\na spy,\nthen\nthat would be my job!\"\nThe maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n \"All right, whatever you say.\"" ] ]
valid	20027	[ "What type of joke does the author make about his coworkers?", "Why did the author want the tasters to taste lagers?", "How did the author classify the beers?", "What did not happen during the experiment?", "How did the tasters feel during the experiment", "What is true about the results?", "How did the author's favorite beer test in the experiment?" ]	[ [ "A joke about writing skills", "A joke about gender stereotypes", "A joke about laziness", "A joke about alcoholics" ], [ "They all sneer at lagers", "It is the most common beer in the US", "It is his favorite beer", "It would be new to most of them" ], [ "He used prices at his local store", "He used nationwide average prices", "He used his favorite beer categories", "He asked the tasters to create 3 categories" ], [ "All tasters had the same amount of each beer", "All tasters spent the same amount of time tasting", "All tasters tried the beers in the same order", "All tasters ranked the beers" ], [ "Dismayed", "Confident", "Drunk", "Happy" ], [ "A majority of the tasters chose the same favorite beer", "People found it hard to rate a favorite beer from the 10", "No favorite beer was also rated as a least favorite beer by a different taster", "All tasters rated a favorite beer of the 10" ], [ "No one liked it", "It had the best value for the cost", "It was not rated as worth the money it costs", "Almost everyone loved it" ] ]	[ 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.", "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers .", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)", "was over.", "Booze You Can Use \n\n I love beer, but lately I've been wondering: Am I getting full value for my beer dollar? As I've stocked up on microbrews and fancy imports, I've told myself that their taste is deeper, richer, more complicated, more compelling--and therefore worth the 50 percent to 200 percent premium they command over cheap mass products or even mainstream Bud. And yet, I've started to wonder, is this just costly snobbery? If I didn't know what I was drinking, could I even tell whether it was something from Belgium, vs. something from Pabst?", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack." ], [ "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers .", "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)" ], [ "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "Pete's Wicked Lager. National-scale \"microbrew.\" $1.11 per pint. (Deep-discount sale. List price $1.46 per pint.) Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few American \"microbreweries\" produce lagers of any sort. Pete's is called a lager but was visibly darker than, say, Bud. \n\n Samuel Adams Boston Lager. National macro-microbrew. $1.56 per pint. (That was list price. The following week it was on sale for $1.25 per pint, which would have made it do far better in the value rankings.) Calls itself America's Best Beer. Has dark orangey-amber color that was obviously different from all other lagers tested. \n\n Mid-Range \n\n Budweiser. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Self-styled King of Beers.", "1) Buy Sam Adams when they want an individual glass of lager to be as good as it can be. \n\n 2) Buy Busch at all other times, since it gives them the maximum taste and social influence per dollar invested. \n\n The detailed rankings and comments for all tasters on all beers may be found . \n\n Next installment: fancy beers ." ], [ "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "was over.", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate." ], [ "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)" ], [ "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "time limit for the tasting, apart from the two-hour limit in which we had reserved the conference room. One experimenter (the boss of most of the others there) rushed through his rankings in 10 minutes and gave the lowest overall scores.", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:" ], [ "After tasting the beers, each taster rated beers A through J on the following standards: \n\n Overall quality points: Zero to 100, zero as undrinkable and 100 as dream beer. Purely subjective measure of how well each taster liked each beer. \n\n Price category: The tasters knew that each beer came from the expensive, medium, or cheap category--and they had to guess where A through J belonged. A rating of 3 was most expensive, 2 for average, 1 for cheap. \n\n Description: \"Amusing presumption,\" \"fresh on the palate,\" \"crap,\" etc. \n\n Best and Worst: Tasters chose one Best and one Worst from the \"flight\" (as they would call it if this were a wine test). \n\n When the session was over, results for each beer were collected in a grid like this:", "The neat 6:3:2 mathematical relationship among the price groups should be noted. The high-end beers cost roughly three times as much as the cheapest ones, and twice as much as the middle range. The beers used in the experiment were as follows: \n\n High End \n\n Grolsch. Import lager (Holland). $1.67 per pint. (See an important .) Chosen for the test because of its beer-snob chic; also, one of my favorite beers. \n\n Heineken. Import lager (Holland). $1.53 per pint. (Sale price. List price was $1.71 per pint.) Chosen because it is America's long-standing most popular import.", "1 Philosophy : The experiment was designed to take place in two separate sessions. The first session, whose results are revealed here, involved beers exclusively from the lager group. Lagers are the light-colored, relatively lightly flavored brews that make up most of the vattage of beer consumption in the United States. Imported lagers include Foster's, Corona, and Heineken. Budweiser is a lager; so are Coors, Miller, most light beers, and most bargain-basement beers.", "I'm afraid we'll never know the answer to that exact question, since I'm not brave enough to expose my own taste to a real test. But I'm brave enough to expose my friends'. This summer, while working at Microsoft, I put out a call for volunteers for a \"science of beer\" experiment. Testing candidates had to meet two criteria: 1) they had to like beer; and 2) they had to think they knew the difference between mass products and high-end microbrews. \n\n Twelve tasters were selected, mainly on the basis of essays detailing their background with beer. A few were selected because they had been bosses in the Microsoft department where I worked. All were software managers or developers ; all were male, but I repeat myself. Nearly half had grown up outside the United States or lived abroad for enough years to speak haughtily about American macrobrews. Most tasters came in talking big about the refinement of their palates. When they entered the laboratory (which mere moments before had been a Microsoft conference room), they discovered an experiment set up on the following lines:", "Here again one costly beer-- Sam Adams --shows up well, while another, Grolsch , continues to struggle, but not as badly as the medium-price Miller Genuine Draft . Sam's success could reflect its quasi-mislabeling, presenting a strong-flavored beer as a \"lager.\" It could also reflect that participants simply thought it was good. (Only one guessed it was Sam Adams.) As for Grolsch ... it is very strongly hopped, which can seem exotic if you know you're drinking a pricey import but simply bad if you don't. MGD overtook Grolsch in the race for the bottom because, while many people hated Grolsch, some actually liked it; no one liked MGD. There are some other important findings buried in the chart, but they're clearest if we move to ...", "The taster who took the longest, nearly the full two hours, had the ratings that came closest to the relative price of the beers. (This man grew up in Russia.) The experimenters were asked not to compare impressions until the test", "Beer snobs sneer at lagers, because they look so watery and because so many bad beers are in the group. But the lager test came first, for two reasons. One, lagers pose the only honest test of the ability to tell expensive from dirt-cheap beers. There are very few inexpensive nut brown ales, India pale ales, extra special bitters, or other fancy-pantsy, microbrew-style, nonlager drinks. So if you want to see whether people can taste a money difference among beers of the same type, you've got to go lager. Two, the ideal of public service requires lager coverage. This is what most people drink, so new findings about lager quality could do the greatest good for the greatest number. \n\n In the second stage of the experiment, held several weeks later, the same testers reassembled to try the fancier beers. The results of that tasting will be reported separately, once Microsoft's mighty Windows 2000-powered central computers have .", "To see all the grids for all the beers, click . \n\n 4 Data Analysis: The ratings led to four ways to assess the quality of the beers. \n\n 1. Best and Worst. Least scientific, yet clearest cut in its results. Eleven tasters named a favorite beer. Ten of them chose Sam Adams . The other one chose Busch , the cheapest of all beers in the sample. (The taster who made this choice advises Microsoft on what new features should go into the next version of Word.) Busch was the only beer to receive both a Best and a Worst vote. \n\n Bottom rankings were also clear. Of the 11 naming a Worst beer, five chose Grolsch , the most expensive beer in the survey. Results by best/worst preference:", "2. Overall preference points . This was a subtler and more illuminating look at similar trends. The beers were ranked on \"corrected average preference points\"--an average of the zero-to-100 points assigned by each taster, corrected, just like ice skating scores, by throwing out the highest and lowest score each beer received. The tasters used widely varying scales--one confining all beers to the range between zero and 30, another giving 67 as his lowest mark. But the power of our corrected ranking system surmounted such difficulties to provide these results:", "3) Value for Money: the Taste-o-meter® . Since this experiment's real purpose was to find the connection between cost and taste, the next step was to adjust subjective preference points by objective cost. The Taste-o-meter rating for each beer was calculated by dividing its corrected average preference rating by its price per pint . If Beer X had ratings twice as high as Beer Y, but it cost three times as much, Beer Y would have the higher Taste-o-meter rating. When the 10 beers are reranked this way, the results are:", "The Safeway that supplied the beers didn't carry any true bargain-basement products, such as \"Red, White, and Blue,\" \"Old German,\" or the one with generic printing that just says \"Beer.\" The experiment was incomplete in that regard, but no tester complained about a shortage of bad beer. Also, with heavy heart, the test administrator decided to leave malt liquors, such as Mickey's (with its trademark wide-mouth bottles), off the list. They have the air of cheapness but actually cost more than Bud, probably because they offer more alcohol per pint.", "In a familiar pattern, we have Grolsch bringing up the rear, with less than one-quarter the Taste-o-meter power of Busch , the No. 1 value beer. The real news in this ranking is: the success of Busch ; the embarrassment of Heineken and Miller Genuine Draft , an expensive and a medium beer, respectively, which share the cellar with the hapless Grolsch ; and the nearly Busch-like value of Milwaukee's Best and Schmidt's . It is safe to say that none of our testers would have confessed respect for Busch, Milwaukee's Best, or Schmidt's before the contest began. But when they didn't know what they were drinking, they found these beers much closer in quality to \"best\" beers than the prices would indicate.", "We won't even speak of poor Grolsch or MGD any more. The story here is the amazing snob-power-per-dollar of Busch , closely followed by Schmidt's . A dollar spent on Busch gets you three times the impressiveness of a dollar spent in Grolsch, useful information when planning a party. Not everyone liked Busch--one called it \"crap\"; another, \"Water. LITE.\" But the magic of statistics lets us see the larger trends. \n\n 5 Conclusions . Further study is needed. But on the basis of evidence to date, we can say: \n\n \n\n One and only one beer truly survived the blind taste test. This is Sam Adams , which 10 tasters independently ranked \"best\" without knowing they were drinking a fancy beer. (They knew it was darker than the others but couldn't have known whether this was some trick off-brand sneaked into the test.)", "2 Materials : Ten lagers were selected for testing, representing three distinct price-and-quality groups. Through the magic of the market, it turns out that lager prices nearly all fall into one of three ranges: \n\n a) High end at $1.50 to $1.60 per pint. (\"Per pint\" was the unit-pricing measure at the Safeway in Bellevue, Wash., that was the standard supply source for the experiment. There are 4.5 pints per six pack, so the high-end price point is around $7 per six pack.) \n\n b) Middle at around 80 cents per pint, or under $4 per six pack. \n\n c) Low at 50 cents to 55 cents per pint, or under $3 per six pack.", "Don't serve Grolsch unless you know people will consider it exotic, or unless you've invited me. \n\n Apart from Sam Adams and Grolsch, the tasters really had trouble telling one beer from another . This conclusion is implicit in many of the findings, but it was really obvious during the experiment itself, when the confident look of men-who-know-their-beer quickly turned to dismay and panic as they realized that all the lagers tasted pretty much the same. \n\n \n\n The evidence suggests other implications about specific beers. For instance, the comments about Coors Light are much less enthusiastic than the average-or-better numerical rankings. Most tasters paused to complain about it--\"fizzy and soapy\"--before giving it reasonable marks. But the main implication, and the most useful consumer news from this study, is a radically simplified buying philosophy for lager beers. Based on this study, rational consumers should:", "coding scheme was the same for all tasters. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the sample beers. (Total intake, for a taster who drank all of every sample: 30 ounces, or two and a half normal beers. Not", "3 Experimental procedure: Each taster sat down before an array of 10 plastic cups labeled A through J. The A-to-J", "lethal; also, they were just going back to software coding when they were done.) Saltines were available to cleanse the palate. The cups were red opaque plastic, so tasters could judge the beer's color only from above. There was no", "4) Social Value for Money: the Snob-o-meter® . In addition to saying which beers they preferred, the tasters were asked to estimate whether the beers were expensive or not--in effect, to judge whether other people would like and be impressed by the beers. One taster perfectly understood the intention of this measure when he said, in comments about Beer B (Heineken), \"I don't like it, but I bet it's what the snobs buy.\" The Snob-o-meter rating for each beer is similar to the Taste-o-meter. You start with the \"group\" ranking--whether the tasters thought the beer belonged in Group 1 (cheap), 2, or 3--and then divide by the price per pint. The result tells you the social-mobility power of the beer--how impressive it will seem, relative to how much it costs. The Snob-o-meter rankings are:", "Pete's Wicked Lager. National-scale \"microbrew.\" $1.11 per pint. (Deep-discount sale. List price $1.46 per pint.) Like the next one, this put us into the gray zone for a lager test. Few American \"microbreweries\" produce lagers of any sort. Pete's is called a lager but was visibly darker than, say, Bud. \n\n Samuel Adams Boston Lager. National macro-microbrew. $1.56 per pint. (That was list price. The following week it was on sale for $1.25 per pint, which would have made it do far better in the value rankings.) Calls itself America's Best Beer. Has dark orangey-amber color that was obviously different from all other lagers tested. \n\n Mid-Range \n\n Budweiser. $.84 per pint. (Sale. List price $.89 per pint.) Self-styled King of Beers." ] ]
valid	20020	[ "What is the message of the piece?", "What is Gingrich’s role in the piece?", "What was the important thing for Linda to do?", "Who are the parties in the story that think it’s time to move Monica to another office?", "What is the musical’s relationship like between Monica and Linda?", "What are some of the feelings that Bill’s character has in the story in the correct order from start to finish?", "How does the musical number portray the relationship between Bill and Monica?", "Why would the president need an intern?", "What happened with the impending government shut down at the opening of the musical number?", "What is the nature of Monica and Bill’s interactions in the musical?" ]	[ [ "Although wrongdoings happened, the public seemed to think what they had was better than making a change", "There is no place for personal affairs in the political space and they will not distract congress", "Politicians who have affairs will not be found out", "A president can be removed from office for an affair" ], [ "He intercepts talk of the affair and is the whistleblower", "He is the lawyer for Lewinsky", "He and Linda are congress people", "He organizes impeachment, eventually resigns" ], [ "Cover up the details for Monica", "Speak with the president", "Deny ever hearing Monica tell the story", "Get a recording of Monica telling the story" ], [ "Betty and Starr", "Evelyn and Betty", "Starr and Newt", "Newt and Evelyn" ], [ "Monica and Linda conspired together to hatch the plan", "Monica keeps reiterating the story over and over in different ways to Linda", "Linda does not believe what Monica is telling here and discredits it", "Linda presses for details and Monica obliges" ], [ "Surprise, secrecy, humility", "Loneliness, contempt, vulnerability, disbelief", "Loneliness, violence, anger, disbelief", "Truthfulness, shame, justice" ], [ "Monica knew Bill before she became his intern and was skeptical of his conduct", "Monica and Bill kept their relationship entirely a secret", "Bill sought out Monica specifically to be his intern", "Monica led Bill on and seduced him" ], [ "The intern would organize things for the other Oval office staff", "To save money during a government shut down", "He never did have an intern", "It was a cover up to keep the affair going" ], [ "The shutdown threat is only mentioned at the start and not again", "The government shut down entirely", "The shutdown caused greater interest in the president’s personal life because there was nothing else to focus on", "The shutdown was avoided with the actions of the President" ], [ "Bill sends Monica letters and asks her to be his intern", "Monica brings Bill desserts and visits at busy, stressful times", "Monica shows up at less busy times and brings presents", "Bill avoids Monica but she is persistent in he pursuit" ] ]	[ 1, 4, 4, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "[The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] \n\n \"President Lonely\" (a ballad) \n\n CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats \n\n Who fulfill my every thought. \n\n And soldiers, sailors, and Marines \n\n To fight battles I want fought. \n\n There's no one who's got more power, \n\n I'm the leader of all that's free \n\n But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just \n\n Lonely. \n\n I'm President Lonely. \n\n But I guess I'll just have to muddle through.", "All he's got is some recordings \n\n Made by a vengeful snitch. \n\n I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that b-- \n\n A vast right-wing conspiracy \n\n Is using her to beat on me. \n\n They wanna torpedo my agenda \n\n They hate me and Hillary. \n\n But I will never let them ruin \n\n Our dreams for a better world. \n\n I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that \n\n Girl.", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "\"I Never Have\" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) \n\n CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, \n\n An act my lawyers won't allow. \n\n I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, \n\n I just can't say a word right now. \n\n But I don't know why she'd say these things \n\n Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that n-- \n\n Starr has spent $40 million, \n\n There's desperation on his face. \n\n An utter waste of public money, \n\n A prosecutorial disgrace.", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown.", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!" ], [ "[Clinton's enemies reject his apology, and soon the House of Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT GINGRICH here discloses his approach.] \n\n \"Bring 'em Down\" (dark, moody) \n\n GINGRICH: Mustn't seem to be too cheerful, \n\n Mustn't overreach, \n\n Must remember to seem unhappy \n\n That we're going to impeach. \n\n Must remember to remain sober \n\n As we undertake this chore. \n\n At the same time, let's remember \n\n To pin some stuff on Gore. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Sure, they were elected,", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking," ], [ "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown.", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "Flying in their planes. \n\n CLINTON: And here at the White House \n\n My staff should remain. \n\n PANETTA \n\n [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. \n\n CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers \n\n To take a few days off. \n\n Tell the maids and cooks and butlers \n\n To go play themselves some golf. \n\n We have to do without the clerks \n\n Let them all go home. \n\n CURRIE: What about the secretaries? \n\n Who will get the phones? \n\n CLINTON", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "ICKES: The president is just as firm \n\n The die, it seems, is cast. \n\n PANETTA: Without a budget passed by Congress \n\n The government will close. \n\n All of the workers \n\n Will be sent home on furloughs. \n\n CLINTON \n\n [speaking] : Well, wait a second--not all of them. We'll need to keep some essential personnel. \n\n PANETTA: The Army and the Navy \n\n Will need to stay in place. \n\n ICKES: Also those at NASA \n\n Who keep the shuttle up in space. \n\n PANETTA: We'll need to keep the pilots", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things." ], [ "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "Flying in their planes. \n\n CLINTON: And here at the White House \n\n My staff should remain. \n\n PANETTA \n\n [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. \n\n CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers \n\n To take a few days off. \n\n Tell the maids and cooks and butlers \n\n To go play themselves some golf. \n\n We have to do without the clerks \n\n Let them all go home. \n\n CURRIE: What about the secretaries? \n\n Who will get the phones? \n\n CLINTON", "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high." ], [ "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "\"I Never Have\" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) \n\n CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, \n\n An act my lawyers won't allow. \n\n I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, \n\n I just can't say a word right now. \n\n But I don't know why she'd say these things \n\n Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that n-- \n\n Starr has spent $40 million, \n\n There's desperation on his face. \n\n An utter waste of public money, \n\n A prosecutorial disgrace.", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown." ], [ "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "[The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] \n\n \"President Lonely\" (a ballad) \n\n CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats \n\n Who fulfill my every thought. \n\n And soldiers, sailors, and Marines \n\n To fight battles I want fought. \n\n There's no one who's got more power, \n\n I'm the leader of all that's free \n\n But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just \n\n Lonely. \n\n I'm President Lonely. \n\n But I guess I'll just have to muddle through.", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "All he's got is some recordings \n\n Made by a vengeful snitch. \n\n I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that b-- \n\n A vast right-wing conspiracy \n\n Is using her to beat on me. \n\n They wanna torpedo my agenda \n\n They hate me and Hillary. \n\n But I will never let them ruin \n\n Our dreams for a better world. \n\n I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that \n\n Girl.", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "\"I Never Have\" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) \n\n CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, \n\n An act my lawyers won't allow. \n\n I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, \n\n I just can't say a word right now. \n\n But I don't know why she'd say these things \n\n Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that n-- \n\n Starr has spent $40 million, \n\n There's desperation on his face. \n\n An utter waste of public money, \n\n A prosecutorial disgrace.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "[Clinton's enemies reject his apology, and soon the House of Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT GINGRICH here discloses his approach.] \n\n \"Bring 'em Down\" (dark, moody) \n\n GINGRICH: Mustn't seem to be too cheerful, \n\n Mustn't overreach, \n\n Must remember to seem unhappy \n\n That we're going to impeach. \n\n Must remember to remain sober \n\n As we undertake this chore. \n\n At the same time, let's remember \n\n To pin some stuff on Gore. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Sure, they were elected,", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]", "Flying in their planes. \n\n CLINTON: And here at the White House \n\n My staff should remain. \n\n PANETTA \n\n [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. \n\n CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers \n\n To take a few days off. \n\n Tell the maids and cooks and butlers \n\n To go play themselves some golf. \n\n We have to do without the clerks \n\n Let them all go home. \n\n CURRIE: What about the secretaries? \n\n Who will get the phones? \n\n CLINTON" ], [ "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "\"I Never Have\" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) \n\n CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, \n\n An act my lawyers won't allow. \n\n I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, \n\n I just can't say a word right now. \n\n But I don't know why she'd say these things \n\n Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that n-- \n\n Starr has spent $40 million, \n\n There's desperation on his face. \n\n An utter waste of public money, \n\n A prosecutorial disgrace.", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "[The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] \n\n \"President Lonely\" (a ballad) \n\n CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats \n\n Who fulfill my every thought. \n\n And soldiers, sailors, and Marines \n\n To fight battles I want fought. \n\n There's no one who's got more power, \n\n I'm the leader of all that's free \n\n But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just \n\n Lonely. \n\n I'm President Lonely. \n\n But I guess I'll just have to muddle through.", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "All he's got is some recordings \n\n Made by a vengeful snitch. \n\n I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that b-- \n\n A vast right-wing conspiracy \n\n Is using her to beat on me. \n\n They wanna torpedo my agenda \n\n They hate me and Hillary. \n\n But I will never let them ruin \n\n Our dreams for a better world. \n\n I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that \n\n Girl.", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]" ], [ "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown.", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "When the president crosses the line. \n\n It may have seemed like dirty pool \n\n To drag his people 'fore the jury. \n\n We wasted lots of Vernon's time, \n\n May have busted Bettie Currie. \n\n His aides aren't the innocent bystanders \n\n As they claim when they moan and whine. \n\n They won't say what they know full well: \n\n The president crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n I'd be a nitwit not to bend a bit \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n The talking heads are accusing me", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "Flying in their planes. \n\n CLINTON: And here at the White House \n\n My staff should remain. \n\n PANETTA \n\n [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. \n\n CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers \n\n To take a few days off. \n\n Tell the maids and cooks and butlers \n\n To go play themselves some golf. \n\n We have to do without the clerks \n\n Let them all go home. \n\n CURRIE: What about the secretaries? \n\n Who will get the phones? \n\n CLINTON", "[The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] \n\n \"President Lonely\" (a ballad) \n\n CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats \n\n Who fulfill my every thought. \n\n And soldiers, sailors, and Marines \n\n To fight battles I want fought. \n\n There's no one who's got more power, \n\n I'm the leader of all that's free \n\n But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just \n\n Lonely. \n\n I'm President Lonely. \n\n But I guess I'll just have to muddle through.", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast." ], [ "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "ICKES: The president is just as firm \n\n The die, it seems, is cast. \n\n PANETTA: Without a budget passed by Congress \n\n The government will close. \n\n All of the workers \n\n Will be sent home on furloughs. \n\n CLINTON \n\n [speaking] : Well, wait a second--not all of them. We'll need to keep some essential personnel. \n\n PANETTA: The Army and the Navy \n\n Will need to stay in place. \n\n ICKES: Also those at NASA \n\n Who keep the shuttle up in space. \n\n PANETTA: We'll need to keep the pilots", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "[Clinton's enemies reject his apology, and soon the House of Representatives begins the long process of impeachment. NEWT GINGRICH here discloses his approach.] \n\n \"Bring 'em Down\" (dark, moody) \n\n GINGRICH: Mustn't seem to be too cheerful, \n\n Mustn't overreach, \n\n Must remember to seem unhappy \n\n That we're going to impeach. \n\n Must remember to remain sober \n\n As we undertake this chore. \n\n At the same time, let's remember \n\n To pin some stuff on Gore. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Sure, they were elected,", "[The advisers depart, leaving President Clinton alone. He turns introspective.] \n\n \"President Lonely\" (a ballad) \n\n CLINTON: I've got deputies and bureaucrats \n\n Who fulfill my every thought. \n\n And soldiers, sailors, and Marines \n\n To fight battles I want fought. \n\n There's no one who's got more power, \n\n I'm the leader of all that's free \n\n But if you subtract the flags and lackeys, I'm just \n\n Lonely. \n\n I'm President Lonely. \n\n But I guess I'll just have to muddle through.", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown.", "Flying in their planes. \n\n CLINTON: And here at the White House \n\n My staff should remain. \n\n PANETTA \n\n [speaking] : But even here at the White House, some adjustments will be required. \n\n CLINTON: OK, tell the ushers \n\n To take a few days off. \n\n Tell the maids and cooks and butlers \n\n To go play themselves some golf. \n\n We have to do without the clerks \n\n Let them all go home. \n\n CURRIE: What about the secretaries? \n\n Who will get the phones? \n\n CLINTON", "Twice, in point of fact. \n\n Voters obviously were bewildered \n\n To have made a choice like that. \n\n Now, like charging linemen, \n\n We'll move in for the sack. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n Bring 'em down. \n\n \n\n [The House votes to hold impeachment hearings. But just a few weeks later, the midterm elections, which are expected to go the GOP's way, are held. Contrary to predictions, the Democrats pick up seats, and the GOP's obsession with scandal is repudiated. Gingrich resigns, and the practical chances of Clinton's removal evaporate. As the show ends, we hear from Starr, Lewinsky, and Clinton.]", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "That must mean I'm a pretty good president, \n\n Though how, I don't think I know. \n\n But obviously I'm not Starr or Gingrich, \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n Which may be why they love me so. \n\n [Curtain.]", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high." ], [ "MONICA!\nThe White House may have been in crisis all year, but the events were less the stuff of great drama than of a farcical musical comedy. Hey, wait a minute--let's put on a show! \n\n The time: November 1995. \n\n The House Republicans, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, are insisting on their version of the budget. President Bill Clinton is stubbornly rejecting it. The Republicans have taken a bold option: They will just refuse to pass a budget, and they'll let the government shut down. In the Oval Office, BILL CLINTON meets with advisers LEON PANETTA and HAROLD ICKES and secretary BETTY CURRIE to discuss this development. \n\n \"The Shutdown\" (upbeat production number) \n\n PANETTA: The Republicans have positions \n\n To which they're clinging fast.", "Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old girlfriends dish the latest dirt. \n\n GOLDBERG: I got tickets \n\n To the opera, \n\n Bloomie's says I've got $40 due, \n\n I lost a filling \n\n At lunch on Thursday. \n\n That's it for me, \n\n Now tell me what's up with you. \n\n TRIPP: My friend Monica? \n\n From the White House? \n\n I'm pretty sure what she's saying here is true. \n\n It seems this Monica chick \n\n Has been sucking the president's--", "TRIPP: That's so weird! What did he think? That you'd go blabbin' this to the whole world? \n\n LEWINSKY: I mean--rilly! Hey, what's that clicking? \n\n TRIPP: It's just my gum. \n\n LEWINSKY: Oh--OK! \n\n [As the relationship between Clinton and Monica continues, some members of the White House staff become worried about the prudence of continuing the relationship with so much potential for scandal. This song is a conversation between Betty Currie, who, though worried, still thinks Monica is a good person, and the rather stonier EVELYN LIEBERMAN .] \n\n \"Time to Go\" \n\n CURRIE: They go back there, \n\n They're just talking,", "LIEBERMAN: Still the Secret Service wears a frown. \n\n They shouldn't worry, he pats her down. \n\n But I'm not kidding, it's time for her to go. \n\n CURRIE: Maybe she would like the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Good idea--don't wait! \n\n CURRIE: Studly guys work at the Pentagon. \n\n LIEBERMAN: Let's get Clinton's head on straight! \n\n CURRIE: He comes back \n\n From Easter services, \n\n Soon she's bopping in the door. \n\n LIEBERMAN: \"Hallelujah, He Is Risen\"", "TRIPP: And then what happened? \n\n \"What Went On\" (upbeat) \n\n LEWINSKY: Then I led him on. \n\n I showed him my thong, \n\n I let him take a long and ling'ring look. \n\n I led him on. \n\n He studied my thong, \n\n And from that point I had the president hooked. \n\n That night when I took the president some pizza, \n\n I made sure that he knew that he could have a piece. \n\n We went into the hallway by his study \n\n And dispensed with formalities. \n\n TRIPP: Oh please go on! \n\n You must go on!", "Come on, girlfriend, \n\n Spill, spill, spill, spill, spill! \n\n Now go on, \n\n Please go on. \n\n Did Clinton let you say hi to Little Bill? \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: His lips and mine locked in a kiss fantastic, \n\n His hands roved freely 'neath my blouse, \n\n I reached into the presidential trousers, \n\n And he got a phone call from a member of the House. \n\n So I went on, \n\n While he talked on the phone, \n\n I took a position before him on my knees, \n\n And I went on. \n\n And he talked on.", "Shouldn't inspire thoughts so sizzlin'. \n\n Yes, it's really time for Monica to go. \n\n \n\n [Times passes. Monica moves to the Pentagon, but the relationship intermittently continues. Meanwhile, Paula Jones sues the president for sexual harassment, and it seems clear that before long, Clinton will have to testify under oath. Two close observers of those developments are old friends Linda Tripp and LUCIENNE GOLDBERG , who is friendly with lawyers for Jones and lawyers in the office of Independent Counsel KENNETH STARR . One day, Tripp and Goldberg talk on the phone.] \n\n \"Talk, Talk, Chat, Chat\" (sprightly) \n\n GOLDBERG and TRIPP: Talk, talk, \n\n Chat, chat, \n\n Two old galpals swap the latest word.", "I'm sure she has a very thirsty mind. \n\n LIEBERMAN: I don't mind a girl who thinks, \n\n It's just what she picks to drink. \n\n Betty, it's Lewinsky's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She brings him \n\n Little presents. \n\n She really is a very thoughtful soul. \n\n LIEBERMAN: It's not the junk I mind as much \n\n As her up real close and personal touch. \n\n I tell ya, it's Miss Monica's time to go. \n\n CURRIE: She never comes \n\n When he's really busy. \n\n Rarely is there anyone around.", "\"I Never Have\" (performance should build in tempo and intensity) \n\n CLINTON: You know I'd like to answer questions, \n\n An act my lawyers won't allow. \n\n I'll give you more not less, sooner not later, \n\n I just can't say a word right now. \n\n But I don't know why she'd say these things \n\n Her head's full of who knows what. But I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that n-- \n\n Starr has spent $40 million, \n\n There's desperation on his face. \n\n An utter waste of public money, \n\n A prosecutorial disgrace.", "GOLDBERG: Oh that's sick! \n\n TRIPP: And the two of them are going to lie about it, \n\n Too. \n\n GOLDBERG: Back up, Linda, \n\n Did I hear you rightly? \n\n Clinton got into an intern's pants? \n\n God, this news is manna, Linda! \n\n At last our cause will finally have it's chance! \n\n TRIPP: Oh, you're a dreamer Luci! \n\n There'll be headlines, then he'll pull off an \n\n Escape. \n\n He'll spin the story, he'll turn the tables--", "The cheers and applause are overwhelming, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n The fawning adoration's pleasant, \n\n But presidents need cuddles, too. \n\n [Enter Betty Currie.] \n\n CURRIE: Mr. President? The intern is here. And she's brought you some pizza! \n\n [The lights go down. When they resume, the intern-- MONICA LEWINSKY --is talking on the phone to her good friend LINDA TRIPP .] \n\n LEWINSKY: Well, y'know, I'd seen him around, like, a lot. And I know he noticed me. So when they said they needed an intern to answer the phones, I said, \"Hel-lo-o-o!\" And then I had the idea to take him pizza!", "[Months of investigation, legal wrangling, and public relations campaigning follow. Starr's tactics come under heavy fire, to which he responds.] \n\n \"Crossing the Line\" \n\n STARR: It's true Monica asked to lawyer up, \n\n Which Bittman put the lid on. \n\n And I felt bad about her mommy's grilling \n\n Upon our little gridiron. \n\n The Democrats and liberals \n\n Blast these tactics of mine, \n\n But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n He's crossed the line. \n\n Only a fool wouldn't stretch the rules", "\"The People Have Spoken\" (dramatic, stirring) \n\n STARR: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n I had Clinton boxed into a corner \n\n Looks like he's going to get away. \n\n I spent four years and 40 million \n\n That's a lot of time and loot. \n\n I made Clinton look ridiculous, \n\n But the only scalp I got was Newt's. \n\n \n\n LEWINSKY: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n My boyfriend is still in office", "\"Testimony\" (snappy) \n\n CLINTON: Depends what the definition of \"is\" is, \n\n Depends on the meaning of sex, \n\n \"Alone together\" is literal nonsense, \n\n Before you reach conclusions, read your text. \n\n [Afterward, he speaks to the nation, admits doing wrong, and apologizes, though grudgingly.] \n\n CLINTON: Inappropriate was the nature of our actions, \n\n And believe me I regret the whole damn thing, \n\n But inappropriate are all these personal questions, \n\n The country doesn't need to know these things.", "And he might return to me one day. \n\n You think perhaps that he will not want me \n\n For all the trouble I've caused so far, \n\n But he knows I can always make him happy \n\n With my thong and my cigar. \n\n CLINTON: The election was held and the people have spoken, \n\n I can't believe what they had to say. \n\n The removal threat is over, \n\n Kenneth Starr should go away. \n\n I tell you, though, it is a mystery, \n\n I mean, I'm unfaithful and I lie. \n\n I might be guilty of obstruction, \n\n Yet my ratings are sky-high.", "Though what the congressman heard was \n\n \"Please, please, please, please, please!\" \n\n But then we didn't go on! \n\n TRIPP: You didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, he stopped me when he seemed upon the cusp. \n\n TRIPP: So you didn't go on? \n\n LEWINSKY: No, we didn't go on. \n\n He said he wasn't sure if I was someone he \n\n Could \n\n Trust. \n\n [The lights fade as the girlfriends engage in cross talk.] \n\n TRIPP: Trust? \n\n LEWINSKY: That's why we didn't go on.", "Of laying a perjury trap. \n\n But all it catches is lying men. \n\n Honest men beat the rap. \n\n There's people who say I'm against sex; \n\n I've had sex. It's fine. \n\n But lying about it gets my blood up \n\n And the president's crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n I crossed the line. \n\n Tell Steve Brill I'll leak at will \n\n When the president crosses the line. \n\n \n\n [After months of denials and futile delays, Clinton finally testifies before the Starr grand jury and argues that, technically, he didn't lie.]", "All he's got is some recordings \n\n Made by a vengeful snitch. \n\n I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that b-- \n\n A vast right-wing conspiracy \n\n Is using her to beat on me. \n\n They wanna torpedo my agenda \n\n They hate me and Hillary. \n\n But I will never let them ruin \n\n Our dreams for a better world. \n\n I tell ya, I never had sex with that woman \n\n I never had sex with that \n\n Girl.", "GOLDBERG: Unless you get that airhead down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: What? \n\n GOLDBERG: Unless you get that silly, vapid, trampy time bomb \n\n Down on tape. \n\n TRIPP: Oh--one more thing ... \n\n GOLDBERG: What? \n\n TRIPP: There's a dress ... \n\n GOLDBERG: Hold on, let me call Sparky. \n\n \n\n [Independent Counsel Starr uses Tripp to detain Monica. A few days later, the news breaks. On the advice of his pal Harry Thomason, Clinton flat-out lies to his wife, to his loyalists, and to the public about the relationship.]", "[speaking] : We've got to make sure the Oval Office functions with efficiency. We can't afford the tiniest error. \n\n PANETTA: Aha! I have it! \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n Someone who's an expert with a phone. \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n We'll bring in an intern, \n\n I assure you, Mr. President-- \n\n Your routine here won't get blown. \n\n PANETTA , ICKES , and CURRIE [solemnly agreeing] : \n\n The presence of an intern will ensure \n\n Your routine here won't get blown." ] ]
valid	50826	[ "Which of the following is not a difference between Martians and Earthpeople?", "Why does the woman in the shack treat the protagonist poorly?", "Why does the boy likely carry a net?", "Which of the following is most true about Harry Smythe?", "Where is the gold in Mars?", "How does the protagonist feel about the woman from the shack?", "What is not true about the crossbreed boy?", "How do the Martians likely feel about the protagonist and his role?", "Why did one of the Martians pull a knife on the protagonist?", "How did the colonization of Mars help the Martians?" ]	[ [ "Martians don't care about dishonesty", "Martians have different ears", "Martians have tribal ceremonies", "Martians can't carry a tune" ], [ "She does not trust him", "He is threatening her", "She thinks he killed her husband", "He is racist against Martians" ], [ "To try to catch butterflies", "To defend himself", "To help him whistle", "To look like he is catching butterflies" ], [ "He is infamous", "He does not like the protagonist", "He is hiding on Earth", "He is a Martian" ], [ "There is no gold in Mars", "Under the Haremheb Reservation", "In the city of Deimos and Phobos", "Prospectors mined it already" ], [ "Suspicious", "Angry", "Sympathetic", "Romantic" ], [ "He has not caught any butterflies", "He can whistle well", "His kind is common", "He misses his dad" ], [ "Confusion", "Pride", "Attraction", "Resentment" ], [ "He insulted the Chief by calling him a liar", "He was bothering the woman and her son", "He did not respect their traditions", "He was not welcome at their Festival" ], [ "The colonizers brought their culture", "The colonizers left their advanced technology", "The colonizers did not help the Martians", "The colonizers found gold for the Martians" ] ]	[ 3, 1, 4, 1, 1, 3, 3, 4, 4, 3 ]	[ 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "\"Power sign of the Earthmen,\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"Not necessarily,\" I said. \"I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as\n you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men\n and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey.\"\n\n\n He didn't reply to that.\n\n\n \"And I don't give a damn about it,\" I added distinctly.\n\n\n His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said\n nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then\n moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you\n prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into\n the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for an Earthwoman,\" I said. \"This particular Earthwoman\n took a Martian for a husband.\"", "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians\n can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an\n instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched\n the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often\n thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do\n beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way\n things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these\n purple sands.\n\n\n I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my\n index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the\n flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had\n come.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" I said. \"The Chief. Take me to him.\"", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress.\n Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances\n put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There\n was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the\n Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the\nbelu\ntree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments\n burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact\n center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums.", "Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though,\n was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son\n when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was\n empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying\n good-by.\n\n\n That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb\n Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.\n\n\n It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance\n to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians\n alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my\n lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "THE MOONS OF MARS\nBy DEAN EVANS\n\n\n Illustrated by WILLER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery boy should be able to whistle, except,\n \nof course, Martians. But this one did!\nHe seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He\n swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you\n couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying\nhim\n.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:" ], [ "I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow\n even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it,\n went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the door—and\n looked straight into her eyes.\n\n\n She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it looked like it\n might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she\n was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still\n stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that\n jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten\n woodwork stung my flinching cheeks.\n\n\n I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. \"And that is the\n way it goes,\" I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful\n with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she\n immediately puts it to use—on you.", "I got up and went out of the tent.\nThe woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming\n circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son\n who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned\n against the bole of a\nbelu\ntree with her arms down and slightly\n curled backward around it.\n\n\n \"That's considered bad luck,\" I said.\n\n\n Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle\n fire still flickering in her eyes.\n\n\n \"That's a\nbelu\ntree,\" I said. \"Embracing it like that is like looking\n for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?\"\n\n\n \"Would it make any difference?\" She spoke softly, but the words came to\n me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. \"How much bad luck\n can you have in one lifetime, anyway?\"", "She nodded. Somehow her eyes didn't look defiant any more.\n\n\n \"Where's his father?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"H-he's dead.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry. Are you all right? I mean do you get along okay and\n everything, now that...?\"\n\n\n I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and\n needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was\n luxurious living she was doing—at least not lately.\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said suddenly. \"Would you like to go home to Earth? I could\n fix—\"\n\n\n But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders\n stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not\n coated with honey.\n\n\n \"Get the hell out of here, you fool!\"", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who\n was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in\n front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something\n in his eyes which might have been a leer.\n\"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?\" he said. He chuckled hoarsely\n in his throat. \"Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it.\"\n His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever\n was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class\n dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said\n complainingly:\n\n\n \"Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think\n a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more\n reasonable—\"", "\"They disappeared from the shack they were living in,\" I said. \"They\n went in a hurry—a very great hurry.\"\n\n\n That one he didn't answer, either.\n\n\n \"I would like to know where she is.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" His whisper was brittle.\n\n\n \"She's not in trouble,\" I told him quickly. \"She's not wanted. Nor her\n child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to\n him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp\n hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long\n moment before he handed it back.\n\n\n \"I have never seen this Earthman,\" he said.", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "I ignored that. \"Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had\n nothing to fear from me.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning,\" I went\n on. \"Lady, he's wanted. And this thing, on my lapel is an Authority\n Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is.\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" Her words were flat.\n\n\n \"His name is Harry Smythe.\"\n\n\n If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light\n from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected.", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked\n up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within\n it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle\n of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic\n jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking\n figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.\n\n\n I looked down again at the woman. \"Your little boy and his butterfly\n net,\" I said softly. \"In a season when no butterflies can be found.\n What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the\n alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he\n could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good\n as anybody's.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "I smiled reassuringly. \"Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.\n I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the\n little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles\n remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told\n me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had\n taught him.\"\n\n\n Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have\n been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.\n\n\n She said one word only: \"Well?\"", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air,\n shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings,\n like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of\n the creature that uttered it.\n\n\n I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out\n angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank." ], [ "\"Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is\n the wrong season.\"\n\n\n The light in his eyes snapped off. \"Well, good-by,\" he said abruptly\n and very relevantly.\n\n\n \"Good-by,\" I said.\n\n\n His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where\n they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which\n followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left\n foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him.\n I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely\nmechanical\nlittle boy.\n\n\n When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering.", "I took a short-cut over the rag-cliffs and went down a winding,\n sand-worn path. The temple stones stood out barren and dry-looking,\n like breast bones from the desiccated carcass of an animal. For a\n moment I stopped and stared down at the ruins. I didn't see the boy. He\n was somewhere down there, though, still swinging his butterfly net and,\n probably, still whistling.\n\n\n I started up once more.\n\n\n And then I heard it—a shrill blast of sound in an octave of urgency; a\n whistle, sure, but a warning one.\n\n\n I stopped in my tracks from the shock of it. Yes, I knew from whom it\n had come, all right. But I didn't know why.", "I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked\n up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within\n it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle\n of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic\n jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking\n figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.\n\n\n I looked down again at the woman. \"Your little boy and his butterfly\n net,\" I said softly. \"In a season when no butterflies can be found.\n What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the\n alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he\n could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good\n as anybody's.", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "THE MOONS OF MARS\nBy DEAN EVANS\n\n\n Illustrated by WILLER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery boy should be able to whistle, except,\n \nof course, Martians. But this one did!\nHe seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He\n swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you\n couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying\nhim\n.", "It was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing\n him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long\n he'd know it, too. And he did—but he didn't let me know he did until\n we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the\n entrance to the valley of the two moons.\n\n\n Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and\n then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he\n waited for me.\n\n\n \"Well,\" I said. \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again\n and got to his feet.\n\n\n \"You've been following me,\" he said, and his brown eyes stared\n accusingly into mine.\n\n\n \"I have?\"", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "I got up and went out of the tent.\nThe woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming\n circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son\n who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned\n against the bole of a\nbelu\ntree with her arms down and slightly\n curled backward around it.\n\n\n \"That's considered bad luck,\" I said.\n\n\n Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle\n fire still flickering in her eyes.\n\n\n \"That's a\nbelu\ntree,\" I said. \"Embracing it like that is like looking\n for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?\"\n\n\n \"Would it make any difference?\" She spoke softly, but the words came to\n me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. \"How much bad luck\n can you have in one lifetime, anyway?\"", "\"That isn't an honorable thing to do,\" he said very gravely. \"A\n gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman.\"\n\n\n I didn't smile. \"And what would you have me do about it?\"\n\n\n \"Stop following me, of course, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Very well,\" I said. \"I won't follow you any more. Will that be\n satisfactory?\"\n\n\n \"Quite, sir.\"\n\n\n Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared\n along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow\n myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin.", "And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air,\n shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings,\n like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of\n the creature that uttered it.\n\n\n I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out\n angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.", "I smiled reassuringly. \"Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.\n I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the\n little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles\n remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told\n me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had\n taught him.\"\n\n\n Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have\n been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.\n\n\n She said one word only: \"Well?\"", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who\n was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in\n front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something\n in his eyes which might have been a leer.\n\"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?\" he said. He chuckled hoarsely\n in his throat. \"Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it.\"\n His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever\n was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class\n dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said\n complainingly:\n\n\n \"Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think\n a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more\n reasonable—\"", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "\"'The Calm',\" he said in a sober, little-boy voice.\n\n\n \"The\nwhat\n?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"From the William Tell Overture,\" he explained, still looking up at me.\n He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"And where did you learn that?\"\n\n\n \"My mother taught me.\"\n\n\n I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still\n held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the\n title of the tune he whistled.\n\n\n \"You whistle very well,\" I told him.\n\n\n That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the\n corners of his small mouth.\n\n\n He nodded grave agreement.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any\n hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of\n course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no\n choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going.\n\n\n Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the\n fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold,\n have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had\n probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out\n with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set\n himself of finding the killer of his daddy.", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank." ], [ "I ignored that. \"Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had\n nothing to fear from me.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning,\" I went\n on. \"Lady, he's wanted. And this thing, on my lapel is an Authority\n Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is.\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" Her words were flat.\n\n\n \"His name is Harry Smythe.\"\n\n\n If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light\n from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected.", "\"They disappeared from the shack they were living in,\" I said. \"They\n went in a hurry—a very great hurry.\"\n\n\n That one he didn't answer, either.\n\n\n \"I would like to know where she is.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" His whisper was brittle.\n\n\n \"She's not in trouble,\" I told him quickly. \"She's not wanted. Nor her\n child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to\n him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp\n hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long\n moment before he handed it back.\n\n\n \"I have never seen this Earthman,\" he said.", "His words chopped short and he almost choked on the final unuttered\n syllable. His glance had dropped to my badge and the look on his face\n was one of startled surprise.\n\n\n \"I—\" he said.\n\n\n I cocked a frown of my own at him.\n\"Well, so long, mate,\" he grunted, and spun around and dug his toes\n in the sand and was away. I stood there staring at his rapidly\n disappearing form for a few moments and then looked back once more at\n the house. A tattered cotton curtain was just swinging to in the dirty,\n sand-blown window. That seemed to mean the woman had been watching. I\n sighed, shrugged again and went away myself.\n\n\n When I got back to Security Headquarters, I went to the file and began\n to rifle through pictures. I didn't find the woman, but I did find the\n man.\n\n\n He was a killer named Harry Smythe.", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "\"That isn't an honorable thing to do,\" he said very gravely. \"A\n gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman.\"\n\n\n I didn't smile. \"And what would you have me do about it?\"\n\n\n \"Stop following me, of course, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Very well,\" I said. \"I won't follow you any more. Will that be\n satisfactory?\"\n\n\n \"Quite, sir.\"\n\n\n Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared\n along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow\n myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin.", "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "I smiled reassuringly. \"Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.\n I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the\n little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles\n remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told\n me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had\n taught him.\"\n\n\n Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have\n been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.\n\n\n She said one word only: \"Well?\"", "\"Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is\n the wrong season.\"\n\n\n The light in his eyes snapped off. \"Well, good-by,\" he said abruptly\n and very relevantly.\n\n\n \"Good-by,\" I said.\n\n\n His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where\n they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which\n followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left\n foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him.\n I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely\nmechanical\nlittle boy.\n\n\n When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering.", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "It was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing\n him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long\n he'd know it, too. And he did—but he didn't let me know he did until\n we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the\n entrance to the valley of the two moons.\n\n\n Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and\n then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he\n waited for me.\n\n\n \"Well,\" I said. \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again\n and got to his feet.\n\n\n \"You've been following me,\" he said, and his brown eyes stared\n accusingly into mine.\n\n\n \"I have?\"", "I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who\n was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in\n front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something\n in his eyes which might have been a leer.\n\"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?\" he said. He chuckled hoarsely\n in his throat. \"Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it.\"\n His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever\n was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class\n dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said\n complainingly:\n\n\n \"Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think\n a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more\n reasonable—\"", "I took the picture into the Chief's office and laid it on his desk,\n waited for him to look down at it and study it for an instant, and then\n to look back up to me. Which he did.\n\n\n \"So?\" he said.\n\n\n \"Wanted, isn't he?\"\n\n\n He nodded. \"But a lot of good that'll do. He's holed up somewhere back\n on Earth.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I said. \"He's right here. I just saw him.\"\n\n\n \"\nWhat?\n\" He nearly leaped out of his chair.\n\n\n \"I didn't know who he was at first,\" I said. \"It wasn't until I looked\n in the files—\"", "And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air,\n shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings,\n like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of\n the creature that uttered it.\n\n\n I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out\n angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "\"'The Calm',\" he said in a sober, little-boy voice.\n\n\n \"The\nwhat\n?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"From the William Tell Overture,\" he explained, still looking up at me.\n He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"And where did you learn that?\"\n\n\n \"My mother taught me.\"\n\n\n I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still\n held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the\n title of the tune he whistled.\n\n\n \"You whistle very well,\" I told him.\n\n\n That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the\n corners of his small mouth.\n\n\n He nodded grave agreement.", "I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked\n up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within\n it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle\n of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic\n jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking\n figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.\n\n\n I looked down again at the woman. \"Your little boy and his butterfly\n net,\" I said softly. \"In a season when no butterflies can be found.\n What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the\n alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he\n could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good\n as anybody's.", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"" ], [ "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any\n hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of\n course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no\n choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going.\n\n\n Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the\n fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold,\n have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had\n probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out\n with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set\n himself of finding the killer of his daddy.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress.\n Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances\n put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There\n was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the\n Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the\nbelu\ntree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments\n burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact\n center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums.", "Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though,\n was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son\n when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was\n empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying\n good-by.\n\n\n That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb\n Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.\n\n\n It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance\n to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians\n alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my\n lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.", "The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians\n can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an\n instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched\n the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often\n thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do\n beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way\n things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these\n purple sands.\n\n\n I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my\n index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the\n flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had\n come.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" I said. \"The Chief. Take me to him.\"", "\"Power sign of the Earthmen,\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"Not necessarily,\" I said. \"I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as\n you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men\n and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey.\"\n\n\n He didn't reply to that.\n\n\n \"And I don't give a damn about it,\" I added distinctly.\n\n\n His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said\n nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then\n moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you\n prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into\n the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for an Earthwoman,\" I said. \"This particular Earthwoman\n took a Martian for a husband.\"", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "THE MOONS OF MARS\nBy DEAN EVANS\n\n\n Illustrated by WILLER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery boy should be able to whistle, except,\n \nof course, Martians. But this one did!\nHe seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He\n swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you\n couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying\nhim\n.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words." ], [ "I blinked again. When the flame in her eyes suddenly seemed to grow\n even hotter, I turned on my heel and went to the door. I opened it,\n went out on the top slab step. I turned back to close the door—and\n looked straight into her eyes.\n\n\n She was crying, but that didn't mean exactly what it looked like it\n might mean. Her right hand had the door edge gripped tightly and she\n was swinging it with all the strength she possessed. And while I still\n stared, the door slammed savagely into the casing with a shock that\n jarred the slab under my feet, and flying splinters from the rotten\n woodwork stung my flinching cheeks.\n\n\n I shrugged and turned around and went down the steps. \"And that is the\n way it goes,\" I muttered disgustedly to myself. Thinking to be helpful\n with the firewood problem, you give a woman a nice sharp axe and she\n immediately puts it to use—on you.", "\"They disappeared from the shack they were living in,\" I said. \"They\n went in a hurry—a very great hurry.\"\n\n\n That one he didn't answer, either.\n\n\n \"I would like to know where she is.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" His whisper was brittle.\n\n\n \"She's not in trouble,\" I told him quickly. \"She's not wanted. Nor her\n child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to\n him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp\n hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long\n moment before he handed it back.\n\n\n \"I have never seen this Earthman,\" he said.", "I smiled reassuringly. \"Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.\n I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the\n little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles\n remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told\n me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had\n taught him.\"\n\n\n Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have\n been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.\n\n\n She said one word only: \"Well?\"", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "I ignored that. \"Why did you pull out of that shack? I told you you had\n nothing to fear from me.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for the man you saw me talking with this morning,\" I went\n on. \"Lady, he's wanted. And this thing, on my lapel is an Authority\n Card. Assuming you know what it means, I'm asking you where he is.\"\n\n\n \"What man?\" Her words were flat.\n\n\n \"His name is Harry Smythe.\"\n\n\n If that meant anything to her, I couldn't tell. In the flickering light\n from the fires, subtle changes in expression weren't easily detected.", "I got up and went out of the tent.\nThe woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming\n circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son\n who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned\n against the bole of a\nbelu\ntree with her arms down and slightly\n curled backward around it.\n\n\n \"That's considered bad luck,\" I said.\n\n\n Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle\n fire still flickering in her eyes.\n\n\n \"That's a\nbelu\ntree,\" I said. \"Embracing it like that is like looking\n for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?\"\n\n\n \"Would it make any difference?\" She spoke softly, but the words came to\n me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. \"How much bad luck\n can you have in one lifetime, anyway?\"", "I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who\n was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in\n front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something\n in his eyes which might have been a leer.\n\"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?\" he said. He chuckled hoarsely\n in his throat. \"Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it.\"\n His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever\n was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class\n dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said\n complainingly:\n\n\n \"Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think\n a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more\n reasonable—\"", "I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked\n up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within\n it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle\n of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic\n jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking\n figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.\n\n\n I looked down again at the woman. \"Your little boy and his butterfly\n net,\" I said softly. \"In a season when no butterflies can be found.\n What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the\n alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he\n could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good\n as anybody's.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "She nodded. Somehow her eyes didn't look defiant any more.\n\n\n \"Where's his father?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"H-he's dead.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry. Are you all right? I mean do you get along okay and\n everything, now that...?\"\n\n\n I stopped. I wanted to ask her if she was starving by slow degrees and\n needed help. Lord knows the careworn look about her didn't show it was\n luxurious living she was doing—at least not lately.\n\n\n \"Look,\" I said suddenly. \"Would you like to go home to Earth? I could\n fix—\"\n\n\n But that was the wrong approach. Her eyes snapped and her shoulders\n stiffened angrily and the words that ripped out of her mouth were not\n coated with honey.\n\n\n \"Get the hell out of here, you fool!\"", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air,\n shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings,\n like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of\n the creature that uttered it.\n\n\n I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out\n angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air.", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "\"Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is\n the wrong season.\"\n\n\n The light in his eyes snapped off. \"Well, good-by,\" he said abruptly\n and very relevantly.\n\n\n \"Good-by,\" I said.\n\n\n His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where\n they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which\n followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left\n foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him.\n I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely\nmechanical\nlittle boy.\n\n\n When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering." ], [ "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "I took a short-cut over the rag-cliffs and went down a winding,\n sand-worn path. The temple stones stood out barren and dry-looking,\n like breast bones from the desiccated carcass of an animal. For a\n moment I stopped and stared down at the ruins. I didn't see the boy. He\n was somewhere down there, though, still swinging his butterfly net and,\n probably, still whistling.\n\n\n I started up once more.\n\n\n And then I heard it—a shrill blast of sound in an octave of urgency; a\n whistle, sure, but a warning one.\n\n\n I stopped in my tracks from the shock of it. Yes, I knew from whom it\n had come, all right. But I didn't know why.", "After a long while she looked up into my eyes. \"His name was Tahily,\"\n she said. \"He had the secret. He knew where the gold vein was. And\n soon, in a couple of years maybe, when all the prospectors were gone\n and he knew it would be safe, he was going to stake a claim and go\n after it. For us. For the three of us.\"\n\n\n I sighed. There wasn't, isn't, never will be any gold on this planet.\n But who in the name of God could have the heart to ruin a dream like\n that?\nNext day I followed the little boy. He left the reservation in a cheery\n frame of mind, his whistle sounding loud and clear on the thin morning\n air. He didn't go in the direction of town, but the other way—toward\n the ruins of the ancient Temple City of the Moons. I watched his chubby\n arm and the swinging of the big butterfly net on the end of that arm.\n Then I followed along in his sandy tracks.", "I stopped. Even in my own ears, my words sounded comfortless. I looked\n up, over at the flaming circle and at the sweat-laved dancers within\n it. The sound of the drums was a wild cacophonous tattoo now, a rattle\n of speed and savagery combined; and those who moved to its frenetic\n jabberings were not dancers any more, but only frenzied, jerking\n figurines on the strings of a puppeteer gone mad.\n\n\n I looked down again at the woman. \"Your little boy and his butterfly\n net,\" I said softly. \"In a season when no butterflies can be found.\n What was that for? Was he part of the plan, too, and the net just the\n alibi that gave him a passport to wander where he chose? So that he\n could listen, pick up a little information here, a little there?\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. She didn't have to answer. My guesses can be as good\n as anybody's.", "\"Been after butterflies, I see. I'll bet you didn't get any. This is\n the wrong season.\"\n\n\n The light in his eyes snapped off. \"Well, good-by,\" he said abruptly\n and very relevantly.\n\n\n \"Good-by,\" I said.\n\n\n His whistling and his walking started up again in the same spot where\n they had left off. I mean the note he resumed on was the note which\n followed the one interrupted; and the step he took was with the left\n foot, which was the one he would have used if I hadn't stopped him.\n I followed him with my eyes. An unusual little boy. A most precisely\nmechanical\nlittle boy.\n\n\n When he was almost out of sight, I took off after him, wondering.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "\"'The Calm',\" he said in a sober, little-boy voice.\n\n\n \"The\nwhat\n?\" I asked.\n\n\n \"From the William Tell Overture,\" he explained, still looking up at me.\n He said it deadpan, and his wide brown eyes never once batted.\n\n\n \"Oh,\" I said. \"And where did you learn that?\"\n\n\n \"My mother taught me.\"\n\n\n I blinked at him. He didn't blink back. His round little face still\n held no expression, but if it had, I knew it would have matched the\n title of the tune he whistled.\n\n\n \"You whistle very well,\" I told him.\n\n\n That pleased him. His eyes lit up and an almost-smile flirted with the\n corners of his small mouth.\n\n\n He nodded grave agreement.", "I smiled reassuringly. \"Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.\n I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the\n little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles\n remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told\n me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had\n taught him.\"\n\n\n Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have\n been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.\n\n\n She said one word only: \"Well?\"", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "\"They disappeared from the shack they were living in,\" I said. \"They\n went in a hurry—a very great hurry.\"\n\n\n That one he didn't answer, either.\n\n\n \"I would like to know where she is.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\" His whisper was brittle.\n\n\n \"She's not in trouble,\" I told him quickly. \"She's not wanted. Nor her\n child, either. It's just that I have to talk to her.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n I pulled out the file photo of Harry Smythe and handed it across to\n him. His wrinkled hand took it, pinched it, held it up close to a lamp\n hanging from one of the ridge poles. His eyes squinted at it for a long\n moment before he handed it back.\n\n\n \"I have never seen this Earthman,\" he said.", "I got up and went out of the tent.\nThe woman never heard me approach. Her eyes were toward the flaming\n circle and the dancers within, and, too, I suppose, to her small son\n who was somewhere in that circle with them, whistling. She leaned\n against the bole of a\nbelu\ntree with her arms down and slightly\n curled backward around it.\n\n\n \"That's considered bad luck,\" I said.\n\n\n Her head jerked around with my words, reflected flames from the circle\n fire still flickering in her eyes.\n\n\n \"That's a\nbelu\ntree,\" I said. \"Embracing it like that is like looking\n for a ladder to walk under. Or didn't you know?\"\n\n\n \"Would it make any difference?\" She spoke softly, but the words came to\n me above the drums and the shouts of the dancers. \"How much bad luck\n can you have in one lifetime, anyway?\"", "It was desert country, of course. There wasn't any chance of tailing\n him without his knowledge and I knew it. I also knew that before long\n he'd know it, too. And he did—but he didn't let me know he did until\n we came to the rag-cliffs, those filigree walls of stone that hide the\n entrance to the valley of the two moons.\n\n\n Once there, he paused and placed his butterfly net on a rock ledge and\n then calmly sat down and took off his shoes to dump the sand while he\n waited for me.\n\n\n \"Well,\" I said. \"Good morning.\"\n\n\n He looked up at me. He nodded politely. Then he put on his shoes again\n and got to his feet.\n\n\n \"You've been following me,\" he said, and his brown eyes stared\n accusingly into mine.\n\n\n \"I have?\"", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "\"That isn't an honorable thing to do,\" he said very gravely. \"A\n gentleman doesn't do that to another gentleman.\"\n\n\n I didn't smile. \"And what would you have me do about it?\"\n\n\n \"Stop following me, of course, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Very well,\" I said. \"I won't follow you any more. Will that be\n satisfactory?\"\n\n\n \"Quite, sir.\"\n\n\n Without another word, he picked up his butterfly net and disappeared\n along a path that led through a rock crevice. Only then did I allow\n myself to grin. It was a sad and pitying and affectionate kind of grin.", "And then the whistle broke off short. One instant it was in the air,\n shrieking with a message. The next it was gone. But it left tailings,\n like the echo of a death cry slowly floating back over the dead body of\n the creature that uttered it.\n\n\n I dropped behind a fragment of the rag-cliff. A shot barked out\n angrily. Splinters of the rock crazed the morning air." ], [ "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians\n can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an\n instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched\n the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often\n thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do\n beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way\n things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these\n purple sands.\n\n\n I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my\n index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the\n flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had\n come.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" I said. \"The Chief. Take me to him.\"", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress.\n Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances\n put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There\n was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the\n Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the\nbelu\ntree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments\n burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact\n center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums.", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "\"Power sign of the Earthmen,\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"Not necessarily,\" I said. \"I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as\n you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men\n and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey.\"\n\n\n He didn't reply to that.\n\n\n \"And I don't give a damn about it,\" I added distinctly.\n\n\n His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said\n nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then\n moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you\n prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into\n the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for an Earthwoman,\" I said. \"This particular Earthwoman\n took a Martian for a husband.\"", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though,\n was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son\n when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was\n empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying\n good-by.\n\n\n That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb\n Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.\n\n\n It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance\n to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians\n alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my\n lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.", "I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any\n hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of\n course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no\n choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going.\n\n\n Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the\n fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold,\n have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had\n probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out\n with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set\n himself of finding the killer of his daddy." ], [ "The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians\n can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an\n instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched\n the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often\n thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do\n beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way\n things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these\n purple sands.\n\n\n I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my\n index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the\n flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had\n come.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" I said. \"The Chief. Take me to him.\"", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "\"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?\" I asked. \"All\n I did was knock on your door.\"\n\n\n \"I heard it.\" Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.\n\n\n I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before\n I answered: \"As a matter of fact, I don't want to see\nyou\nat all. I\n didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even\n interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here\n that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean.\"\n\n\n Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the\n outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.\n\n\n \"Come in,\" she almost gasped.", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though,\n was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son\n when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was\n empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying\n good-by.\n\n\n That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb\n Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.\n\n\n It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance\n to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians\n alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my\n lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.", "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "I looked up just in time to avoid running into a spread-legged man who\n was standing motionless directly in the middle of the sand-path in\n front of the door. His hands were on his hips and there was something\n in his eyes which might have been a leer.\n\"Pulled a howler in there, eh, mate?\" he said. He chuckled hoarsely\n in his throat. \"Not being exactly deaf, I heard the tail end of it.\"\n His chuckle was a lewd thing, a thing usually reserved—if it ever\n was reserved at all—for the mens' rooms of some of the lower class\n dives. And then he stopped chuckling and frowned instead and said\n complainingly:\n\n\n \"Regular little spitfire, ain't she? I ask you now, wouldn't you think\n a gal which had got herself in a little jam, so to speak, would be more\n reasonable—\"", "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"", "I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed\n protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you\n couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.\n A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a\n shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you\n like the appearance of squeezed blood.\n\n\n There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,\n and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had\n probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles\n to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly\n to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I\n looked once again at the woman.\n\n\n \"What about him?\" she whispered.\n\n\n Her eyes were still startled.", "I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any\n hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of\n course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no\n choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going.\n\n\n Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the\n fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold,\n have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had\n probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out\n with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set\n himself of finding the killer of his daddy." ], [ "The house he went into was over in that crumbling section which forms\n a curving boundary line, marking the limits of those frantic and ugly\n original mine-workings made many years ago by the early colonists. It\n seems that someone had told someone who had told someone else that\n here, a mere twenty feet beneath the surface, was a vein as wide as\n a house and as long as a fisherman's alibi, of pure—\npure\n, mind\n you—gold.\n\n\n Back in those days, to be a colonist meant to be a rugged individual.\n And to be a rugged individual meant to not give a damn one way or\n another. And to not give a damn one way or another meant to make one\n hell of a mess on the placid face of Mars.", "The Martian turned, went away from the half-light of the circle. He led\n me some yards off to the north to a swooping-tent. Then he stopped,\n pointed.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" he said.\n\n\n I watched him slip away.\n\n\n Wahanhk is an old Martian. I don't think any Martian before him has\n ever lived so long—and doubtless none after him will, either. His\n leathery, almost purple-black skin was rough and had a charred look\n about it, and up around the eyes were little plaits and folds that had\n the appearance of being done deliberately by a Martian sand-artist.\n\n\n \"Good evening,\" I said, and sat down before him and crossed my legs.\n\n\n He nodded slowly. His old eyes went to my badge.\n\n\n From there they went to the Authority Card.", "The dancers were both men and women and they were as naked as Martians\n can get, but their dance was a thing of grace and loveliness. For an\n instant—before anyone observed me—I stood motionless and watched\n the sinuously undulating movements, and I thought, as I have often\n thought before, that this is the one thing the Martians can still do\n beautifully. Which, in a sad sort of way, is a commentary on the way\n things have gone since the first rocket-blasting ship set down on these\n purple sands.\n\n\n I felt the knife dig my spine. Carefully I turned around and pointed my\n index finger to my badge and card. Bared teeth glittered at me in the\n flickering light, and then the knife disappeared as quickly as it had\n come.\n\n\n \"Wahanhk,\" I said. \"The Chief. Take me to him.\"", "The huge circle fire was burning and the dance was in progress.\n Briefly, this can be described as something like the ceremonial dances\n put on centuries ago by the ancient aborigines of North America. There\n was one important exception, however. Instead of a central fire, the\n Martians dig a huge circular trench and fill it with dried roots of the\nbelu\ntree and set fire to it. Being pitch-like, the gnarled fragments\n burn for hours. Inside this ring sit the spectators, and in the exact\n center are the dancers. For music, they use the drums.", "It was a startling thought, for there just aren't any such mixed\n marriages. Or at least I had thought there weren't. Physically,\n spiritually, mentally, or by any other standard you can think of,\n compared to a human male the Martian isn't anything you'd want around\n the house.\n\n\n I finally said: \"So that is why he is able to whistle.\"\n\n\n She didn't answer. Even before I spoke, her eyes had seen the correct\n guess which had probably flashed naked and astounded in my own eyes.\n And then she swallowed with a labored breath that went trembling down\n inside her.\n\n\n \"There isn't anything to be ashamed of,\" I said gently. \"Back on Earth\n there's a lot of mixtures, you know. Some people even claim there's no\n such thing as a pure race. I don't know, but I guess we all started\n somewhere and intermarried plenty since.\"", "He looked me straight in the eyes when he said it—and almost before\n the words were out of his mouth, they were whipped in again on a\n drawn-back, great, sucking breath. For, somewhere outside, somewhere\n near that dancing circle, in perfect time with the lively beat of the\n drums, somebody was whistling.\n\n\n It was a clear, clean sound, a merry, bright, happy sound, as sharp\n and as precise as the thrust of a razor through a piece of soft yellow\n cheese.\n\n\n \"In your teeth, Wahanhk! Right in your teeth!\"\n\n\n He only looked at me for another dull instant and then his eyes slowly\n closed and his hands folded together in his lap. Being caught in a lie\n only bores a Martian.", "\"Power sign of the Earthmen,\" he muttered.\n\n\n \"Not necessarily,\" I said. \"I'm not here for trouble. I know as well as\n you do that, before tonight is finished, more than half of your men\n and women will be drunk on illegal whiskey.\"\n\n\n He didn't reply to that.\n\n\n \"And I don't give a damn about it,\" I added distinctly.\n\n\n His eyes came deliberately up to mine and stopped there. He said\n nothing. He waited. Outside, the drums throbbed, slowly at first, then\n moderated in tempo. It was like the throbbing—or sobbing, if you\n prefer—of the old, old pumps whose shafts go so tirelessly down into\n the planet for such pitifully thin streams of water.\n\n\n \"I'm looking for an Earthwoman,\" I said. \"This particular Earthwoman\n took a Martian for a husband.\"", "How had it been possible for her to teach, and for him to whistle?\nAll Martians are as tone-deaf as a bucket of lead.\nI went up three slab steps and rapped loudly on the weather-beaten door.\nThe woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but\n she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first\n realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the\n middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle\n age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the\n validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice\n wasn't young any more, either.\n\n\n \"Well? And what did I do now?\"\n\n\n \"I beg your pardon?\" I said.\n\n\n \"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing\n just something to cover a hole in your shirt?\"", "And then, suddenly, it wasn't. Even though the noise of the dance and\n the dancers was loud enough to command the attention and the senses. I\n could still hear her quiet sobbing, and I could see the heaving of the\n small, thin shoulders.\n\n\n And I knew then the reason for old Wahanhk's bitterness when he had\n said to me, \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh? Martians are not\n that important any more.\"\n\n\n What I said then probably sounded as weak as it really was: \"I'm sorry,\n kid. But look, just staking out in that old shack of yours and trying\n to pry information out of the type of men who drifted your way—well, I\n mean there wasn't much sense in that, now was there?\"\n\n\n I put an arm around her shoulders. \"He must have been a pretty nice\n guy,\" I said. \"I don't think you'd have married him if he wasn't.\"", "Not finding him wasn't especially alarming. What was alarming, though,\n was not finding the Earthwoman and her little half-breed Martian son\n when I went back to the tumbledown shack where they lived. It was\n empty. She had moved fast. She hadn't even left me a note saying\n good-by.\n\n\n That night I went into the Great Northern desert to the Haremheb\n Reservation, where the Martians still try to act like Martians.\n\n\n It was Festival night, and when I got there they were doing the dance\n to the two moons. At times like this you want to leave the Martians\n alone. With that thought in mind, I pinned my Authority Card to my\n lapel directly above my badge, and went through the gates.", "THE MOONS OF MARS\nBy DEAN EVANS\n\n\n Illustrated by WILLER\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction September 1952.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nEvery boy should be able to whistle, except,\n \nof course, Martians. But this one did!\nHe seemed a very little boy to be carrying so large a butterfly net. He\n swung it in his chubby right fist as he walked, and at first glance you\n couldn't be sure if he were carrying it, or it carrying\nhim\n.", "I had idly listened to a little half-breed Martian boy whistling part\n of the William Tell Overture, and it had led me to a wanted killer\n named Harry Smythe.\nUnderstandably, Mr. Smythe did not produce himself on a silver platter.\n I spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to get a lead on him and\n got nowhere. If he was hiding in any of the places I went to, then he\n was doing it with mirrors, for on Mars an Authority Card is the big\n stick than which there is no bigger. Not solely is it a warrant, it is\n a commandeer of help from anyone to whom it is presented; and wherever\n I showed it I got respect.\n\n\n I got instant attention. I got even more: those wraithlike tremblings\n in the darker corners of saloons, those corners where light never seems\n quite to penetrate. You don't look into those. Not if you're anything\n more than a ghoul, you don't.", "\"That is impossible,\" he grunted bitterly.\n\n\n \"I would have said so, too,\" I agreed. \"Until this afternoon, that is.\"\n\n\n His old, dried lips began to purse and wrinkle.\n\n\n \"I met her little son,\" I went on. \"A little semi-human boy with\n Martian features. Or, if you want to turn it around and look at the\n other side, a little Martian boy who whistles.\"\n\n\n His teeth went together with a snap.\n\n\n I nodded and smiled. \"You know who I'm talking about.\"\n\n\n For a long long while he didn't answer. His eyes remained unblinking on\n mine and if, earlier in the day, I had thought the little boy's face\n was expressionless, then I didn't completely appreciate the meaning of\n that word. Wahanhk's face was more than expressionless; it was simply\n blank.", "He came whistling. All little boys whistle. To little boys, whistling\n is as natural as breathing. However, there was something peculiar about\n this particular little boy's whistling. Or, rather, there were two\n things peculiar, but each was related to the other.\n\n\n The first was that he was a Martian little boy. You could be very sure\n of that, for Earth little boys have earlobes while Martian little boys\n do not—and he most certainly didn't.\n\n\n The second was the tune he whistled—a somehow familiar tune, but one\n which I should have thought not very appealing to a little boy.\n\n\n \"Hi, there,\" I said when he came near enough. \"What's that you're\n whistling?\"\n\n\n He stopped whistling and he stopped walking, both at the same time, as\n though he had pulled a switch or turned a tap that shut them off. Then\n he lifted his little head and stared up into my eyes.", "There had not been any gold found, of course, and now, for the most\n part, the mining shacks so hastily thrown up were only fever scars\n of a sickness long gone and little remembered. A few of the houses\n were still occupied, like the one into which the Martian boy had just\n disappeared.\n\n\n So his\nmother\nhad taught him the William Tell Overture, had she?\n That tickling thought made me chuckle as I stood before the ramshackle\n building. And then, suddenly, I stopped chuckling and began to think,\n instead, of something quite astonishing:", "\"Why should I care about an Earthman? My husband was a Martian. And\n he's dead, see? Dead. Just a Martian. Not fit for anything, like all\n Martians. Just a bum who fell in love with an Earthwoman and had the\n guts to marry her. Do you understand? So somebody murdered him for it.\n Ain't that pretty? Ain't that something to make you throw back your\n head and be proud about? Well, ain't it? And let me tell you, Mister,\n whoever it was, I'll get him.\nI'll get him!\n\"\n\n\n I could see her face now, all right. It was a twisted, tortured thing\n that writhed at me in its agony. It was small yellow teeth that bared\n at me in viciousness. It was eyes that brimmed with boiling, bubbling\n hate like a ladle of molten steel splashing down on bare, white flesh.\n Or, simply, it was the face of a woman who wanted to kill the killer of\n her man.", "\"Nothing,\" I answered. \"Except that Martians are supposed to be\n tone-deaf, aren't they? It's something lacking in their sense of\n hearing. So when I heard this little boy, and saw he was a Martian, and\n when he told me his\nmother\nhad taught him—\" I shrugged and laughed a\n little. \"Like I said before, I guess I got just plain nosy.\"\n\n\n She nodded. \"We agree on that last part.\"\n\n\n Perhaps it was her eyes. Or perhaps it was the tone of her voice. Or\n perhaps, and more simply, it was her attitude in general. But whatever\n it was, I suddenly felt that, nosy or not, I was being treated shabbily.\n\n\n \"I would like to speak to the Martian lady,\" I said.\n\n\n \"There isn't any Martian lady.\"\n\n\n \"There\nhas\nto be, doesn't there?\" I said it with little sharp\n prickers on the words.", "I sat down and did with my shoes as he had done. There wasn't any\n hurry; I knew where he was going. There could only be one place, of\n course—the city of Deimos and Phobos. Other than that he had no\n choice. And I thought I knew the reason for his going.\n\n\n Several times in the past, there have been men who, bitten with the\n fever of an idea that somewhere on this red planet there must be gold,\n have done prospecting among the ruins of the old temples. He had\n probably heard that there were men there now, and he was carrying out\n with the thoroughness of his precise little mind the job he had set\n himself of finding the killer of his daddy.", "But she did, too: \"\nDoes there?\n\"\n\n\n I gawked at her and she stared back. And the stare she gave me was hard\n and at the same time curiously defiant—as though she would dare me to\n go on with it. As though she figured I hadn't the guts.\n\n\n For a moment, I just blinked stupidly at her, as I had blinked stupidly\n at the little boy when he told me his mother had taught him how to\n whistle. And then—after what seemed to me a very long while—I slowly\n tumbled to what she meant.\n\n\n Her eyes were telling me that the little Martian boy wasn't a little\n Martian boy at all, that he was cross-breed, a little chap who had a\n Martian father and a human, Earthwoman mother.", "\"All right,\" I answered. \"There wasn't anything that made me think you\n had. The point is that he knows the woman. It follows, naturally, that\n she might know him.\"\n\n\n \"This one is\nwanted\n?\" His old, broken tones went up slightly on the\n last word.\n\n\n I nodded. \"For murder.\"\n\n\n \"Murder.\" He spat the word. \"But not for the murder of a Martian, eh?\n Martians are not that important any more.\" His old eyes hated me with\n an intensity I didn't relish.\n\n\n \"You said that, old man, not I.\"\n\n\n A little time went by. The drums began to beat faster. They were\n rolling out a lively tempo now, a tempo you could put music to.\n\n\n He said at last: \"I do not know where the woman is. Nor the child.\"" ] ]
valid	22102	[ "What is the age difference between Kimball and his oldest sister?", "What is Kimball's home planet?", "Why did Kimball's marriage end?", "What is wrong with Kimball?", "Did Kimball's sisters like him?", "What did Kimball like to do when he was a boy?", "What does young Kimball use as a weapon?", "Is Kimball happy?" ]	[ [ "9 years", "15 years", "17 years", "8 years" ], [ "Unknown", "Venus", "Mars", "Earth" ], [ "We never learn why it ended.", "He was a career officer.", "She ended it because she felt he wasn't committed.", "He left his wife because he was bored." ], [ "He is neurotic.", "He is completely psychotic.", "There is nothing wrong with him.", "His schizoid tendencies are amplified by space travel." ], [ "Yes, they go out to make sure he's safe.", "No, they seem burdened by having him around.", "No, they hate him.", "Yes, they play make believe with him." ], [ "Smoke cigarets.", "Read.", "Play with his sisters.", "Fight Therns." ], [ "A radium pistol", "A book", "A faucet", "A Martian pistol" ], [ "No, he wishes he never left.", "No, he is terribly lonely.", "Yes, he gets to travel all over.", "Yes, he loves losing himself in imagination." ] ]	[ 4, 4, 3, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone." ], [ "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”" ], [ "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”" ], [ "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——" ], [ "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”" ], [ "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”" ], [ "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "From downstream came the faint sounds of music. It might have been a\n phonograph playing in one of the summer cabins with names like Polly Ann\n Roost and Patches and Seventh Heaven, but to Kimmy it was the hated cry\n of the Father of Therns calling the dreadful Plant Men to their feast of\n victims borne into\n [116]\n this Valley Dor by the mysterious Iss.\n\n\n Kimmy shifted the heavy Martian pistol into his left hand and checked\n his harness. A soft smile touched his lips. He was well armed; there was\n nothing he had to fear from the Plant Men. His bare feet turned\n up-stream, away from the sound of the phonograph, toward the shallows in\n the river that would permit him to cross and continue his search along\n the base of the Golden Cliffs—\nThe sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. “Oh, three\n hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes.”", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening\n gulf.\n\n\n “What will you do?”\n\n\n “You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said\n impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it\n comes.”\n\n\n “In two years.”\n\n\n “In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that\n it didn’t matter?\n\n\n He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.\n\n\n “Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you\n should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”\n\n\n “Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted\n clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up\n already?", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”" ], [ "Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn’t been asleep. It\n would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had\n been remembering. “All right, Sergeant,” he said.\n “Coming up.”\n\n\n He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he\n hadn’t had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured\n taste of the cigaret on his tongue.\n\n\n Oddly enough, he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t excited, either. And that was\n much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the\n desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed\n russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So\n long a road, he thought, from then to now.", "Steinhart reached for a cigaret and then stopped, remembering that\n Kimball had had to give them up because of the flight. Kimball caught\n the movement and half-smiled.\n\n\n “I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the\n psych said.\n\n\n “It doesn’t matter now.”\n\n\n “No, I suppose not.”\n\n\n “You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”\n\n\n “Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart\n [119]\n said. “It’s just some of the things——”\n\n\n Kimball said: “I talked too much.”\n\n\n “You had to.”\n\n\n “You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would\n you,” the Colonel said smiling.\n\n\n “You were married, Kim. What happened?”", "And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented\n cottage and saying exasperatedly: “\nWhy do you run off by\n yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so——\n”\n\n\n And his sisters: “\nPlaying with his wooden swords and his radium\n pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful\n books——\n”\n\n\n He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the\n heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red\n hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and\n canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but\n which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of\n Mars.\n\n\n And Steinhart: “\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\n”\nThe hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time\n was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.", "“More therapy?”\n\n\n “I’d like to know. This is for me.”\nKimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she\n finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the\n way she put it.”\n\n\n “She knew you were a career officer; what did she\n expect——?”\n\n\n “That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”\n\n\n “Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”\n\n\n They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds\n and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky.\n Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched\n them wheel across the clear, deep night.\n\n\n “I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean\n that.”", "For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening\n stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from\n the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the\n sky was changing from pink to gray to dusty blue. A bright star was\n breaking through the curtain of fading light. He knew it was Venus, the\n Evening Star. But let it be Earth, he thought. And instead of white, let\n it be the color of an emerald.\n\n\n He paused in midstream, letting the warm water riffle around his feet.\n Looking up at the green beacon of his home planet, he thought: I’ve left\n all that behind me. It was never really what I wanted. Mars is where I\n belong. With my friends, Tars Tarkas the great Green Jeddak, and Carter,\n the Warlord, and all the beautiful brave people.\nThe phonograph sang with Vallee’s voice: “Cradle me where\n southern skies can watch me with a million eyes——”", "Kimmy’s eyes narrowed and he waded stealthily across the sacred river.\n That would be Matai Shang, the Father of Holy Therns—spreading his arms\n to the sunset and standing safely on his high balcony in the Golden\n Cliffs while the Plant Men gathered to attack the poor pilgrims Iss had\n brought to this cursed valley.\n\n\n “Sing me to sleep, lullaby of the leaves”—the phonograph\n sang. Kimmy stepped cautiously ashore and moved into the cover of a\n clump of willows. The sky was darkening fast. Other stars were shining\n through. There wasn’t much time left.\nKimball stood now in the bright glare of the briefing shack, a strange\n figure in blood-colored plastic. The representatives of the press had\n been handed the mimeographed releases by the PRO and now they sat in\n silence, studying the red figure of the man who was to ride the rocket.", "Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn’t been\n an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam\n psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal\n because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their\n Rorschach blots.\n\n\n “You’re a lonely man, Colonel Kimball——”\n\n\n “Too much imagination could be bad for this job.”\n\n\n How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running\n out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the\n pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the\n tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?", "He dropped to the sand and dug his hands into the dry powdery soil. He\n could scarcely see now, for blackness was flickering at the edges of his\n vision and his failing heart and lungs were near collapse.\nKimmm-eee!\n[123]\n A huge green warrior on a gray monster of a thoat was beckoning to him.\n Pointing toward the low hills on the oddly near horizon.\nKimmmm-eeeee!\nThe voice was thin and distant on the icy wind. Kimball knew that voice.\n He knew it from long ago in the Valley Dor, from the shores of the Lost\n Sea of Korus where the tideless waters lay black and deep——\n\n\n He began stumbling across the empty, lifeless plain. He knew the voice,\n he knew the man, and he knew the hills that he must reach, quickly now,\n or die.", "On the dais nearby, listening to the PRO, but watching Kimball, sat\n Steinhart, the team analyst. Kimball returned his steady gaze thinking:\n They start out burning with desire to cure the human mind and end with\n the shadow of the images. The words become the fact, the therapy the\n aim. What could Steinhart know of longing? No, he thought, I’m not being\n fair. Steinhart was only doing his job.\n\n\n The big clock on the back wall of the briefing shack said three\n fifty-five. Zero minus one hour and five minutes.\n\n\n Kimball looked around the room at the pale faces, the open mouths. What\n have I to do with you now, he thought?\nOutside, the winter night lay cold and still over the Base. Floodlights\n spilled brilliance over the dunes and the scrubby earth, high fences\n casting laced shadows across the burning white expanses of\n ferroconcrete.", "Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one\n fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.\nThe water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind\n that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk\n and the grasping, blood-sucking arms——\n\n\n The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it\n tightly, knowing that he\n [117]\n could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword\n alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way\n John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to\n attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.", "He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear\n the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.\n\n\n He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their\n voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.\n\n\n “Where is that little brat, anyway?”\n\n\n “He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find\n him——”\n\n\n “Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My\n rad-ium pis-tol——’”\n\n\n “Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you\n AN-swer!”", "Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He\n looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They\n were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John\n Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies\n for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the\n shifting light of the two moons.\n\n\n [121]\n “Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”\n\n\n If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would\n come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords\n clashing——\n\n\n “He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”\n\n\n “Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”", "The keening sound of air over the wings brought a thrill. Below him, a\n great curving disk of reds and browns and yellows. He could see dust\n storms raging and the heavy, darkened lines of the canals.\n\n\n There was skill in his hands. He righted the rocket, balanced it. Began\n the tricky task of landing. It took all of his talent, all of his\n training. Ponderously, the ship settled into the iron sand; slowly, the\n internal fires died.\nKimball stood in the control room, his heart pounding. Slowly, the ports\n opened. Through the thick quartz he could see the endless plain. Reddish\n brown, empty. The basin of some long ago sea. The sky was a deep,\n burning blue with stars shining at midday at the zenith. It looked\n unreal, a painting of unworldly quiet and desolation.\nWhat is reality, Kimmy?\nSteinhart was right, he thought vaguely. A tear streaked his cheek. He\n had never been so alone.", "Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the\n murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny\n sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.\n\n\n “You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said\n finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the\n planets——”\n\n\n Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull\n rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.", "They were thinking: Why him? Out of all the scores of\n applicants—because there are always applicants for a sure-death\n job—and all the qualified pilots, why this one?\n\n\n The Public Relations Officer was speaking now, reading from the mimeoed\n release as though these civilians couldn’t be trusted to get the sparse\n information given them straight without his help, given grudgingly and\n without expression.\n\n\n [118]\n Kimball listened, only half aware of what was being said. He watched the\n faces of the men sitting on the rows of folding chairs, saw their eyes\n like wounds, red from the early morning hour and the murmuring reception\n of the night before in the Officers’ Club. They are wondering how\nI\nfeel, he was thinking. And asking themselves why I want to go.", "“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of\n course. You know there’s no such thing as a\nnormal\nhuman being. We all\n have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the\n symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability\n to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”\nKimball turned to regard the psych\n coolly\n .\n “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do\nyou\nknow?”\n\n\n The analyst flushed. “No.”\n\n\n “I didn’t think so.”\n\n\n “You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,”\n Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely\n child.”\n\n\n [120]\n Kimball was watching the sky again.\n\n\n Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little\n about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”", "They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of\n the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered\n in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.\nKimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted\n middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the\n pebbled shore of the River Iss.\n\n\n They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and\n seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he\n could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze\n came up.\n\n\n “Kimm-eeeee—”\n\n\n They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far\n down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”", "The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into\n sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He\n shivered, not with horror now. With cold.\n\n\n He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.\nHe lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite\n alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent\n now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was\n measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball\n slept insulated and complete.\n\n\n And he dreamed.\n\n\n He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the\n hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures\n as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old——", "As they filed out of the briefing shack, Steinhart climbed into the\n command car with Kimball. Chance or design? Kimball wondered. The\n others, he noticed, were leaving both of them alone.\n\n\n “We haven’t gotten on too well, have we, Colonel?” Steinhart\n observed in a quiet voice.\n\n\n Kimball thought: He’s pale skinned and very blond. What is it that he\n reminds me of? Shouldn’t there be a diadem on his forehead? He smiled\n vaguely into the rumbling night. That’s what it was. Odd that he should\n have forgotten. How many rocket pilots, he wondered, were weaned on\n Burroughs’ books? And how many remembered now that the Thern priests all\n wore yellow wings and a circlet of gold with some fantastic jewel on\n their forehead?\n\n\n “We’ve done as well as could be expected,” he said.", "He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender\n care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering\n information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of\n the world.\n\n\n He dreamed of his wife. “\nYou don’t live here, Kim.\n”\n\n\n She was right, of course. He\n [122]\n wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love\n is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.\n\n\n And time slipped by, the weeks into months; the sun dwindled and earth\n was gone. All around him lay the stunning star-dusted night.\n\n\n He lay curled in the plastic womb when the ship turned. He awoke\n sluggishly and dragged himself into awareness.\n\n\n “I’ve changed,” he thought aloud. “My face is younger;\n I feel different.”" ] ]
valid	99919	[ "What does the author see as the turning point for the modern reason-based political climate?", "What was the Women's Equality party conference focused on?", "What does the author argue as a possible solution for the lack of emotion in politics?", "Why does the author think that the Trump and Brexit campaigns were both successful?", "What does the author see as a major issue with advancing liberal policy?", "How does the author think the populist movement has succeed in using emotions?", "What does the author believe a major reason for political backlash towards feminism is?", "What does the author believe to be the most important human quality involved in politics?", "What does the author argue as a drawback of the current role of emotion in the political process?" ]	[ [ "Donald Trump being elected", "The Enlightenment", "World War II", "The Age of Anger" ], [ "Enacting new equality based political policies and practices", "Networking for women who were interested in entering politics", "Voting on the Brexit referendum", "Protesting the election of Donald Trump" ], [ "The inclusion of many more women in the political process", "Electing more of the strongmen-type leaders who exhibit aggressive emotions", "A forced integration of emotion into the political process", "A re-education of the next generation to place more of a focus on emotion" ], [ "Reminiscing on the racist and sexist attitudes of the past", "Appealing to the ethos of hard-working, no-whining people", "Good political branding and effective propaganda usage", "A lack of positive outlet for the emotion that people suppress" ], [ "Liberals are not good at appealing to the emotionally blocked population that is majority male", "Liberals are too pushy with their inclusion of marginalized groups", "Liberals do not enact enough policy to fight the inequalities of capitalism", "Liberals are not willing to include enough women in political movements" ], [ "By including more women in their political movement", "By blaming other people for the source of negative emotions", "By convincing people to embrace their emotional relationship with the world", "By ignoring the use of emotion altogether" ], [ "The movement's failure to appeal to the emotion and empathy of the public", "A focus on identity politics and eliminating problematic language and action", "Humiliating men for experiencing negative emotions such as anxiety", "A lack of intersectionality in the mainstream feminist movement " ], [ "Logic and Emotion working together", "Logic", "Emotion", "Competitiveness " ], [ "It is seen as overly ambitious and disingenuous", "It allows people, especially men, to avoid having to confront their anxieties", "It fosters low confidence and a negative world-view", "It is inferior to reason when it comes to doing the most good for the most people" ] ]	[ 2, 1, 1, 4, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "The Women's Equality party conference was awash with talk about women 'doing politics differently'. The phrase was trotted out repeatedly, although it wasn't entirely clear what it actually meant. This week, as hundreds of thousands of women prepare to march on Washington on Saturday following the inauguration of Donald Trump (with marches in 200 other US cities and more than 50 others worldwide, including across the UK and in London, where Sophie Walker will be one of the speakers) this seems a good moment to try to pin down whether there is anything new about 21st-century women's activism and, if so, what it is.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"" ], [ "The Women's Equality party conference was awash with talk about women 'doing politics differently'. The phrase was trotted out repeatedly, although it wasn't entirely clear what it actually meant. This week, as hundreds of thousands of women prepare to march on Washington on Saturday following the inauguration of Donald Trump (with marches in 200 other US cities and more than 50 others worldwide, including across the UK and in London, where Sophie Walker will be one of the speakers) this seems a good moment to try to pin down whether there is anything new about 21st-century women's activism and, if so, what it is.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation." ], [ "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "Emotion is stigmatised as belonging to lesser, non-normative groups. Women are hysterical. Black men are hypersexual. Homosexuals are unreliably camp. There is no option for the would-be winners, competing to maximise their self-interest, to respond to injury by saying, \"Please, that's painful!\" – still less by weeping.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak." ], [ "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "The Women's Equality party conference was awash with talk about women 'doing politics differently'. The phrase was trotted out repeatedly, although it wasn't entirely clear what it actually meant. This week, as hundreds of thousands of women prepare to march on Washington on Saturday following the inauguration of Donald Trump (with marches in 200 other US cities and more than 50 others worldwide, including across the UK and in London, where Sophie Walker will be one of the speakers) this seems a good moment to try to pin down whether there is anything new about 21st-century women's activism and, if so, what it is.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak." ], [ "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?" ], [ "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "Emotion is stigmatised as belonging to lesser, non-normative groups. Women are hysterical. Black men are hypersexual. Homosexuals are unreliably camp. There is no option for the would-be winners, competing to maximise their self-interest, to respond to injury by saying, \"Please, that's painful!\" – still less by weeping.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak." ], [ "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "The Women's Equality party conference was awash with talk about women 'doing politics differently'. The phrase was trotted out repeatedly, although it wasn't entirely clear what it actually meant. This week, as hundreds of thousands of women prepare to march on Washington on Saturday following the inauguration of Donald Trump (with marches in 200 other US cities and more than 50 others worldwide, including across the UK and in London, where Sophie Walker will be one of the speakers) this seems a good moment to try to pin down whether there is anything new about 21st-century women's activism and, if so, what it is.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced." ], [ "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "Emotion is stigmatised as belonging to lesser, non-normative groups. Women are hysterical. Black men are hypersexual. Homosexuals are unreliably camp. There is no option for the would-be winners, competing to maximise their self-interest, to respond to injury by saying, \"Please, that's painful!\" – still less by weeping.", "I used to get mildly irritated when feminists focused too hard on female representation, when there seemed so many other pressing things to talk about, as if vaginas alone made a difference. And it is true that there is a glass-ceiling feminism that takes little heed of women for whom race, class, disability and/or sexuality intersect to intensify and redouble gender discrimination. But sheer numbers of women do make a difference. Nicky Morgan notes that women in parliament are more inclined to collaborate across party than men. Sal Brinton, who has had a lifetime of being a lone woman on decision-making bodies, says that when women get to 40 per cent in a meeting or on a board, the language changes. There's a different way of conducting business, a different sense of how to move things on. In a hall overwhelmingly dominated by women, it is possible for a leader to cry and everyone to be on her side. For no one to think (after a moment of adjustment from unreconstructed be-more-like-a-man feminists like me) that you're weak.", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "The Women's Equality party conference was awash with talk about women 'doing politics differently'. The phrase was trotted out repeatedly, although it wasn't entirely clear what it actually meant. This week, as hundreds of thousands of women prepare to march on Washington on Saturday following the inauguration of Donald Trump (with marches in 200 other US cities and more than 50 others worldwide, including across the UK and in London, where Sophie Walker will be one of the speakers) this seems a good moment to try to pin down whether there is anything new about 21st-century women's activism and, if so, what it is.", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre." ], [ "Among the variety of reasons for Brexit and Trump, rage was right up there. Emotion is back in fashion. The Brexiters and Trump eschewed rational arguments in favour of pleas to feeling. Trump is President of Emotions. (Sad!) Yet we are ill-equipped to understand this outbreak of feeling, as Pankaj Mishra argues in his forthcoming book, The Age of Anger, because our dominant intellectual concepts are incapable of comprehending the role of emotion in politics.", "Over the coming months and years, progressives are going to have to grapple with what kind of emotional appeal they can make beyond the populists' exploitative deformation of feeling. The task will be to retrieve emotion from its current co-option into a minatory, ultimately self-defeating way of looking at the world. \n\n Women are not (of course) alone in identifying the need for soul in politics. Robert Musil and Stephen Toulmin, among others, have identified that there was a highly rationalistic and scientific turn in Enlightenment thinking after Descartes and Newton. Had the Enlightenment developed instead out of the vision of Montaigne, or Shakespeare, the thinking goes, it would have made more room for kindness, and would have given us a fuller, more complex and nuanced account of human experience. In the current destabilised times, people are returning to their ideas.", "What women's activism might bring to politics is a different sensibility, one that acknowledges that emotions are inevitable, messy – and necessary. There is a hole in politics where opposition used to be and social democracy used to flourish. That is largely because rational arguments, facts, expertise, seem to bear too little relation to the way that many people feel about the world. The liberals' arguments seem to be conducted in a kind of parallel universe, of interest only to those who thrive there. When called to articulate a vision for Britain in Europe, the best Remainers could manage was an abstract account of financial penalties if the electorate didn't do as it was told – which, since it never connected, was easily dismissed as 'Project Fear'. \n\n People have not, in fact, lost interest in truth. But first and foremost, they know the truth of their emotional relationship to the world. Liberals and social democrats currently have no way of addressing this. A lot of the time, they appear to be talking gobbledygook.", "The populist right has found an emotive way to engage electorates by channelling their feelings, often displacing them onto someone else in the process. If you cannot look at yourself in the mirror – because anxiousness makes you feel weak and to be weak is to be a failed human being – you are prey to finding someone else to blame for your loss of dignity. In a world of competition, the only way to self-esteem is to be a winner. And someone else must therefore become the loser.\nThere is an alternative: a politics that begins with the notion that emotions do not have to be repressed or deformed into bigotry and abuse. An understanding of feelings that does not equate weakness with shame, and compassion with maladaptive weakness, is much more likely to suggest solutions than one that denies our emotional lives, most of what makes us human.", "Since the Enlightenment, Mishra argues, our political thinking has been ever more tightly gripped by materialist, mechanistic premises – for example by the idea that \"humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, anger and resentment.\"\nHomo economicus\n, he says, \"views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.\" There is no room in this world view for more complex motivations: vanity, say, or the fear of humiliation.", "How, then, to comprehend, let alone articulate, the vulnerability, the shame, the loss of identity created by inequality, job losses and purposeless communities? The roiling emotions engendered by capitalism's failure to confer the promised general prosperity cannot be understood when emotion is a thing men are meant to contain, then repudiate. Strongmen leaders do not stand in front of their political parties and weep about their daughters. That sort of thing is for losers. Male valour is about not showing emotional distress. (This is very deeply embedded in our culture: \"Thy tears are womanish,\" Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence scolds Romeo, although Romeo has every right to be upset, because he has just killed a man, who was Juliet's cousin.)", "A female sensibility in politics is not, it probably needs saying, antithetical to reason, even though feeling and reason are often posited as opposites. Plato contrasted the wild horse of passion and the wise charioteer of reason (his point being, of course, that they needed each other). Jane Austen would have had no plots without the frequent difficulty human beings have in accommodating desire and wisdom: success, as she repeatedly shows, lies in the reconciliation of sense and sensibility. Such an accommodation requires self-examination, generosity of spirit, fidelity to self, and hard thinking. But first and foremost, it takes an honesty about feeling.", "Emotion is stigmatised as belonging to lesser, non-normative groups. Women are hysterical. Black men are hypersexual. Homosexuals are unreliably camp. There is no option for the would-be winners, competing to maximise their self-interest, to respond to injury by saying, \"Please, that's painful!\" – still less by weeping.", "When people admit to their emotions, they call for empathy; they can galvanise action. \"And the government's name for a single mother raising two children and caring for her elderly father?\" Sophie Walker asked, in her conference speech, promptly supplying the (clearly absurd) answer: 'Economically inactive'. Walker's single mother is of no importance in the Trump/Farage fantasy land of winning, greatness, the deal, othering the outsider. The unpaid work of caring is about love; it entails vulnerability, which immediately makes it suspect in a world of winning and losing, in which the only permissible emotions are triumph and mocking schadenfreude.", "The prevailing political mood of the moment is anxiety. \"To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,\" Mark Lilla wrote recently in the New York Times, \"subject to perpetual social and technological transformation, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution. Anxiety in the face of this process is now a universal experience, which is why reactionary ideas attract adherents around the world who share little except their sense of historical betrayal.\"", "The emotion is there, nevertheless, metastasising. Since men without the means to express vulnerability cannot mourn frankly their loss of identity as a provider (let alone their disorientation when other groups threaten to undermine their unearned sense of superiority), injured masculinity must disguise itself in images of strength, mastery, honour. Trump himself is a personification of this phenomenon, as Laurie Penny has observed: \"At once an emblem of violent, impenetrable masculinity – the nasally-rigid, iron-hearted business Svengali determined to slap America until it stops snivelling – and a byword for hysterical sensitivity, a wailing man-baby with a hair-trigger temper.\"", "All this emotion-with-nowhere-to-go was seized on by the Trump and Brexit campaigns. They found a way to channel it, allowing electorates to associate themselves with winning, to bray 'losers' at people they didn't like. It turned out not to matter very much what they were winning at or where it took them. Getting Trump into the White House, like Brexit, was an end in itself, a way of displacing pain, therapeutic.", "When liberals make pious noises about understanding the anxiety of constituents who have turned away from them, their solution often seems to entail taking on some of the bigotry. You don't have to look very far to find those who believe that feminism is inadequate to the task of humanising politics because it is, in fact, part of the problem. Lilla, in another piece in the New York Times, and Simon Jenkins, in the Guardian, have each argued that the policing of language and behaviour – which some call courtesy – has provoked a backlash and so must bear some of the blame for populism. The logical extension of this argument is that feminists, along with Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ activists and other assorted 'snowflakes', need to take a step back and think about just how much damage they're doing.", "If we are not to face a breakdown to essentialist tribal identities of gender and race, people have to find a way of articulating feelings of distress in a way that doesn't humiliate them. If men cannot face their anxiety, it will be denied, and then absolutely nothing will be done to alleviate it; there will be a privatisation of misery. There are structural reasons for the explosion of mental health disorders in advanced economies, for the opiate addiction in the rustbelt, the epidemic of distress among young people, other sorts of self-harm. But if we can't acknowledge the underlying dread and helplessness that people experience in the face of a world controlled by global finance capital and incomprehensible algorithms, individuals will continue to be stigmatised as failing. Either you will be a winner, an entrepreneurial individual competing freely in the market, deflecting your distress by manning up, lashing out; or your inchoate feelings of desperation will be – sorry – your problem, mate.", "It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this had been one of the most significant, and, yes, persuasive moments of the entire event. Walker could hardly have made her point – that her daughter's diagnosis had punctured her own privilege as a white, university-educated journalist (and tall and beautiful, which she did not say but which is nevertheless probably relevant) – more tellingly. Her tears powerfully conveyed her devastation at feeling her child was destined, as she put it, either to be invisible or to be exposed, and the helplessness this induced.", "The problem is that this assumes white men's lives are neutral territory around which the common interest can coalesce. It is, in other words, male identity politics. \"There has been a massive backlash by white men,\" Sophie Walker told me, at the WE party headquarters in Bermondsey, a few weeks after the conference speech. \"We are living out the identity politics of the straight white man right now.\"", "It was also deeply reactionary. The hideous inequalities of global capitalism being what they are, it is hard for the 99 per cent to conceive of themselves becoming winners as things stand – so Trump and Brexit offered instead a return to fantasies of the past. The iconography of Brexit has its roots in Britain's resistance to the Nazis (conveniently overlooking small things like imperial reach and American intervention), while the Trump campaign's \"make America great again\" offered still more explicit nostalgia for a time when the nation had a common destiny, with white men front and centre.", "Perhaps women's activism can give us all a way into reconnecting with a different, more generous apprehension of the Enlightenment. By caring about caring, for example – not as an abstract problem that acts as a brake on the economy, but because caring is about love, family, community, humanity. By reminding men that it is possible to acknowledge pain and survive, and then get stronger. As the political ground shifts under our feet and old allegiances and responses turn out to be no use to us, we are going to need to find a different language of politics. And the language of women is where we should start.\nTop image: Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality Party, speaking at the party's first annual conference, in Manchester, November 2016 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)\nThis article was originally published on TheLong+Short. Read the original article.", "Women on the march\nIn the last weekend of November, Sophie Walker took to the stage at the Women's Equality Party's first conference to make her leader's speech and, within a few minutes, began weeping. She cried as she recounted the difficulties of being a single parent trying to access services for her autistic daughter: \"Finding out that no one was interested, no one cared, no one welcomed her as person who lived differently.\" \n\n This wasn't just a stray tear, brushed away. Walker (pictured above) seemed to be struggling to go on. The conference held its breath. I gripped the sides of my chair in a mixture of sympathy and embarrassment, thinking this wasn't going to go down well in the media, that she would be mocked for feebleness; what kind of leader, faced with an audience of hundreds, stands in front of them and cries at life's defeats?", "There are two ways in which women might potentially 'do politics differently': policy, and practice. As far as the former is concerned, the Women's Equality party is promoting broad areas of policy capable of attracting women from across the traditional political spectrum, including closing the gender pay gap, subsidising childcare, ending violence against women, and equal representation in business, politics and the media. Detail and delivery would be more fraught, but, for now, these are things most women can get behind. Both Nicky Morgan, former Conservative Education Secretary, and Sal Brinton, President of the Liberal Democrats, spoke at the conference. \n\n It is in its practice, though, that women's activism has real potential to enlarge our understanding of what it means to be political." ] ]
test	63860	[ "What does the phrase, \"Here she comes,\" refer to?", "Has Shano always lived on Mercury?", "What two details provided early in the story tell us who sabotaged the Stardust?", "How, specifically, did the enemy fleet find the Stardust?", "Shano's cough turns out to be the symptom of an advantage in the fight against the Uranians. What is that advantage?", "Where does Shano want to go to die?", "Why does Shano try to save the ship?", "How did the lieutenant die?", "Why did Shano leave his cabin during the powerdown?" ]	[ [ "The female mayor of Q City was arriving for a planned meeting.", "The incoming spaceship Stardust.", "The cook, who was running late.", "Shano's wife, who was joining him in line." ], [ "No, he worked in many places in the solar system.", "Yes, he worked in the spaceport on Mercury until he retired.", "The only other place that he lived was Pluto, where he worked in the vanium mines.", "No, he was a Martian before coming to Mercury." ], [ "We are told about the lieutenant's portly build and about a strange notch on his jaw. The lieutenant sabotaged the ship.", "The captain is from Jupiter and seems surprised that there is a passenger aboard. The captain sabotaged the ship.", "The man ahead of Shano in line makes a big production of his disgust about the red signal. He could still go, but he chooses not to. He sabotaged the ship.", "Shano is old and his body is worn out. He is suicidal, that's why he sabotaged the ship." ], [ "The enemy had superior space sonar which could detect even the voices of whispering crewmen, so even though the Stardust was running silent, it was detected.", "The saboteur signaled the enemy ships through one of the passenger cabin portholes, using a lamp so bright that goggles were needed to avoid eye damage. This light was easily seen by the watching enemy.", "A saboteur hid a noise-generating device one of the decks, which the enemy detected even though the Stardust was supposed to be running silent.", "Shano was the saboteur, and he flipped the switch on the noise-emitter he had hidden in a maintenance corridor to signal the enemy fleet." ], [ "Shano was terminally ill from the cough. Since he was about to die anyway, he didn't care if he died in the engine room.", "The cough, while painful, brings more air into the lungs, enabling Shano to keep his blood oxygenated while working in the Stardust's damaged engine room.", "The noise from Shano's coughing allows the other engineers to keep track of his location in the damaged engine room, and give him instructions about how to keep the engines running.", "Lungs congested from working in the vanium ore extraction industry are much less affected by toxia gas, which enabled Shano to work in the Stardust's damaged engine room." ], [ "Mars.", "Earth.", "Venus.", "Pluto." ], [ "Because he was afraid to die in space where his body would never be found.", "Because it was his one big chance to prove that he, a broken down menial worker, was worth as much as the next man.", "Because he was extremely patriotic.", "Because he had a solid understanding of the Stardust's engines, and he was the best candidate for the dangerous work." ], [ "He died from toxia gas poisoning while trying to repair the Stardust's damaged engines.", "He was killed by Shano.", "He died of a head injury in a maintenance corridor, when he hit his head on the pipes.", "He died during the initial enemy attack, as a result of a direct hit from a ray gun." ], [ "He was looking for a safer place to ride out the battle than his cabin.", "He had no reason. He just did it on the spur of the moment.", "He was looking for the escape pods that were required equipment on every spaceship.", "He wanted to offer the captain his help in the battle." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.", "Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "\"\nAttention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The\n signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five\n minutes.\n\"\n\n\n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the\n infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking\n Shano aside as he passed.\nRed signal.\nIn bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his\n eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out\n there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own\n risk.\n\n\n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n\n\n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.\n Plucking at an urgency there.", "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "\"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.", "SIGNAL RED\nBy HENRY GUTH\nThey tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a\n\n suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him.\n\n Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But\n\n Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport.\n Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n\n\n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.", "Dropping the goggles to his rheumy eyes, he saw that the passenger line\n had dissolved. He moved, shuffling, to the gate, thrust his ticket into\n the scanner slot, and pushed through the turnstile when it clicked.\n\n\n \"\nFlight twenty-one, now arriving from Venus\n,\" the loud-speaker said\n monotonously. Shano glanced briefly upward and saw the gleaming belly\n of twenty-one sinking into the spaceport cone of light.\n\n\n He clawed his way up the gangway and thrust out his ticket to the\n lieutenant standing alone at the air lock. The lieutenant, a sullen,\n chunky man with a queer nick in his jawbone, refused the ticket.\n \"Haven't you heard, mister? Red signal. Go on back.\"", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"", "A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension." ], [ "Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "SIGNAL RED\nBy HENRY GUTH\nThey tried to stop him. Earth Flight 21 was a\n\n suicide run, a coffin ship, they told him.\n\n Uranian death lay athwart the space lanes. But\n\n Shano already knew this was his last ride.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1949.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nMercurian night settled black and thick over the Q City Spaceport.\n Tentative fingers of light flicked and probed the sky, and winked out.\n\n\n \"Here she comes,\" somebody in the line ahead said.", "\"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"" ], [ "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "The\nStardust's\nmechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It\n reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're\n about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove\n them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know\n we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n\n\n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick\n with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out\n what the matter was with his space ship.\n\n\n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine\n room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And\n we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without\n the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair\n the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "\"\nAttention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The\n signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five\n minutes.\n\"\n\n\n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the\n infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking\n Shano aside as he passed.\nRed signal.\nIn bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his\n eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out\n there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own\n risk.\n\n\n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n\n\n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.\n Plucking at an urgency there.", "As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "\"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"" ], [ "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "The\nStardust's\nmechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It\n reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're\n about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove\n them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know\n we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n\n\n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick\n with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out\n what the matter was with his space ship.\n\n\n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine\n room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And\n we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without\n the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair\n the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "What were the things he'd heard about nicked jaws? And where had\n he heard them? Digging ore on Pluto; talk in the pits? Secretive\n suspicions voiced in smoke-laden saloons of Mars? In the labor gangs of\n Uranus? Where? Shano smoked and didn't know. But he knew there was a\n rumor, and that it was the talk of ignorant men. The captain had evaded\n it. Shano smoked and coughed and stared at the steel bulkhead and\n waited.\nThe ship's alarm clanged. Shano jerked from his bunk like a broken\n watch spring. He crouched, trembling, on arthritic joints, as a\n loud-speaker blared throughout the ship.\n\n\n \"\nAll hands! We now maintain dead silence. Close down and stop all\n machinery. Power off and lights out. An enemy fleet is out there,\n listening and watching for mechanical and electronic disturbance.\n Atmosphere will be maintained from emergency oxygen cylinders. Stop\n pumps.\n\"", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "\"\nAttention! Attention, Stardust passengers! The signal is red. The\n signal is red. Refunds now being made. Refunds now. Take-off in five\n minutes.\n\"\n\n\n The man ahead swore and flicked up an arm. \"Red,\" he groaned. \"By the\n infinite galaxies, this is the last straw!\" He charged away, knocking\n Shano aside as he passed.\nRed signal.\nIn bewildered anxiety Shano lifted the goggles from his\n eyes and stared into the sudden blackness. The red signal. Danger out\n there. Passengers advised to ground themselves, or travel at their own\n risk.\n\n\n He felt the passengers bump and fumble past him, grumbling vexatiously.\n\n\n A hot dread assailed him, and he coughed, plucking at his chest.\n Plucking at an urgency there.", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "\"We're afloat,\" the officer said. \"We've taken off.\" A fleck of light\n danced far back in his eye. Shano felt the pressure of acceleration\n gradually increasing, increasing, and hurried in.\nCaptain Menthlo, a silver-mustached Jupiterian, broad, huge, yet\n crushable as a beetle, talked while his hands manipulated a panel of\n studs in the control room. The pilot, his back encased in leather, sat\n in a bucket seat before him, listening into earphones.", "He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand.\n Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through\n labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering\n against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the\n distance and Shano stopped.\n\n\n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his\n cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n\n\n A bell clanged.\n\n\n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled\n hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure\n disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe." ], [ "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe." ], [ "Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "As though on oiled pistons the ship sank into the light, its long\n shark-like hull glowing soft and silvery, and settled with a feathery\n snuggle into the cradle's ribs.\n\n\n The passenger line quivered as a loud-speaker boomed:\n\n\n \"\nStardust, now arrived at Cradle Six! Stardust, Cradle Six! All\n passengers for Venus and Earth prepare to board in ten minutes.\n\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped phlegm from his thin lips, his hand following\n around the bony contours of his face, feeling the hollows and the beard\n stubble and loose skin of his neck. He coughed and thought of the\n vanium mines of Pluto, and his gum-clogged lungs. A vague, pressing\n desire for home overwhelmed him. It had been so long.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"" ], [ "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "The\nStardust's\nmechanical voice bellowed: \"Engine room!\" It\n reproduced the captain's heavy breathing and his tired voice. \"We're\n about midway to Venus,\" it said. \"There were two ships and we drove\n them off. But there may be others. They'll be coming back. They know\n we've been hit. We have to get away fast!\"\n\n\n Shano could see the captain in his mind, worried, squared face slick\n with moisture. Shouting into a control room mike. Trying to find out\n what the matter was with his space ship.\n\n\n The engineer's answer came from the grill. \"Impossible, sir. Engine\n room full of toxia gas. Not a suit aboard prepared to withstand it. And\n we have to keep it in there. Selector filaments won't function without\n the gas. Our only chance was to put a man in the engine room to repair\n the broken selector valve rods or keep them running by hand.\"", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension." ], [ "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "The speaker spluttered and Shano smoked thoughtfully, listening to the\n talk back and forth, between the captain and the engineer. He didn't\n understand it, but knew that everything was ended. They were broken\n down in space and would never make Earth. Those Uranian devils would\n come streaking back. Catch them floating, helpless, and blast them to\n bits. And he would never get home to die.\n\n\n Shano coughed, and cursed his lungs. Time was when these gum-clogged\n lungs had saved his life. In the Plutonian mines. Gas explosions in the\n tunnels. Toxia gas, seeping in, burning the men's insides. But with\n gum-clogged lungs he'd been able to work himself clear. Just getting\n sick where other men had died, their insides burned out.", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand.\n Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through\n labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering\n against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the\n distance and Shano stopped.\n\n\n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his\n cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n\n\n A bell clanged.\n\n\n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled\n hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure\n disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM.", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "\"Surprised to learn of a passenger aboard,\" the captain said, glancing\n briefly sideways. \"You're entitled to know of the danger ahead.\" He\n flicked a final stud, spoke to the pilot and at last turned a serious,\n squared face to Shano. \"Old man,\" he said. \"There's a Uranian fleet out\n there. We don't know how many ships in this sector. Flight twenty-one,\n which just landed, had a skirmish with one, and got away. We may not be\n so lucky. You know how these Uranian devils are.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed, and wiped his mouth. \"Dirty devils,\" he said. \"I was\n driv' off the planet once, before this war started. I know things\n about them Uranian devils. Heard them in the mines around. Hears\n things, a laborer does.\"\n\n\n The captain seemed for the first time to realize the social status of\n his lone passenger, and he became a little gruff.", "The deck lurched and the ship swung this way and that. Maybe dodging,\n maybe maneuvering—Shano didn't know. He felt the deck lurch, that was\n all.\n\n\n \"Fire number seven.\"\n\n\n He heard the weird scream of a ray gun, and felt the constricting\n terror that seemed to belt the ship like an iron band.\n\n\n This was a battle in space, and out there were Uranian cruisers trying\n to blast the\nStardust\nout of the sky. Trying and trying, while the\n captain dodged and fired back—pitted his skill and knowledge against\n an enemy Shano couldn't see.\n\n\n He wanted desperately to help the captain break through, and get to\n Earth. But he could only cling to the plastic pipes and cough.\n\n\n The ship jounced and slid beneath his feet, and was filled with sound.\n It rocked and rolled. Shano caromed off the bulkhead.", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"" ], [ "Shano crouched and listened as the ship's steady drone ceased and the\n vibrations ceased. The pumps stopped, the lights went out.\n\n\n Pressing the cold steel bulkhead, Shano heard oxygen hiss through the\n pipes. Hiss and hiss and then flow soundlessly, filling the cabin and\n his lungs. He choked.\n\n\n The cabin was like a mine shaft, dark and cold. Feet pounded on the\n deck outside.\n\n\n Shano clawed open the door. He peered out anxiously.\n\n\n Cold blobs of light, phosphorescent bulbs held in the fists of men,\n glimmered by. Phosphorescent bulbs, because the power was off. Shano\n blinked. He saw officers and men, their faces tight and pinched,\n hurrying in all directions. Hurrying to shut down the ship.", "Shano smoked and thought.\nThey wouldn't even know, he told himself, squirming through the\n emergency exit into the engine room, and sealing it after him. And they\n wouldn't understand if they did. Pink mist swirled about him. Toxia\n gas. Shano coughed.\n\n\n He squinted around at the massive, incomprehensible machinery. The guts\n of the space ship.\n\n\n Then he saw the shattered, gold-gleaming cylinder, gas hissing from\n a fine nozzle, and filaments glowing bluish inside it, still working\n away. He saw five heavy Carrsteel rods hanging useless, on melted-down\n pins, and the slots their pronged ends hooked into. He looked at his\n hands, and shook his head.", "He got up when Rourke stopped thrashing. The face was purple and he\n was dead. Shano shivered. He crouched in the passageway shivering and\n coughing.\nA tremendous grinding sounded amid-ships. Loud rending noises of\n protesting metal. The ship bucked like a hooked fish. Then it was\n still. An empty clank echoed through the hull. The captain's voice\n came, almost yelling. \"Emergency! Emergency! Back to your posts. Engine\n room—report! Engine room—\"\n\n\n Shano picked himself off the deck, his mind muddled. He coughed and\n put a cigarette to his lips, flicking a lighter disk jerkily from his\n pocket. He blew smoke from his nostrils and heard the renewed pounding\n of feet. What was going on now?\n\n\n \"Engine room! Your screen is dead! Switch onto loud-speaker system.\n Engine room!\"", "Shano paused uncertainly at the end of the passageway. A thick cluster\n of vertical pipes filled the corner. He peered at the pipes and saw a\n gray box snuggled behind them. It had two toggle switches and a radium\n dial that quivered delicately.\n\n\n Shano scratched his scalp as boots pounded on the decks, above\n and below. He listened attentively to the ship's familiar noises\n diminishing one by one. And finally even the pounding of feet died out;\n everything became still. The silence shrieked in his ears.\nThe ship coasted. Shano could sense it coasting. He couldn't feel it\n or hear it, but he knew it was sliding ghost-like through space like a\n submarine dead under water, slipping quietly past a listening enemy.\n\n\n The ship's speaker rasped softly. \"\nEmergency. Battle posts.\n\"", "Shano coughed, and lifted the heavy rods into position. One jerked back\n suddenly and smoothly, and something went, \"Pop, pop,\" behind him and\n machinery whirred. He lifted the rod and slipped it back on. Another\n jerked, pulled open a large valve, and dropped off. Shano bent, and\n lifted, coughing and coughing. He forgot what he was doing, mind blank\n the way it went when he worked. Just rhythmically fell into the job,\n the way a laborer does. He waited for a rod to slip and fall, then\n lifted it up and slipped it in place, skin sweating, joints shooting\n pain along his limbs. He heard the machinery working. He heard the\n high, howling whine of cosmic jets. He, Shano, was making the machinery\n go. He was running the cosmic drive.\n\n\n A bell clanged somewhere. \"Engine room! Engine room! We're under way!\n What happened?\"", "Shano coughed, wracking his body, as forgotten memories stirred\n sluggishly in his mind. \"Yup,\" he said, and jerked free and stumbled\n down the steel deck.\n\n\n In his cabin he lay on the bunk, lighted a cigarette and smoked,\n coughing and staring at the rivet-studded bulkhead. The slow movement\n of his mind resolved into a struggle, one idea groping for the other.", "\"One try,\" he said to himself. \"One try, Shano. One important thing in\n your life. Here's your opportunity. The toxia gas will get you. It'll\n kill you at this concentration. But you'll last for maybe twelve hours.\n Another man wouldn't last a minute. Another man's lungs aren't clogged\n with Juno gum.\"\n\n\n He grasped a rod and lifted it, sweating under the weight, and slipped\n the forked end into its slot. Going home to die, he thought. Well,\n maybe not going home. Couldn't remember what Earth looked like anyway.\n\n\n What was that again? Oh yeah—just lift them up, and when they drop\n off, lift them up again.", "A chunky man backed out, holstering a flat blaster. He turned and saw\n Shano, standing smoking. He walked over and nudged Shano, his face\n dark. Shano blew smoke into the dark face.\n\n\n \"Old man,\" said Rourke. \"What're you doing down here?\"\n\n\n Shano blinked.\n\n\n Rourke fingered the nick in his jaw, eyes glinting. \"You're supposed to\n be in your cabin,\" he said. \"Didn't I warn you we'd run into trouble?\"", "\"Want you to sign this waiver, saying you're traveling at your own\n risk. We'll expect you to keep to your cabin as much as possible.\n When the trouble comes we can't bother with a passenger. In a few\n hours we'll shut down the ship entirely, and every mechanical device\n aboard, to try to avoid detection.\" His mustaches rose like two spears\n from each side of his squared nose as his face changed to an alert\n watchfulness. \"Going home, eh?\" he said. \"You've knocked around some,\n by the looks of you. Pluto, from the sound of that cough.\"\n\n\n Shano scrawled his signature on the waiver. \"Yeah,\" he said. \"Pluto.\n Where a man's lungs fights gas.\" He blinked watery eyes. \"Captain,\n what's a notched jaw mean to you?\"", "Silence, while Shano coughed and made the machinery go, thinking about\n the Earth he hadn't seen for many years.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" the speaker bawled. \"There's a man in there! Working the\n valve rods! Somebody is in the engine room and the gas isn't....\"\n\n\n Shano grinned, feeling good. Feeling happy. Lifting the heavy steel\n rods, driving the ship. Keeping the jets screaming and hurtling the\n liner\nStardust\ntoward Venus. He wondered if they'd found Rourke yet.\n If he could keep going for twelve hours they would get to Venus. After\n that....\n\n\n \"Home,\" he coughed. \"Hell! Who wants to go home?\"", "Shano coughed, and peered through the lenses of his goggles. \"Please,\"\n he said. \"Want to go home. I've a right.\" The nicked jaw stirred faint\n memories within his glazed mind.\n\n\n The lieutenant punched his ticket. \"It's your funeral, old man.\"\n\n\n The loud-speaker blared. \"\nStardust, taking off in thirty seconds. The\n signal is red. Stardust, taking—\n\"\n\n\n With the words dinning in his ears, Shano stepped into the air lock.\n The officer followed, spun wheels, and the lock closed. The outside was\n shut off.\n\n\n Lifting goggles they entered the hull, through a series of two more\n locks, closing each behind them.", "\"Well, old man,\" the captain grasped Shano's shoulder and turned him\n around. \"It means somebody cut himself, shaving. You stick tight to\n your cabin.\" He nodded curtly and indicated the door.\n\n\n Descending the companionway to the next deck Shano observed the\n nick-jawed lieutenant staring out the viewport, apparently idling. The\n man turned and gripped Shano's thin arm.\n\n\n \"A light?\" he said, tapping a cigarette. Shano produced a lighter\n disk and the chunky man puffed. He was an Earthman and his jaw seemed\n cut with a knife, notched like a piece of wood. Across the breast of\n his tunic was a purple band, with the name\nRourke\n. \"Why are you so\n anxious to get aboard, old man?\" He searched Shano's face. \"There's\n trouble ahead, you know.\"", "\"Hold fire.\"\n\n\n He crawled to his knees on the slippery deck, grabbed the pipes and\n pulled himself erect, hand over hand. His eyes came level with the gray\n metal box behind the pipes. He squinted, fascinated, at the quivering\n dial needle. \"Hey!\" he said.\n\n\n \"Stand by.\"\n\n\n Shano puzzled it out, his mind groping. He wasn't used to thinking.\n Only working with his hands.\n\n\n This box. This needle that had quivered when the ship was closed\n down....\n\n\n \"It's over. Chased them off. Ready guns before laying to. Third watch\n on duty.\"\n\n\n Shano sighed at the sudden release of tension throughout the space\n liner\nStardust\n.", "Giddily, Shano heard clicks and rasps and then a thick voice, atom\n motors whirring in the background.\n\n\n \"Selector's gone, sir. Direct hit. Heat ray through the deck plates.\n We've sealed the tear. Might repair selector in five hours.\"\n\n\n Shano coughed and sent a burst of smoke from his mouth.\n\n\n \"Captain!\" A rasping, grating sound ensued from a grill above Shano's\n head, then a disconnected voice. \"Get the men out of there. It's\n useless. Hurry it up!\" A series of clicks and the heavy voice of the\n chief engineer. \"Captain! Somebody's smashed the selector chamber.\n Engine room's full of toxia gas!\"\n\n\n Shano jumped. He prodded the body on the deck with his toe.", "Smoke spewed from his nostrils. His forehead wrinkled with\n concentration. Those rumors: \"Man sells out to Uranus, gets a nick cut\n in his jaw. Ever see a man with a nick in his jaw? Watch him, he's up\n to something.\" The talk of ignorant men. Shano remembered.\n\n\n He poked behind the pipes and angrily slapped the toggle switches on\n the box. The captain would only scoff. He'd never believe there was a\n traitor aboard who had planted an electronic signal box, giving away\n the ship's position. He'd never believe the babblings of an old man.\n\n\n He straightened up, glaring angrily. He knew. And the knowledge made\n him cold and furious. He watched the engine room emergency exit as it\n opened cautiously.", "The captain's voice. Calm, brief. It sent a tremor through Shano's\n body. He heard a quick scuffle of feet again, running feet, directly\n overhead, and the captain's voice, more urgently, \"Power on. They've\n heard us.\"\n\n\n The words carried no accusation, but Shano realized what they meant.\n A slip-up. Something left running. Vibrations picked up quickly by\n detectors of the Uranian space fleet.\n\n\n Shano coughed and heard the ship come to life around him. He pulled\n himself out of the spasm, cursing Pluto. Cursing his diseased,\n gum-clogged lungs. Cursing the Uranian fleet that was trying to prevent\n his going home—even to die.\n\n\n This was a strange battle. Strange indeed. It was mostly silence.\n\n\n Occasionally, as though from another world, came a brief, curt order.\n \"Port guns alert.\" Then hush and tension.", "He plucked at his agitated chest, thinking of a whole damn Uranian\n fleet swooping down on a spot in space, expecting to find a crippled\n ship there with a spy inside it. And finding nothing. Because of Shano.\n A useless old man.\n\n\n Coughing came out all mixed up with laughing.", "Shano smoked and contemplated the chunky man. Estimated his strength\n and youth and felt the anger and frustration mount in him. \"Devil,\" he\n said.\n\"Devil,\" he said and dug his cigarette into the other's face.\nHe lunged then, clawing. He dug the cigarette into Rourke's flushed\n face, and clung to his body. Rourke howled. He fell backward to the\n deck, slapping at his blistered face. He thrashed around and Shano\n clung to him, battered, pressing the cigarette relentlessly, coughing,\n cursing the pain in his joints.\n\n\n Shano grasped Rourke's neck with his hands. He twisted the neck with\n his gnarled hands. Strong hands that had worked.", "Shano coughed, his whole skeletal body jerking. Arthritic joints sent\n flashes of pain along his limbs. Here she comes, he thought, feeling\n neither glad nor sad.\n\n\n He coughed and slipped polarized goggles over his eyes.\n\n\n The spaceport emerged bathed in infra red. Hangars, cradles, freighter\n catapults and long runways stood out in sharp, diamond-clear detail.\n High up, beyond the cone of illumination, a detached triple row of\n bright specks—portholes of the liner\nStardust\n—sank slowly down.\n\n\n There was no eagerness in him. Only a tiredness. A relief. Relief from\n a lifetime of beating around the planets. A life of digging, lifting,\n lugging and pounding. Like a work-worn Martian camel, he was going home\n to die.", "He acted impulsively. A young ensign strode by, drawn blaster in hand.\n Shano followed him; followed the bluish glow of his bulb, through\n labyrinthine passages and down a companionway, coughing and leering\n against the pain in his joints. The blue light winked out in the\n distance and Shano stopped.\n\n\n He was suddenly alarmed. The captain had warned him to stay in his\n cabin. He looked back and forth, wondering how to return.\n\n\n A bell clanged.\n\n\n Shano saw a cold bulb glowing down the passageway, and he shuffled\n hopefully toward it. The bulb moved away. He saw an indistinct figure\n disappear through a door marked, ENGINE ROOM." ] ]
test	32744	[ "Why did Michael feel dejected upon first returning to Earth?", "What was the function of the golden lockets around Michael's and Mary's necks?", "What was the movie the council watched upon Michael and Mary's return?", "Why did Mary allow herself to become pregnant?", "Why did the council choose to alter the images captured by Michael and Mary?", "How did Michael and Mary convince the council to let them die in the desert?", "How did Earth become so dried-up and largely devoid of life?" ]	[ [ "He understood that humans would only destroy the planets they had found.", "He was devastated to see the Earth's state of decay.", "He realized Mary wanted to stay on Earth.", "Their mission to discover other inhabitable planets had failed." ], [ "It reminded them of their love for one another.", "It could kill them with a mere touch.", "It triggered the cloning process that would keep them alive to complete their mission.", "It expedited space travel so that more could be discovered in two thousand years." ], [ "A compressed video diary of their failed mission.", "A detailed record of the reincarnation process.", "An account of the diversified plant and animal life discovered on other planets.", "A catalog of their vast and varied discoveries made during the course of their journey." ], [ "She wanted to feel real humanity again.", "So that she wouldn't be alone if Michael decided to go back to space.", "She was tired of reincarnating and wanted to usher in a new generation.", "She wanted to defy the laws passed by the council." ], [ "They wanted to maintain their way of life on Earth.", "They wanted to preserve false hope among the population and keep them calm.", "They could not bear to watch the violence depicted in them.", "They wanted to lie to the people so they would keep working the water pumps for them." ], [ "They threatened to play the real tape to the people of Earth.", "They showed them the account of their two-thousand-year journey.", "They leveraged the council's fear of witnessing violence by threatening to kill themselves.", "They told them about Mary's pregnancy." ], [ "The council selfishly used the majority of its resources.", "An atomic bomb destroyed everything.", "Because of the detrimental effects of climate change.", "Through years of war and the hoarding of resources." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made\n it!\"\n\n\n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He\n can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our\n hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n\n\n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n\n\n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one\n grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a\n cinder.\"", "A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.", "The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing\n like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing,\n sucking the water from the seas.\n\n\n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For\n some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were\n uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other.\n And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place\n else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to\n others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make\n the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here\n to stay—and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n\n\n The silence did not change.\n\n\n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"", "He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"", "\"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.", "\"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"", "They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across\n the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the\n desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat\n for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and\n inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great\n pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless\n waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of\n dust.\n\n\n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said\n Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains\n and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in\n space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough\n concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why?\n When?\"", "She spoke softly. \"We've been together for a long time. I've loved\n you. I've asked very little. But I need to stay on Earth. Please,\n Michael.\"\n\n\n He looked at her for a moment. Then he flipped a switch. \"Milky Way to\n Earth. Never mind the rescue ship. We're all right. We're coming in.\"\nThe great, white ship settled to Earth that was like a plain after\n flood waters have drained away.\n\n\n The man and woman came out into the blazing sunlight.", "\"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "\"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the\n distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the\n flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.\n Everything's going to be\nall right\n!\"\n\n\n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun\n away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like\n pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white\n ship.\nThey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council\n chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood\n desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And\n on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet\n square.\n\n\n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you\n heard, they report—complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now,\n the proof.\"", "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a\n compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and\n thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks\n and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were\n aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some\n that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into\n flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.\n They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of\n blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must\n ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck\n that was Earth.", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one." ], [ "The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.", "He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "\"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"", "\"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to—to give me\n those—lockets! It's your—duty!\"\n\n\n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To\n ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n\n\n The President's body sagged. \"What—what is it you want?\"\n\n\n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city.\n To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to\n die a natural death.\"", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "\"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.", "They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time.\n They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of\n the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and\n of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the\n life that was their own.\n\n\n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood\n and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he\n had decided to build the house.\n... THE END", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "\"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.", "\"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I—I don't know how to say this.\"\n\n\n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n\n\n \"I'm—going to have a child.\"\n\n\n His face went blank.\n\n\n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the\n softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were\n shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been\n running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"It's true.\"\n\n\n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"", "He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.", "The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and\n whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate\n us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here....\nLet\nthem be\n finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n\n\n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him\n forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing\n there close together, as though attached.\n\n\n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You\nwill\ndie. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or\n your people again.\"\n\n\n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n\n\n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And—supplies.... Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range\n of mountains.\"" ], [ "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "\"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"", "Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair.\n The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in\n the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around.\n Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled\n with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the\n watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an\n ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n\n\n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of\n lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling,\n like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts\n flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time\n passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they\n themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward\n blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "\"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the\n distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the\n flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.\n Everything's going to be\nall right\n!\"\n\n\n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun\n away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like\n pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white\n ship.\nThey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council\n chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood\n desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And\n on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet\n square.\n\n\n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you\n heard, they report—complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now,\n the proof.\"", "The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.", "The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into\n human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and\n extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and\n cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the\n ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their\n bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them\n in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into\n space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,\n compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of\n space.\n\n\n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers\n of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "\"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.", "And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a\n compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and\n thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks\n and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were\n aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some\n that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into\n flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.\n They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of\n blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must\n ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck\n that was Earth.", "\"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "\"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.", "A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet." ], [ "\"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again\n and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that\n was it. It was just—something I felt I\nhad\nto do. Some—\nreal\nlife\n again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of\n myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close\n to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the\n ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night\n or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I\nhad\nto let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was\n something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed\n to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing.\" She\n paused, frowning. \"I didn't stop to think—it would be like this.\"", "\"Michael.\" Her voice trembled. \"I—I don't know how to say this.\"\n\n\n He waited, frowning, watching her intently.\n\n\n \"I'm—going to have a child.\"\n\n\n His face went blank.\n\n\n Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the\n softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were\n shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been\n running. And suddenly his throat was full.\n\n\n \"No,\" he said thickly. \"I can't believe it.\"\n\n\n \"It's true.\"\n\n\n He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.\n\n\n \"Yes, I can see it is.\"\n\n\n \"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael.\"", "\"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for\n three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history\n books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water\n had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth\n and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies\n born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give,\n for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the\n culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they\n were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was\n stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think\n the council could endure what you've done.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"", "Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n\n\n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in\n his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n\n\n \"We can\nlive\nhere, Michael!\"\n\n\n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a\n hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and\n plant and you'll have the child.\"\n\n\n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n\n\n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime\n we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He\n paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a\n way to save them.\"", "\"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"", "\"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.", "\"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "They remained kneeling in the silence beside the pool for a long time.\n They felt the sun on their backs and looked into the clean depth of\n the water deeply aware of the new life breathing all around them and\n of themselves absorbing it, and at the same time giving back to it the\n life that was their own.\n\n\n There was only this quiet and breathing and warmth until Michael stood\n and picked up a rock and walked toward the base of the hill where he\n had decided to build the house.\n... THE END", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"", "A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.", "\"And so this will be just for\nus\n.\" He took her in his arms. \"If I\n remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go\n with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside\n the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see.\"\n\n\n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the\n window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside\n him.\nThey both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking,\n both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the\n giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush\n planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing\n among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently\n like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the\n thoughts projected from the screen:", "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"" ], [ "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "\"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "\"There's been some mistake!\" he cried. \"Go back to the pumps and the\n distilleries! Go back to the water vats and the gardens and the\n flocks! Go back! Work and wait! We'll get the full truth to you.\n Everything's going to be\nall right\n!\"\n\n\n Obediently the mass of faces separated, as though they were being spun\n away on a whirling disk. Michael and the woman were swallowed up, like\n pebbles inside a closing hand, and carried away from the great, white\n ship.\nThey ushered the man and woman into the beamed and paneled council\n chambers and sat them in thick chairs before the wall of polished wood\n desks across which stared the line of faces, silent and waiting. And\n on a far wall, facing them all, hung a silver screen, fifty feet\n square.\n\n\n The President stood. \"Members of the council.\" He paused. \"As you\n heard, they report—complete failure.\" He turned to Michael. \"And now,\n the proof.\"", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "\"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.", "The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into\n human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and\n extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and\n cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the\n ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their\n bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them\n in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into\n space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,\n compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of\n space.\n\n\n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers\n of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.", "\"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"", "Michael stood beside the motion picture projector, close to his chair.\n The lights dimmed. There was only the sound of the pumps throbbing in\n the darkness close and far away, above and beneath and all around.\n Suddenly on the screen appeared an endless depth of blackness filled\n with a mass of glowing white, which extended into the room around the\n watching people, seeming to touch them and then spreading, like an\n ocean, farther away and out and out into an endless distance.\n\n\n Now streaks of yellow fire shot into the picture, like a swarm of\n lightning bugs, the thin sharp nosed shadows of space ships, hurtling,\n like comets, toward the clustered star smear. And then silent thoughts\n flashed from the screen into the minds of the spectators; of time\n passing in months, years and centuries, passing and passing until they\n themselves seemed to be rushing and rushing into the blackness toward\n blinding balls of white light, the size of moons.", "The picture faded in, close to one of the long, needle nosed crafts,\n showing inside, a man and a woman. Time was telescoped again while the\n man cut a tiny piece of scar tissue from his arm and that of the\n woman, put them in bottles and set them into compartments where\n solutions dripped rhythmically into the bottles, the temperature was\n held at that of the human body, and synthetic sunlight focused upon\n them from many pencil like tubes.", "\"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.", "\"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for\n three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history\n books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water\n had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth\n and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies\n born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give,\n for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the\n culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they\n were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was\n stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think\n the council could endure what you've done.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"" ], [ "\"We feel,\" said the President, \"it would be dangerous to allow you to\n go out among the people. They've been informed that your statement\n wasn't entirely true. This was necessary, to avoid a panic. The people\n simply must not know the whole truth.\" He paused. \"Now we ask you to\n keep in mind that whatever we decide about the two of you will be for\n the good of the people.\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary were silent.\n\n\n \"You'll wait outside the council chambers,\" the President went on,\n \"until we have reached our decision.\"", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "Michael put his arm around Mary's waist. He felt the trembling in her\n body and the waiting for death.\n\n\n \"Stop!\" he said quietly.\n\n\n They halted, in slight confusion, barely drawing back.\n\n\n \"If you want to see us die—just come a step closer.... And remember\n what'll happen to you.\"\n\n\n The faces began turning to each other and there was an undertone of\n muttering and whispering. \"A ghastly thing.... Instant.... Nothing to\n do.... Space's broken their minds.... They'll do it.... Eyes're\n mad.... What can we do?... What?...\" The sweaty faces, the cold white\n ones, the flushed hot ones: all began to turn to the President, who\n was staring at the two before him like a man watching himself die in a\n mirror.", "The half circle of faces turned to each other and muttered and\n whispered again. \"In the name of God.... Let them go.... Contaminate\n us.... Like animals.... Get them out of here....\nLet\nthem be\n finished.... Best for us all.... And them....\"\n\n\n There was a turning to the President again and hands thrusting him\n forward to within one step of Michael and Mary, who were standing\n there close together, as though attached.\n\n\n Haltingly he said, \"Go. Please go. Out onto the Earth—to die. You\nwill\ndie. The Earth is dead out there. You'll never see the city or\n your people again.\"\n\n\n \"We want a ground car,\" said Michael. \"And supplies.\"\n\n\n \"A ground car,\" repeated the President. \"And—supplies.... Yes.\"\n\n\n \"You can give us an escort, if you want to, out beyond the first range\n of mountains.\"", "\"Michael and Mary,\" he said, his voice struggling against a tightness,\n \"we've considered a long time concerning what is to be done with you\n and the report you brought back to us from the galaxy.\" He took\n another swallow of water. \"To protect the sanity of the people, we've\n changed your report. We've also decided that the people must be\n protected from the possibility of your spreading the truth, as you did\n at the landing field. So, for the good of the people, you'll be\n isolated. All comforts will be given you. After all, in a sense, you\nare\nheroes and martyrs. Your scar tissue will be cultured as it has\n been in the past, and you will stay in solitary confinement until the\n time when, perhaps, we can migrate to another planet. We feel that\n hope must not be destroyed. And so another expedition is being sent\n out. It may be that, in time, on another planet, you'll be able to\n take your place in our society.\"", "A buzzing rose up from the people like that of a swarm of frightened\n bees. The sea of white faces swayed and their voices began to cry. The\n din and motion held, long and drawn out, with a wail now and a\n fluttering beneath it.\n\n\n Michael and the woman stood above them in the center of the pale,\n hovering faces of the officials.\n\n\n \"Good God,\" said the President. \"You've got to tell them what you said\n isn't true!\"\n\n\n \"We've been searching two thousand years for a truth,\" said Michael.\n \"A thousand of us have died finding it. I've told it. That's the way\n it's got to be.\"\n\n\n The President swayed, took the microphone in his hands.", "He paused. \"Is there anything you wish to say?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, there is.\"\n\n\n \"Proceed.\"\n\n\n Michael stared straight at the President. After a long moment, he\n raised his hand to the tiny locket at his throat.\n\n\n \"Perhaps you remember,\" he said, \"the lockets given to every member of\n the expedition the night before we left. I still have mine.\" He raised\n it. \"So does my wife. They were designed to kill the wearer instantly\n and painlessly if he were ever faced with pain or a terror he couldn't\n endure.\"\n\n\n The President was standing again. A stir ran along the barricade of\n desks.\n\n\n \"We can't endure the city,\" went on Michael, \"or its life and the ways\n of the people.\" He glanced along the line of staring faces.", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "He came and stood beside her. \"I couldn't stand being out in space, or\n anywhere, without you.\"\n\n\n She looked up at him. \"We could go out into the wilderness, Michael,\n outside the force walls. We could go far away.\"\n\n\n He turned from her. \"It's all dead. What would be the use?\"\n\n\n \"I came from the Earth,\" she said quietly. \"And I've got to go back to\n it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and\n the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison.\"\n\n\n \"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust.\" Then he paused and\n looked away from her. \"We're crazy—talking as though we had a\n choice.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they'll have to\ngive\nus a choice.\"\n\n\n \"What're you talking about?\"", "At this instant from the watching council, there were screams of\n horror and voices crying out, \"Shut it off! Shut it off!\" There was a\n moving about in the darkness. Murmurs and harsh cries of disapproval\n grew in volume.\n\n\n Another ship in the picture was split down the side by a meteor and\n the bodies inside were impaled on jagged blades of steel, the\n contorted, bloody faces lighted by bursts of flame. And the screams\n and cries of the spectators rose higher, \"Shut it off.... Oh Lord....\"\n\n\n Lights flashed through the room and the picture died.\nMichael and Mary, both staring, saw, along the line of desks, the\n agonized faces, some staring like white stones, others hidden in\n clutching fingers, as though they had been confronted by a Medusa.\n There was the sound of heavy breathing that mixed with the throbbing\n of the pumps. The President held tightly to the edges of his desk to\n quiet his trembling.", "The President staggered as though about to faint. There was a stirring\n and muttering and a jumping up along the desks. Voices cried out, in\n anger and fear. Arms waved and fists pounded. Hands clasped and\n unclasped and clawed at collars, and there was a pell mell rushing\n around the President. They yelled at each other and clasped each other\n by the shoulders, turned away and back again, and then suddenly became\n very still.\n\n\n Now they began to step down from the raised line of desks, the\n President leading them, and came close to the man and woman, gathering\n around them in a wide half circle.\n\n\n Michael and Mary were holding the lockets close to their throats. The\n half circle of people, with the President at its center was moving\n closer and closer. They were sweaty faces and red ones and dry white\n ones and hands were raised to seize them.", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "\"I command you,\" he suddenly said, in a choked voice, \"to—to give me\n those—lockets! It's your—duty!\"\n\n\n \"We've only one duty, Mr. President,\" said Michael sharply. \"To\n ourselves.\"\n\n\n \"You're sick. Give yourselves over to us. We'll help you.\"\n\n\n \"We've made our choice. We want an answer. Quickly! Now!\"\n\n\n The President's body sagged. \"What—what is it you want?\"\n\n\n Michael threw the words. \"To go beyond the force fields of the city.\n To go far out onto the Earth and live as long as we can, and then to\n die a natural death.\"", "\"If any one of the other couples had made it back,\" said Mary, \"do you\n think they'd be with us?\"\n\n\n \"I think they'd either be with us,\" he said, \"or out in space\n again—or in prison.\"\n\n\n She stared ahead along the beam of headlight that stabbed out into the\n night over the decaying road.\n\n\n \"How sorry are you,\" she said quietly, \"coming with me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know is, if I were out in space for long without you, I'd kill\n myself.\"\n\n\n \"Are we going to die out here, Michael?\" she said, gesturing toward\n the wall of night that stood at the end of the headlight, \"with the\n land?\"\n\n\n He turned from her, frowning, and drove the ground car forward,\n watching the headlights push back the darkness.", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "\"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"", "\"The sins of our past, Mr. Nelson,\" said the President. \"The Atomic\n wars five thousand years ago. And the greed. It was too late a long\n time ago. That, of course, is why the expedition was sent out. And now\n you've come back to us with this terrible news.\" He looked around,\n slowly, then back to Michael. \"Can you give us any hope at all?\"\n\n\n \"None.\"\n\n\n \"Another expedition? To Andromeda perhaps? With you the leader?\"\n\n\n Michael shook his head. \"We're finished with expeditions, Mr.\n President.\"\n\n\n There were mutterings in the council, and hastily whispered\n consultations. Now they were watching the man and woman again.", "Mary knelt down and drank from the spring.\n\n\n \"It's so cool. It must come from deep down.\"\n\n\n \"It does,\" he said. There were tears in his eyes and a tightness in\n his throat. \"From deep down.\"\n\n\n \"We can\nlive\nhere, Michael!\"\n\n\n Slowly he looked all around until his sight stopped at the bottom of a\n hill. \"We'll build our house just beyond those rocks. We'll dig and\n plant and you'll have the child.\"\n\n\n \"Yes!\" she said. \"Oh yes!\"\n\n\n \"And the ones back in the city will know the Earth again. Sometime\n we'll lead them back here and show them the Earth is coming alive.\" He\n paused. \"By following what we had to do for ourselves, we've found a\n way to save them.\"", "\"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture.\n Those young bodies that didn't die of old age.\"\n\n\n He waited.\n\n\n \"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently.\"\n\n\n Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.\n\n\n \"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between\n suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice.\"\n\n\n He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long\n moment. \"So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What\n would it do to them?\"\n\n\n He was still for a long time. \"Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know\n you at all.\" A pause. \"And so now you and I are back where we started.\n Which'll it be, space or Earth?\"" ], [ "They followed the crumbling highway all night until light crept across\n the bald and cracked hills. The morning sun looked down upon the\n desolation ten feet above the horizon when the car stopped. They sat\n for a long time then, looking out upon the Earth's parched and\n inflamed skin. In the distance a wall of mountains rose like a great\n pile of bleached bones. Close ahead the rolling plains were motionless\n waves of dead Earth with a slight breeze stirring up little swirls of\n dust.\n\n\n \"I'm getting out,\" she said.\n\n\n \"I haven't the slightest idea how much farther to go, or why,\" said\n Michael shrugging. \"It's all the same. Dirt and hills and mountains\n and sun and dust. It's really not much different from being out in\n space. We live in the car just like in a space ship. We've enough\n concentrated supplies to last for a year. How far do we go? Why?\n When?\"", "\"I can't seem to remember so much quiet around me. There's always been\n the sound of a space ship, or the pumps back in the cities.\"\n\n\n He did not answer but continued to watch her footsteps and to feel the\n dust squishing up between his toes. Then suddenly:\n\n\n \"Mary!\"\n\n\n She stopped, whirling around.\n\n\n He was staring down at her feet.\n\n\n She followed his gaze.\n\n\n \"It's grass!\" He bent down. \"Three blades.\"\n\n\n She knelt beside him. They touched the green blades.\n\n\n \"They're new,\" he said.\n\n\n They stared, like religious devotees concentrating upon some sacred\n object.", "And those watching the screen on which time and distance were a\n compressed and distilled kaleidoscope, saw planet after planet and\n thousands at a time; heard strange noises; rasping and roaring, clinks\n and whistles, screams and crying, sighing and moaning. And they were\n aware through all this of atmosphere and ground inimical to man, some\n that would evaporate at the touch of a human body, or would burst into\n flame, or swallow, or turn from liquid to solid or solid to liquid.\n They saw and heard chemical analyses, were aware of this ocean of\n blackness and clouds of white through which man might move, and must\n ever move, because he could live only upon this floating dust speck\n that was Earth.", "A note of hysteria stabbed into the radio voice. \"Are you all right?\n Stand by! We're sending a rescue ship.\"\n\n\n \"They've got a right to know what we've found,\" said the woman. \"They\n sent us out. They've waited so long—.\"\n\n\n He stared into space. \"It's hopeless. If we'd found another planet\n they could live on, they'd do the same as they've done here.\"\n\n\n He touched the tiny golden locket that hung around his neck. \"Right\n now, I could press this and scratch myself and the whole farce would\n be over.\"\n\n\n \"No. A thousand of us died. You've got to think of them.\"\n\n\n \"We'll go back out into space,\" he said. \"It's clean out there. I'm\n tired. Two thousand years of reincarnation.\"", "As the man and woman were led away, the pumps beat in the stillness,\n and at the edge of the shrinking seas the salt thick waters were being\n pulled into the distilleries, and from them into the tier upon tier of\n artificial gardens that sat like giant bee hives all around the\n shoreline; and the mounds of salt glistening in the sunlight behind\n the gardens were growing into mountains.\nIn their rooms, Michael and Mary were talking through the hours, and\n waiting. All around them were fragile, form-fitting chairs and\n translucent walls and a ceiling that, holding the light of the sun\n when they had first seen it, was now filled with moonlight.\n\n\n Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far\n below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the\n shoreline of the sea.\n\n\n \"We should have delivered our message by radio,\" he said, \"and gone\n back into space.\"\n\n\n \"You could probably still go,\" she said quietly.", "The cries of the people were slipping away and a stillness growing\n like an ocean calm and, within it, the sound of the pumps, throbbing,\n sucking the water from the seas.\n\n\n And then Michael's voice, \"The thousand who left with us are dead. For\n some time we've known the other planets in our solar system were\n uninhabitable. Now we've been from one end of the galaxy to the other.\n And this is what we've found.... We were given Earth. There's no place\n else for us. The rest of the planets in the galaxy were given to\n others. There's no place else for them. We've all had a chance to make\n the best of Earth. Instead we've made the worst of it. So we're here\n to stay—and die.\" He handed the microphone back.\n\n\n The silence did not change.\n\n\n The President grasped Michael's arm. \"What're you saying?\"", "\"This will be your new home. It was found and then lost. But another\n expedition will be sent out to find it again. Be of good hope.\n Everything will be all right.\"\n\n\n Michael turned from the window. \"So there's our evidence. Two thousand\n years. All the others killed getting it. And with a simple twist, it\n becomes a lie.\"\n\n\n Mary sat down and buried her face in her hands.\n\n\n \"What a terrible failure there's been here,\" said Michael. \"The\n neglect and destruction of a whole planet. It's like a family letting\n their home decay all around them, and living in smaller and smaller\n rooms of it, until at last the rooms are all gone, and since they\n can't find another home, they all die in the ruins of the last room.\"", "\"What you showed us was a picture,\" said the President. \"If it had\n been real, we'd all be insane by now. If it were shown to the people\n there'd be mass hysteria.\"\n\n\n \"But even if we'd found another habitable planet, getting to it would\n involve just what we've shown you. Maybe only a tenth of the people\n who left Earth, or a hundredth, would ever reach a destination out in\n space.\"\n\n\n \"We couldn't tolerate such a possibility,\" said the President\n gravely. \"We'd have to find a way around it.\"\n\n\n The pumps throbbed like giant hearts all through the stillness in the\n council chambers. The faces along the line of desks were smoothing\n out; the terror in them was fading away.\n\n\n \"And yet the Earth is almost dead,\" said Michael quietly, \"and you\n can't bring it back to life.\"", "The dark shapes of smaller spheres circling the blinding ones moved\n forward into the picture; red, blue, green, yellow, purple and many\n mixtures of all these, and then one planet filled the screen, seeming\n to be inflated, like a balloon, into a shining red ball. There was a\n razor edge of horizon then and pink sky and an expanse of crimson.\n Flat, yellow creatures lay all around, expanding and contracting. A\n roaring rose and fell like the roaring of a million winds. Then fear\n flowed out of the picture into the minds of the watchers so that they\n gasped and cringed, and a silent voice told them that the atmosphere\n of this planet would disintegrate a human being.\n\n\n Now the red ball seemed to pull away from them into the blackness and\n the blinding balls of light, and all around could be seen the streaks\n of rocket flame shooting away in all directions.", "\"There will be no escort,\" said the President firmly. \"No one has been\n allowed to go out upon the Earth or to fly above it for many hundreds\n of years. We know it's there. That's enough. We couldn't bear the\n sight of it.\" He took a step back. \"And we can't bear the sight of you\n any longer. Go now. Quickly!\"\n\n\n Michael and Mary did not let go of the lockets as they watched the\n half circle of faces move backward, staring, as though at corpses that\n should sink to the floor.\nIt was night. The city had been lost beyond the dead mounds of Earth\n that rolled away behind them, like a thousand ancient tombs. The\n ground car sat still on a crumbling road.\n\n\n Looking up through the car's driving blister, they saw the stars sunk\n into the blue black ocean of space; saw the path of the Milky Way\n along which they had rushed, while they had been searching frantically\n for the place of salvation.", "\"And so this will be just for\nus\n.\" He took her in his arms. \"If I\n remember rightly, this is a traditional action.\" A pause. \"Now I'll go\n with you out onto the Earth—if we can swing it. When we get outside\n the city, or if we do—Well, we'll see.\"\n\n\n They were very still together and then he turned and stood by the\n window and looked down upon the city and she came and stood beside\n him.\nThey both saw it at the same time. And they watched, without speaking,\n both knowing what was in the other's mind and heart. They watched the\n giant four dimensional screens all through the city. A green, lush\n planet showed bright and clear on them and there were ships standing\n among the trees and men walking through the grass, that moved gently\n like the swells on a calm ocean, while into their minds came the\n thoughts projected from the screen:", "\"There—there've been changes,\" he said, \"since you've been out in\n space. There isn't a person on Earth who's seen a violent death for\n hundreds of years.\"\n\n\n Michael faced him, frowning. \"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\n \"Dying violently happened so seldom on Earth that, after a long time,\n the sight of it began to drive some people mad. And then one day a man\n was struck by one of the ground cars and\neveryone\nwho saw it went\n insane. Since then we've eliminated accidents, even the idea. Now, no\n one is aware that death by violence is even a possibility.\"\n\n\n \"I'm sorry,\" said Michael, \"we've been so close to violent death for\n so long.... What you've seen is part of the proof you asked for.\"", "The ship's radio cried out. \"You've made it! Thank God! You've made\n it!\"\n\n\n Another voice, shaking, said, \"President—Davis is—overwhelmed. He\n can't go on. On his behalf and on behalf of all the people—with our\n hope that was almost dead, we greet you.\" A pause. \"Please come in!\"\n\n\n The voice was silent. The air screamed against the hull of the ship.\n\n\n \"I can't tell them,\" said the man.\n\n\n \"Please come in!\" said the radio. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\n The woman looked up at the man. \"You've got to Michael!\"\n\n\n \"Two thousand years. From one end of the galaxy to the other. Not one\n grain of dust we can live on. Just Earth. And it's burned to a\n cinder.\"", "A shout, like the crashing of a thousand surfs, rose and broke over\n them. The man and woman descended the gang-plank toward the officials\n gathered on the platform. They glanced around at the massed field of\n white faces beneath them; saw those same faces that had been turned\n toward them two thousand years past; remembered the cheers and the\n cries that had crashed around them then, as they and the thousand had\n stood before the towering spires of the ships, before the takeoff.\n\n\n And, as then, there were no children among the milling, grasping\n throng. Only the same clutching hands and voices and arms, asking for\n an answer, a salvation, a happy end.\n\n\n Now the officials gathered around the man and the woman, and spoke to\n them in voices of reverence.\n\n\n A microphone was thrust into Michael's hand with the whispered\n admonition to tell the people of the great new life waiting for them,\n open and green and moist, on a virgin planet.", "\"Such a thing,\" he said, smiling grimly, \"hasn't happened on Earth for\n three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history\n books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water\n had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth\n and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies\n born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give,\n for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the\n culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they\n were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was\n stabilized.\" He paused. \"After all this past history, I don't think\n the council could endure what you've done.\"\n\n\n \"No,\" she said quietly. \"I don't think they could.\"", "And then the spectators saw one ship shudder and swerve into a\n blazing, bluish white star, like a gnat flying into a white hot poker;\n saw another drop away and away, out and out into the blackness past\n the swirling white rim of the galaxy, and sink into a dark\n nothingness.\n\n\n Great balls of rock showered like hail onto other ships, smashing them\n into grotesque tin cans. The stream of fire at the tail of another\n ship suddenly died and the ship floated into an orbit around a great,\n yellow planet, ten times the size of Jupiter, then was sucked into it.\n Another burst like a bomb, flinging a man and woman out into the\n darkness, where they hung suspended, frozen into statues, like bodies\n drowned in the depths of an Arctic sea.", "The watchers in the council chamber saw the bits of tissue swell into\n human embryos in a few seconds, and grow arms and legs and faces and\n extend themselves into babies. Saw them taken from the bottles and\n cared for, and become replicas of the man and woman controlling the\n ship, who, all this time were aging, until life went out of their\n bodies. Then the ones who had been the scar tissue disintegrated them\n in the coffin-like tubes and let their dust be sucked out into\n space—all this through millions of miles and a hundred years,\n compressed for the watchers into sixty seconds and a few feet of\n space.\n\n\n Instantly there was black space on the screen again, with the fingers\n of flame pointing out behind the dark bodies of the ships.", "\"I can't face dying,\" Mary said quietly, \"squeezed in with all these\n people, in this tomb they've made around the seas. I want to have the\n open sky and the quiet away from those awful pounding pumps when I\n die. I want the spread of the Earth all around and the clean air. I\n want to be a real part of the Earth again.\"\n\n\n Michael barely nodded in agreement. He was standing very still now.\n\n\n And then there was the sound of the door opening.\n\n\n They both rose, like mourners at a funeral, and went into the council\n chambers.\nAgain they sat in the thick chairs before the wall of desks with the\n faces of the council looking across it like defenders.\n\n\n The pumps were beating, beating all through the room and the quiet.\n\n\n The President was standing. He faced Michael and Mary, and seemed to\n set himself as though to deliver a blow, or to receive one.", "Suddenly a flash cut the blackness, like the flare of a match, and\n died, and the watchers caught from the screen the awareness of the\n death of a ship.\n\n\n They were also aware of the rushing of time through centuries and they\n saw the streaking rocket flames and planets rushing at them; saw\n creatures in squares and circles, in threads wriggling, in lumps and\n blobs, rolling jumping and crawling; saw them in cloud forms whisking\n about, changing their shapes, and in flowing wavelets of water. They\n saw creatures hopping about on one leg and others crawling at\n incredible speeds on a thousand; saw some with all the numbers of legs\n and arms in between; and were aware of creatures that were there but\n invisible.", "They stepped upon the Earth and felt the warmth of the sun and\n strolled toward the top of the hill.\n\n\n \"The air smells clean,\" he said.\n\n\n \"The ground feels good. I think I'll take off my shoes.\" She did.\n \"Take off your boots, Michael. Try it.\"\n\n\n Wearily he pulled off his boots, stood in his bare feet. \"It takes me\n back.\"\n\n\n \"Yes,\" she said and began walking toward the hilltop.\n\n\n He followed, his boots slung around his neck. \"There was a road\n somewhere, with the dust between my toes. Or was it a dream?\"\n\n\n \"I guess when the past is old enough,\" she said, \"it becomes a dream.\"\n\n\n He watched her footprints in the dust. \"God, listen to the quiet.\"" ] ]
test	40954	[ "According to the narrator, traveling is", "Why does the Lieutenant not believe that Gray has seen a ship?", "Why does the Captian ultimately not destroy the other ship?", "SupSaceCom Michell's attitude towards the alien ship is ", "When the aliens are seen again several years later, they warn the people of Earth ", "The narrator states, \"Humanity had been whipped into a state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\" What does this commentary say about humans in general?", "Markham Gray figures out what about the aliens?", "Why were the Earth's ships unable to detect the \"alien\" ships?", "These alien forms, Markham Gray assumes", "Markham Gray tries to turn the tables on those who want to destroy the aliens by" ]	[ [ "stimulating.", "educational.", "a way to broaden horizons.", "essentially boring." ], [ "The Lieutenant did not see it; therefore, it was not a possibility.", "Alarms would have sounded alerting them of another ship's presence.", "Markham Gray was known for \"crying wolf\" to keep himself entertained while travling.", "Markham Gray was old, and his eyes were unreliable." ], [ "He was instructed not to by his commanders.", "He was too afraid to start a war with an alien life force.", "He did not have the proper equipment to do so.", "He believed that the other ship came in peace, and he did not feel they were in danger." ], [ "it should have been taken over and brought back to Earth to learn about the aliens.", "it should have been followed back to its home planet.", "it should have been destroyed at all costs to prevent future issues.", "similar to the Captian's. It posed no threat and should not have been attacked." ], [ "the aliens aligned with other life forms to attack Earth, so they need to prepare for the upcoming war.", "to beware because the next time they meet, they will destroy Earth.", "the troubles that face Earth are internal and have nothing to do with aliens.", "Earth's water supply is in danger of drying up, thus causing the death of the planet." ], [ "Humans cannot comprehend these intense emotions, and they act out in a negative fashion due to that.", "Humans love drama.", "Humans were doomed to a world that embraced insanity.", "Humans are not equipped with the ability to express emotions that they find to be uncommon." ], [ "They plan to align with other lifeforms to attack the planet.", "They are not aliens at all but other lifeforms from Earth.", "They plan to contaminate Earth's water supply.", "They are about to attack Earth." ], [ "Their speed kept them from being picked up on the ship's radar.", "Their size was so massive, they could not be picked up on the ship's radar.", "They are made from materials that are undetectable by the ship's radar.", "They are so small in size, they cannot be picked up on the ship's radar." ], [ "are some sort of insects from Earth who were of superintelligence.", "will take over the planet and enslave all humans.", "will infiltrate the Earth's water system, thus ending all life on the planet.", "will kill all Earthlings by the end of the century." ], [ "allowing them to follow through with their plans knowing the aliens will destroy them.", "trying to show that the plan to destroy all other life forms is insanity because one day, Earth will meet an opponent who may take it out in the way it has other life forms.", "showing them the benefits that the aliens have to offer the Earth.", "letting them know that the aliens are the only ones who can fix Earth's water system, so they must be allowed to live." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "him and he had to return to Babylon. He died there while making plans to\n attack Arabia, Carthage, Rome. You see, given the military outlook, he\n could not afford powerful neighbors on his borders; they might become\n enemies some day.\nAlexander had not been the first to be faced with this problem, nor was\n he the last. So it was later with Rome, and later with Napoleon, and\n later still with Adolf the Aryan, and still later—\nIt isn't travel that is broadening, stimulating, or educational. Not the\n traveling itself. Visiting new cities, new countries, new continents, or\n even new planets,\nyes\n. But the travel itself,\nno\n. Be it by the\n methods of the Twentieth Century—automobile, bus, train, or", "Oh, it's interesting enough for the first few hours, say. You look out\n the window of your car, bus, train, or airliner, or over the side of\n your ship, and it's very stimulating. But after that first period it\n becomes boring, monotonous, sameness to the point of redundance.\n\n\n And so it is in space.\n\n\n Markham Gray, free lance journalist for more years than he would admit\n to, was en route from the Neptune satellite Triton to his home planet,\n Earth, mistress of the Solar System. He was seasoned enough as a space\n traveler to steel himself against the monotony with cards and books,\n with chess problems and wire tapes, and even with an attempt to do an\n article on the distant earthbase from which he was returning for the\nSpacetraveler Digest\n.", "When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—", "aircraft—or be it by spaceship, travel is nothing more than boring.", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "Quite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.", "The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact." ], [ "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "Quite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly." ], [ "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.", "there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.", "SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.", "When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—", "The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally." ], [ "SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"", "SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"", "The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"", "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "Suddenly, the telviz blared.\nCalling the Neuve Los Angeles. Calling the Neuve Los Angeles. Be\n unafraid. We are not hostile.\nThere was quiet on the bridge of the earth ship. Screaming quiet. It was\n seemingly hours before they had recovered even to the point of staring\n at one another.\n\n\n Hans Bormann gasped finally, unbelievingly, \"How could they possibly\n know the name of our ship? How could they possibly know the Amer-English\n language?\"" ], [ "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"", "The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"" ], [ "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "Suddenly, the telviz blared.\nCalling the Neuve Los Angeles. Calling the Neuve Los Angeles. Be\n unafraid. We are not hostile.\nThere was quiet on the bridge of the earth ship. Screaming quiet. It was\n seemingly hours before they had recovered even to the point of staring\n at one another.\n\n\n Hans Bormann gasped finally, unbelievingly, \"How could they possibly\n know the name of our ship? How could they possibly know the Amer-English\n language?\"", "The smile was still on the co-pilot's face as he turned and followed the\n direction of the other's finger. The smile faded. \"I'll be a\nmakron\n!\"\n he blurted. Spinning on his heel, he hurried forward to the bridge,\n muttering as he went.\n\n\n The older man snorted with satisfaction. Actually, he shouldn't have\n been so snappy with the young man; he hated to admit he was growing\n cranky with age. He took up his half completed manuscript again. He\n really should finish this article, though, space knew, he hadn't enough\n material for more than a few paragraphs. Triton was a barren satellite\n if he'd ever seen one—and he had.\n\n\n He had almost forgotten the matter ten minutes later when the ship's\n public address system blurted loudly.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments." ], [ "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "Quite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily." ], [ "The SupSpaceCom's face had gone red with indignation.\nIt was three years before another of the aliens was sighted. Three\n hurried, crowded, harassed years during which all the Solar System's\n resources were devoted to building and arming a huge space fleet and\n rushing space defenses. The total wars of the Twentieth Century paled in\n comparison to the all out efforts made to prepare for this conflict.\n\n\n The second view of the alien ship was similar to the first. This, time\n the\nPendleton\n, a four-man scout returning to the Venus base after a\n patrol in the direction of Sirius, held the intruder in its viewer for a\n full five minutes. Once again, no estimation of its distance nor size\n could be made. All instruments pertaining to such detection seemed to\n fail to function properly.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "SupSpaceCom Michell had been blunt and ruthless. He had rapped out,\n bitingly, \"Roger Post, as captain of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, why did\n you not either destroy the alien craft, or, if you felt it too strong\n for your ship, why did you not blast off into space, luring it away from\n your home planet?\"\n\n\n Post said hesitantly, \"I didn't think it necessary, sir. His attitude\n was—well, of peace. It was as if we were two ships that had met by\n chance and dipped their flags in the old manner and passed on to their\n different destinations. They even were able to telviz us a message.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom snapped, \"That was undoubtedly a case of telepathy. The\n alien is equipped in some manner to impose thoughts upon the human\n brain. You\nthought\nthe telviz was used; actually the alien wasn't\n speaking Amer-English, he was simply forcing thoughts into your minds.\"", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "SupSpaceCom Michell indicated his disgust with an impatient flick of his\n hand. \"Any alien is a potential enemy, Post; that should be elementary.\n And a potential enemy is an enemy in fact. Even though these aliens\n might seem amiable enough today, how do we know they will be in the\n future—possibly in the far future? There can be no friendship with\n aliens. We can't afford to have neighbors; we can't afford to be\n encircled by enemies.\"\n\n\n \"Nor even friends?\" Captain Post had asked softly.\n\n\n Michell glared at his subordinate. \"That is what it amounts to, Captain;\n and the thing to remember is that they feel the same way. They must!\n They must seek us out and destroy us completely and as quickly as\n possible. By the appearance of things, and partially through your\n negligence, they've probably won the first round. They know our\n location; we don't know theirs.\"", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.", "Suddenly, the telviz blared.\nCalling the Neuve Los Angeles. Calling the Neuve Los Angeles. Be\n unafraid. We are not hostile.\nThere was quiet on the bridge of the earth ship. Screaming quiet. It was\n seemingly hours before they had recovered even to the point of staring\n at one another.\n\n\n Hans Bormann gasped finally, unbelievingly, \"How could they possibly\n know the name of our ship? How could they possibly know the Amer-English\n language?\"", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "The supreme commander of Earth's space forces dropped that point. \"Let\n us go back again. When you received this telepathic message—or whatever\n it was—what was your reaction? Did it seem friendly, domineering, or\n what?\"\n\n\n Roger Post stood silent for a moment. Finally he answered, \"Sir, I still\n think it was the telviz, rather than a telepathic communication, but\n the ... the tone of voice seemed to give me the impression of pitying.\"\n\n\n \"Pitying!\" Michell ejaculated.\n\n\n The captain was nervous but determined. \"Yes, sir. I had the distinct\n feeling that the being that sent the message felt sorry for us.\"", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence." ], [ "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "Quite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "But he had gone too far now. He said, \"Not at all. I am not sure of\n where we stand, but things should be much clearer, shortly. First of\n all, your spaceships are tiny. Probably less than ten pounds.\"\nAbout four, Mr. Gray.\n\"Which explains why our instruments did not record them; the instruments\n weren't disrupted, your ships were really too small to register. That's\n where we made our first mistake. We assumed, for no valid reason, that\n you were approximately our own size. We were willing to picture you as\n non-human and possessing limbs, organs, and even senses different from\n ours; but we have pictured 'aliens', as we've been calling you, as\n approximately our own size. Actually, you must be quite tiny.\"", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "Co-pilot Bormann was passing through the lounge. He nodded to the\n distinguished elderly passenger, flicked his eyes quickly,\n professionally, over the vision screen and was about to continue on his\n way.\n\n\n Gray called idly, \"Hans, I thought the space patrols very seldom got out\n here.\"\n\n\n \"Practically never, sir,\" the other told him politely, hesitating\n momentarily. Part of the job was to be constantly amiable, constantly\n watchful of the passengers out here in deep space—they came down with\n space cafard at the drop of a hat. Markham Gray reminded Bormann of\n pictures of Benjamin Franklin he'd seen in history books, and ordinarily\n he didn't mind spending a little time now and then talking things over\n with him. But right now he was hoping the old duffer wasn't going to\n keep him from the game going on forward with Captain Post and the\n steward.\n\n\n \"Just noticed one on the screen,\" the elderly journalist told him\n easily.", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "When all these failed, he sometimes spent a half hour or so staring at\n the vision screen which took up a considerable area of one wall of the\n lounge.\n\n\n Unless you had a vivid imagination of the type which had remained with\n Markham Gray down through the years, a few minutes at a time would have\n been enough. With rare exception, the view on the screen seemed almost\n like a still; a velvety blackness with pin-points of brilliant light,\n unmoving, unchanging.\n\n\n But even Markham Gray, with his ability to dream and to discern that\n which is beyond, found himself twisting with ennui after thirty minutes\n of staring at endless space. He wished that there was a larger number of\n passengers aboard. The half-dozen businessmen and their women and\n children had left him cold and he was doing his best to avoid them. Now,\n if there had only been one good chess player—", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"" ], [ "Markham Gray, watching and listening to this over his set, shook his\n head in dissatisfaction. As always, the military mind was dull and\n unreceptive. The ridiculousness of expecting Post to blast off into\n space in an attempt to fool the other craft in regard to his home\n planet was obvious. The whole affair had taken place within the solar\n system; obviously the alien would know that one of Sol's nine major\n planets was mankind's home. Finding out which one wouldn't be too\n difficult a job.\n\n\n Roger Post was saying hesitantly, \"Then it is assumed that the alien\n craft wasn't friendly?\"", "There was hesitation again, then,\nAnd why was that a mistake, Markham\n Gray?\nGray wet his lips. He might be signing his death warrant, but he\n couldn't stop now. \"Because you are not really 'aliens,' but of Earth\n itself. Several facts point that way. For instance, your ships are\n minute models of Earth ships, or, rather, of human ships. You have\n obviously copied them. Then, too, you have been able to communicate with\n humans too easily. An alien to our world would have had much more\n trouble. Our ways, our methods of thinking, are not strange to you.\"\nYou have discovered a secret which has been kept for many centuries,\n Markham Gray.\nHe was more at ease now; somehow there was no threat in the attitude of", "Markham Gray felt cold fingers trace their way up his back. \"Why, why, I\n must have noticed it several hours ago, Captain. But ... an\nalien\n!...\n I....\" He peered at the enlarged craft on the screen. \"Are you sure,\n Captain? It seems remarkably like our own. I would say—\"\n\n\n The captain had spun back around to stare at the screen again, as though\n to reassure himself of what he had already seen.\n\n\n \"There are no other ships in the vicinity,\" he grated, almost as though\n to himself. \"Besides that, as far as I know, and I should know, there\n are no Earth craft that look exactly like that. There are striking\n similarities, I'll admit, to our St. Louis class scouts, but those jets\n on the prow—there's nothing like them either in existence or\n projected.\"\n\n\n His voice rose in an attempt to achieve decisiveness, \"Lieutenant\n Bormann, prepare to attack.\"", "His articles were in continuous demand in both magazines and newspaper\n supplements; editors clamored for additional material from his\n voco-typer. There was but one complaint against his copy—it wasn't\n alarmist enough, sensational enough. Humanity had been whipped into a\n state of hysteria, an emotional binge, and humanity loved it.\n\n\n And it was there that Markham Gray refused to go along. He had agreed\n with poor Captain Post, now serving a life sentence in the Martian\n prison camps; there had been no sign of hostility from the alien craft.\n It was man who was preparing for war—and Gray knew of no period in\n history in which preparations for war did not eventually culminate in\n one.\n\n\n So it was not really strange that it was he the aliens chose to contact.", "The captain's face was white and frozen. He said, so quietly that they\n could hardly make it out, \"That's not all. Our alarms still haven't been\n touched off, and our estimators aren't functioning; we don't know how\n large they are nor how far away. It's unheard of—.Somehow they've\n completely disrupted our instruments.\"\nMarkham Gray followed the matter with more than average interest, after\n their arrival at the New Albuquerque spaceport. Not that average\n interest wasn't high.\n\n\n Finally man had come in contact with another intelligence. He had been\n dreading it, fearing it, for decades; now it was here. Another life form\n had conquered space, and, seemingly, had equipment, in some respects at\n least, superior to humanity's.", "The next words were coldly contemptuous.\nWe are not wanton killers,\n like man. We have no desire to destroy.\nGray winced and changed the subject. \"You have found your new planet?\"\nAt last. We are about to begin transportation of our population to the\n new world. For the first time since our ancestors became aware of the\n awful presence of man on the Earth, we feel that we can look forward to\n security.\nMarkham Gray remained quiet for a long time. \"I am still amazed that you\n were able to develop so far without our knowledge,\" he said finally.", "And again the alien had sent a message—seemingly, at least, by telviz.\nWe are no danger to you, mankind. Seek your destiny in peace. Your\n troubles are from within.\nThe\nPendleton\nwould have attempted to follow the strange craft, but\n her fuel tanks were nearly dry and she had to proceed to Venus. Her\n captain's report made a sensation.\n\n\n In a way, the whole business had been a good thing for Markham Gray. As\n a free lancing journalist, he'd had a considerable advantage. First, he\n was more than usually informed on space travel and the problems relating\n to it, second, he had been present at—in fact, had made himself—the\n first sighting of the aliens.", "have escaped the danger that overhung us, and you know now that we are\n no alien enemies from space threatening you. We wish you well, mankind;\n perhaps the future will see changes in your nature. It is in this\n friendly hope that we have contacted humanity through you, Mr. Gray.\nThe elderly journalist said quietly, \"I appreciate your thoughtfulness\n and hope you are correct. Good luck to you in your new world.\"\nThank you, Markham Gray, and goodbye.\nThe set was suddenly quiet again.\nMarkham Gray stood before the assembled Military Council of the Solar\n System. He had told his story without interruption to this most powerful\n body on Earth. They listened to him in silence.", "The President of the Council added thoughtfully, \"Quite correct,\n Michell. And in the early stages of the fight, we should be able to\n capture some of their ships intact. As soon as we find what kind of\n insect they are, our bacteriologists will be able to work on a method to\n eliminate any that might remain on Earth.\"\n\n\n Markham Gray's face had paled in horror. \"But why?\" he blurted. \"Why not\n let them go in peace? All they've wanted for centuries is to escape us,\n to have a planet of their own.\"\n\n\n SupSpaceCom Michell eyed him tolerantly. \"You seem to have been taken\n in, Mr. Gray. Once they've established themselves in their new world, we\n have no idea of how rapidly they might develop and how soon they might\n become a threat. Even though they may be peaceful today, they are\n potential enemies tomorrow. And a potential enemy\nis\nan enemy, who\n must be destroyed.\"", "Quite tiny, Markham Gray. Although, of course, the way we think of it\n is that you are quite huge.\nHe was becoming more confident now; widely awake, it was less strange to\n hear the words come from his commonplace home model telviz set. \"Our\n second mistake was in looking for you throughout space,\" he said softly.", "The court martial of Captain Roger Post had been short and merciless.\n Free access to the trial had been given to the press and telviz systems,\n and the newscasts had carried it in its entirety, partially to stress to\n the public mind the importance of the situation, and partially as a\n warning to other spacemen.\n\n\n Post had stood before the raised dais upon which were seated SupSpaceCom\n Michell and four other high-ranking officers and heard the charge\n read—failure to attack the alien craft, destroy it, and thus prevent\n the aliens—wherever they might be from—returning to their own world\n and reporting the presence of man in the galaxy.\n\n\n Markham Gray, like thousands of others, had sat on the edge of his chair\n in the living room of his small suburban home, and followed the trial\n closely on his telviz.", "He said haltingly, \"Why are you here?\"\nWe are familiar with your articles. You alone, Mr. Gray, seem at least\n to seek understanding. Before we left, we felt it our duty to explain\n our presence and our purpose—that is, partially.\n\"Yes,\" he said. Then, in an attempt to check the conclusion at which he\n had just arrived, he added, \"You are going from the Solar\n System—leaving your home for a new one?\"\n\n\n There was a long silence.\n\n\n Finally:\nAs we said, we were going to explain partially our presence\n and purpose, but obviously you know more than we had thought. Would you\n mind revealing the extent of your knowledge?\nGray reached to the foot of the bed and took up his night robe; partly\n because it was chilly, partly to give himself time to consider his\n answer. Perhaps he shouldn't have said that. He was alone in this small\n house; he had no knowledge of their intentions toward him.", "the other. Gray said, \"The hardest thing for me to understand is why it\nhas\nbeen kept a secret. Obviously, you are a tiny form of Earth life,\n probably an insect, which has progressed intellectually as far beyond\n other insect forms as man beyond other mammals. Why have you kept this\n a secret from humans?\"\nYou should be able to answer that yourself, Mr. Gray. As we developed,\n we were appalled by the only other form of life on our planet with a\n developed intelligence. Why, not even your own kind is safe from your\n bloodlust. The lesser animals on Earth have been either enslaved by\n man—or slaughtered to extinction. And even your fellows in the recent\n past were butchered; man killed man wholesale. Do you blame us for\n keeping our existence a secret? We knew that the day humans discovered", "When he had finished, he waited for their questions. The first came from\n SupSpaceCom Michell. He said, thoughtfully, \"You believe their words to\n be substantially correct, Gray?\"\n\n\n \"I believe them to be entirely truthful, your excellency,\" the\n journalist told him sincerely.\n\n\n \"Then they are on the verge of leaving the Earth and removing to this\n other planet in some other star system?\"\n\n\n \"That is their plan.\"\n\n\n The SupSpaceCom mused aloud. \"We'll be able to locate them when they\n blast off en masse. Their single ships are so small that they missed\n being observed, but a mass flight we'll be able to detect. Our cruisers\n will be able to follow them all the way, blasting them as they go. If\n any get through to their new planet, we'll at least know where they are\n and can take our time destroying it.\"", "there was another intelligence on Earth they would begin making plans to\n dominate or, even more likely, to destroy us. Our only chance was to\n find some refuge away from Earth. That is why we began to search the\n other stars for a planet similar to this and suitable to our form of\n life.\n\"You could have fought back, had we attempted to destroy you,\" Gray said\n uncomfortably.", "It was immediately obvious, there at the craft's heart, that this was no\n farce, at least not a deliberate one. Captain Roger Post, youthful\n officer in command of the\nNeuve Los Angeles\n, Lieutenant Hans Bormann\n and the two crew members on watch were white-faced and shaken,\n momentarily confused in a situation which they had never expected to\n face. The two officers stood before the bridge vision screen watching,\n wide-eyed, that sector of space containing the other vessel. They had\n enlarged it a hundred-fold.\n\n\n At the elderly journalist's entrance, the skipper had shot a quick,\n irritated glance over his shoulder and had begun to snap something; he\n cut it off. Instead, he said, \"When did you first sight the alien ship,\n Mr. Gray?\"\n\n\n \"\nAlien?\n\"\n\n\n \"Yes, alien. When did you first sight it? It is obviously following us\n in order to locate our home planet.\" There was extreme tension in the\n captain's voice.", "It came in the early hours of the morning. He awakened, not without a\n chill of fear, the sound of his telviz set in his ears. He had left it\n turned off, he knew that. He shook his head to clear it, impatient of\n the fact that with advancing years it was taking an increasing time to\n become alert after sleep.\n\n\n He had not caught the message. For a brief moment he thought the sound\n had been a dream.\n\n\n Then the telviz spoke again. The screen was blank. It said,\nYou are\n awake, Mr. Gray?\nHe stared at it, uncomprehending.\n\n\n He said, \"I ... I don't understand.\" Then, suddenly, he did understand,\n as though by an inspired revelation. Why they were able to speak\n Amer-English. Why their ship looked like a Terran one. Why they had been\n able to 'disrupt' the Earth ships instruments.", "Gray felt sickness well through him \"But ... but this policy.... What\n happens when man finally finds on his borders a life form more advanced\n than he—an intelligence strong enough to destroy rather than be\n destroyed?\"\n\n\n The tolerance was gone now. The SupSpaceCom said coldly, \"Don't be a\n pessimistic defeatist, Gray.\"\n\n\n He turned to the admirals and generals of his staff. \"Make all\n preparations for the attack, gentlemen.\"", "There was an edge of amusement in the answering thought.\nWe are very\n tiny, Mr. Gray. And our greatest efforts have always been to keep from\n under man's eyes. We have profited greatly, however, by our suitability\n to espionage; little goes on in the human world of which we don't know.\n Our progress was greatly aided by our being able to utilize the science\n that man has already developed. You've noted, for instance, how similar\n our space ships are to your own.\nGray nodded to himself. \"But I'm also impressed by the manner in which\n you have developed some mechanical device to duplicate human speech.\n That involved original research.\"\nAt any rate, neither man nor we need dread the future any longer. We", "The co-pilot smiled courteously. \"You must have seen a meteorite, sir.\n There aren't any—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray flushed. \"I'm not as complete a space neophyte as your\n condescending air would indicate, Lieutenant. As a matter of fact, I'll\n stack my space-months against yours any day.\"\n\n\n Bormann said soothingly, \"It's not that, sir. You've just made a\n mistake. If a ship was within reasonable distance, the alarms would be\n sounding off right now. But that's not all, either. We have a complete\n record of any traffic within a considerable distance, and I assure you\n that—\"\n\n\n Markham Gray pointed a finger at the lower left hand corner of the\n screen. \"Then what is that, Lieutenant?\" he asked sarcastically." ] ]
test	51449	[ "What was Beliakoff and Kelly’s initial goal, going into the passage?", "What was Beliakoff and Kelly’s goal by the end of the passage?", "What do we know about the individuals on Mala from what we see of their life on Mala?", "From the average person’s perspective, how good is the explanation for why the planet of Mala has a war?", "What would have happened if Kelly hadn’t given the folks on Mala the books?", "Which character traits best describe General Drak?", "Which character traits best describe Empress Jusa?", "Which character traits best describe Nob?", "Which of the following themes could be connected to this passage?", "Which of the following best summarizes this passage?" ]	[ [ "They were trying to communicate back with their supervisor.", "They were trying to enter the Slot.", "They were trying to communicate with individuals on Mala.", "They were trying to escape from the Slot." ], [ "To return to Mala.", "To finally enter the Slot.", "To escape from Mala.", "To escape from the Slot once more." ], [ "They don’t truly think for themselves all that well.", "They all enjoy a strong dictatorship.", "They are naturally rebellious to cultural norms.", "They all enjoy a good democracy." ], [ "We don’t know why they’re at war, so we couldn’t make this assessment.", "The reason is decent, the individuals are being discriminated against and many are being denied resources that are critical to survival.", "We know the reason is because of classism on the planet resulting in genocide, so it’s a pretty good reason for folks to rebel against that.", "It’s a terrible explanation." ], [ "The two would’ve been less stressed out.", "The two would’ve been less stressed out, they were supposed to send those books to two planets beyond the Slot.", "They would have given them to a planet within the Slot that has a good trading route with Mala (the book delivery wasn’t urgent).", "Beliakoff would’ve given them the books, they were critical to the governmental operations of the planet." ], [ "Patient, humble, righteous", "Mature, kind, leader-like", "Leader-like, bold, generous", "Snobby, childish, athletic-looking" ], [ "Fair (her looks), newly crowned, malicious", "Plain, quick-witted, cautious", "Plain, intelligent, brave", "Beautiful, smart, newly crowned" ], [ "Obedient, rule-following, self-assured", "Smart, reckless, kind", "Anxious, calculated, cynical", "Bold, self-assured, attractive" ], [ "Communities rooted in role-based systems", "Well-researched sharing of cultures", "Economic freedom", "The importance of autonomy" ], [ "A planet experiences its first planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from both sides of the conflict.", "A planet experiences its second planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from delivery people nearby the planet along with individuals on the planet itself.", "A planet experiences its third planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from delivery people nearby the planet along with individuals on the planet itself.", "A planet experiences its first planet-wide war, the reader sees perspectives from one side of the conflict." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. \"Now, Johnny,\" he said,\n \"easy this time.\nReal\neasy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship.\n She resents being slammed into the Slot.\"\n\n\n \"She'll take it,\" Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal\n abandon.\n\n\n \"Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting\n us off Torriang. A little closer and—\"\n\n\n \"I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an\n instinctive astrogator.\"\n\n\n He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff\n switch.\n\n\n \"You're out two decimal points,\" said Beliakoff, who worried about such\n trifles. \"Enough to ionize us.\"", "\"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"", "\"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"", "\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.", "\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"", "\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.", "\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"", "War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"", "\"Attention, freighter!\" the radio blasted. \"This is the interdictory\n ship\nMoth\n. Heave to and identify yourself.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff answered promptly in the Propendium language. \"Let's see 'em\n unscramble\nthat\n,\" he said to Kelly. They continued their descent.\n\n\n After a while, a voice from the patrol boat said in Propendium,\n \"Attention, freighter! You are entering an interdicted area. Heave to\n at once and prepare to be boarded.\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "MORAL EQUIVALENT\nBy KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhy shouldn't a culture mimic another right\n \ndown to the last little detail? Because the\n \nlast detail may be just that—the final one!\nThe planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in\n clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position\n while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening,\n which deep-space men knew as the Slot.", "\"I can't understand your vile North Propendium accent,\" Beliakoff\n bellowed, in a broad South Propendium dialect. \"If you people can't\n speak a man's language, don't clutter up the ether with your ridiculous\n chatter. I know you long-haul trampers and I'll be damned if I'll give\n you any air, water, food, or anything else. If you can't stock that\n stuff like any normal, decent—\"\n\n\n \"This area is interdicted,\" the patrol boat broke in, speaking now with\n a broad South Propendium accent.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Beliakoff grumbled. \"They've got themselves a robot linguist.\"\n\n\n \"—under direct orders from the patrol boat\nMoth\n. Heave to at once,\n freighter, and prepare to be boarded and inspected.\"", "By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.", "\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said." ], [ "\"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"", "\"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"", "\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.", "Beliakoff cracked his bony knuckles nervously. \"Now, Johnny,\" he said,\n \"easy this time.\nReal\neasy. Gentle her into it. She's not a new ship.\n She resents being slammed into the Slot.\"\n\n\n \"She'll take it,\" Kelly said, with a boyish grin of almost suicidal\n abandon.\n\n\n \"Maybe she will, but how about us? You sort of creased the Slot getting\n us off Torriang. A little closer and—\"\n\n\n \"I was still getting the touch. You ought to be glad I'm an\n instinctive astrogator.\"\n\n\n He set the last dial with a rapid twirl and reached for the kissoff\n switch.\n\n\n \"You're out two decimal points,\" said Beliakoff, who worried about such\n trifles. \"Enough to ionize us.\"", "\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.", "\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"", "War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.", "\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "\"Attention, freighter!\" the radio blasted. \"This is the interdictory\n ship\nMoth\n. Heave to and identify yourself.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff answered promptly in the Propendium language. \"Let's see 'em\n unscramble\nthat\n,\" he said to Kelly. They continued their descent.\n\n\n After a while, a voice from the patrol boat said in Propendium,\n \"Attention, freighter! You are entering an interdicted area. Heave to\n at once and prepare to be boarded.\"", "MORAL EQUIVALENT\nBy KRIS NEVILLE\n\n\n Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction January 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWhy shouldn't a culture mimic another right\n \ndown to the last little detail? Because the\n \nlast detail may be just that—the final one!\nThe planet Lanit II had dwindled to a luminous speck. They were in\n clear space now, at Breakoff Point. Beliakoff held the ship in position\n while Kelly set dials for the jump into the hyperspatial drift opening,\n which deep-space men knew as the Slot.", "\"I can't understand your vile North Propendium accent,\" Beliakoff\n bellowed, in a broad South Propendium dialect. \"If you people can't\n speak a man's language, don't clutter up the ether with your ridiculous\n chatter. I know you long-haul trampers and I'll be damned if I'll give\n you any air, water, food, or anything else. If you can't stock that\n stuff like any normal, decent—\"\n\n\n \"This area is interdicted,\" the patrol boat broke in, speaking now with\n a broad South Propendium accent.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Beliakoff grumbled. \"They've got themselves a robot linguist.\"\n\n\n \"—under direct orders from the patrol boat\nMoth\n. Heave to at once,\n freighter, and prepare to be boarded and inspected.\"", "By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.", "\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said." ], [ "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"", "\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"", "\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.", "\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.", "Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"" ], [ "\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.", "\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"", "\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"", "\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.", "\"They serve a vital purpose,\" Thrang explained. \"All the books agree\n on this. Spies keep a country alert, on its toes, eternally vigilant.\n Through sabotage, they cut down on arms production, which otherwise\n would grow absurdly large, since it has priority over everything else.\n They supply Security with subjects for Interrogation, Confession,\n Brainwashing and Re-indoctrination. This in turn supplies data for\n the enemy propaganda machine, which in turn supplies material for our\n counter-propaganda machine.\"\nDraxil looked awed. \"I didn't know it was so complicated.\"\n\n\n \"That's the beauty of the Earth War,\" Thrang said. \"Stupendous yet\n delicate complications, completely interrelated. Leave out one\n seemingly unimportant detail and the whole structure collapses.\"\n\n\n \"Those Terrans!\" Draxil said, shaking his head in admiration.", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"", "\"Haven't we done enough?\" groaned a clothing-store owner.\n\n\n \"It's never enough! In time of war, Earth people give till it\n hurts—then give some more! They know that no sacrifice is too much,\n that nothing counts but the proper prosecution of the war.\"\n\n\n The clothing-store owner nodded vehemently. \"If it's Earthly, it's good\n enough for me. So what can we do about this spy situation?\"\n\n\n \"That is for us to decide here and now,\" Thrang said. \"According to the\n Prime Minister, our dictatorship cannot boast a single act of espionage\n or sabotage done to it since the beginning of the war. The Chief of\n Security is alarmed. It's his job to keep all spies under surveillance.\n Since there are none, his department has lost all morale, which, in\n turn, affects the other departments.\"\n\n\n \"Do we really need spies?\"", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"" ], [ "\"Hm? Did you find a way of speeding them up?\"\n\n\n \"Sure. Gave them Kyne's old dog-eared books. They're crazy about books.\n Really hustled for them.\"\n\n\n Beliakoff said nothing for several seconds, but his long, sallow face\n became pale. \"You what?\"\n\n\n \"Gave 'em the books. Don't worry,\" Kelly said quickly. \"Kyne gave them\n to me before they hauled him away.\"\n\n\n \"You gave the\nwarfare books\nto the people on Mala?\"\n\"You mean I shouldn't have? Why not? What's wrong with Mala?\"\n\n\n \"Plenty.\" Beliakoff grimly did some quick figuring. \"It'll be a year,\n their time, when we can get back. Kelly, take us out of hyperspace!\"\n\n\n \"Now?\" Kelly gasped. \"Here?\"", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "\"Not at all. Mala is a mirror culture. They consider Earth and its ways\n to be absolute perfection. They copy everything of Earth's they can\n find.\"\n\n\n \"Seems like a good idea. We\nhave\ngot a real good culture.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, but we developed into it. The Malans simply copy what they see,\n with no underlying tradition or rationale. Since they don't know why\n they're doing any particular thing, they can easily misinterpret it,\n warp it into something harmful.\"\n\n\n \"They'll learn,\" Kelly said.", "\"Damn,\" said the flipper, passing the coin across the table and\n standing up.\n\n\n The other man smiled faintly, but said nothing.\nKelly reached for the kissoff switch, then hesitated. \"Look, Igor,\" he\n said, \"do we have to come out now, without charts? It gets risky, you\n know. How can we tell what's out there in normal space?\"\n\n\n \"It is a risk we have to take,\" Beliakoff said stonily.\n\n\n \"But why? What's wrong with the people of Mala having those books?\n Believe me, there's nothing dirty in them.\"\n\n\n \"Look,\" Beliakoff said patiently, \"you know that Mala is a\n semi-restricted planet. Limited trading is allowed under control\n conditions. No articles are allowed on the planet except those on the\n approved list.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Kelly said vaguely. \"Silly sort of rule.\"", "\"But they wouldn't start a war just because they've got some books on\n it, and know that Earth people do it, and—yeah, I guess they would.\"\n Quickly he set the dials. \"You're right, buddy. We have an absolute\n moral obligation to return and straighten out that mess.\"\n\n\n \"I knew you'd see it that way,\" Beliakoff said approvingly. \"And\n there is the additional fact that the Galactic Council could hold\n us responsible for any deaths traceable to the books. It could mean\n Ran-hachi Prison for a hundred years or so.\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't you say that in the first place?\" Kelly flipped the kissoff\n switch. The ship came out in normal space. Fortunately, there was no\n sun or planet in its path.\n\n\n \"Hang on,\" Kelly said, \"we're going where we're going in a great big\n rush!\"", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "War, the Malans agreed, was certainly one of the cleverest of Earth\n institutions and as educational as it was entertaining.\n\"Nope,\" Beliakoff was saying, \"you wouldn't like Ran-hachi Prison, not\n one little bit. It's on Mercury, you know, in the twilight zone. You\n blister by day and you freeze by night. Only two men have escaped from\n Ran-hachi in the last hundred years, and one of them figured his curve\n wrong and flipped into Sol.\"\n\n\n \"What about the other one?\" Kelly asked, perspiring lightly.\n\n\n \"His gyros fused. He was bound straight for the Coal Sack. Take him\n a couple of thousand years to get there, at his speed,\" Beliakoff\n finished dreamily. \"No, Johnny, you wouldn't like Ran-hachi.\"\n\n\n \"Okay, okay,\" Kelly said. \"The death penalty would be better.\"", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "\"They give that only as a measure of extreme clemency,\" Beliakoff said\n with gloomy Slavic satisfaction.\n\n\n \"Enough! We'll straighten out Mala.\" There was more hope than\n conviction in Kelly's voice. \"Thar she lies, off to starboard.\"\n\n\n Mala was a tiny blue and brown sphere, suddenly growing larger in their\n screens.\n\n\n Their radio blared on the emergency channel.\n\n\n Kelly swore. \"That's the Galactic patrol boat from Azolith. What's he\n doing here?\"\n\n\n \"Blockade,\" said Beliakoff. \"Standard practice to quarantine a planet\n at war. We can't touch down legally until the war's declared over.\"\n\n\n \"Nuts. We're going down.\" Kelly touched the controls and the freighter\n began to descend into the interdicted area.", "\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.", "\"Poor devil, Kyne,\" Beliakoff sighed.\n\n\n \"A paranoid,\" Kelly diagnosed. \"Did he ever tell you about the plot to\n keep him out of the Luna Military Academy?\"\n\n\n \"He never talked to me much.\"\n\n\n \"That's because you're a cold, distant, unsympathetic type,\" Kelly\n said, with a complacent smile. \"Me, he told everything. He applied to\n Luna every year. Studied all the textbooks on military organization,\n land tactics, sea tactics, space strategy, histories of warfare.\n Crammed his cabin with that junk. Knew it inside out. Fantastic memory!\"\n\n\n \"Why didn't he get in?\"", "\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "\"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him." ], [ "But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.", "\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"", "But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.", "\"Let me see....\" General Drak examined a wall map upon which the\n important enemy cities were circled in red. There were Alis and Dryn,\n Kys and Mos and Dlettre. Drak could think of no reason for leveling one\n more than another. After a moment's thought, he pushed a button on his\n desk.\n\n\n \"Yeah?\" asked a voice over the loudspeaker.\n\n\n \"Which one, Ingif?\"\n\n\n \"Kys, of course,\" said the cracked voice of his old hardware store\n assistant. \"Fellow over there owes us money and won't pay up.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, Ingif.\" Drak turned to the corporal. \"Go to it, soldier!\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\n The corporal hurried out.", "Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"", "General Drak turned back to the reports on his desk, trying again to\n puzzle out what had happened at Allani. Repulsed Us? Us Repulsed? How\n should it read?\n\n\n \"Oh, well,\" Drak said resignedly. \"In the long run, I don't suppose it\n really makes much difference.\"\nMiles away, in no man's land, stood a bunker of reinforced concrete and\n steel. Within the bunker were two men. They sat on opposite sides of\n a plain wooden table and their faces were stern and impassive. Beside\n each man was a pad and pencil. Upon each pad were marks.\n\n\n Upon the table between them was a coin.\n\n\n \"Your toss,\" said the man on the right.\n\n\n The man on the left picked up the coin. \"Call it.\"\n\n\n \"Heads.\"\n\n\n It came up heads.", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.", "\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"" ], [ "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.", "\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.", "\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly.", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.", "But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "\"Hemophilia. He couldn't pass the physical. He thought they were\n plotting against him. Still, I'm grateful for the chance at a little\n astrogation.\" With the barest hint of a smile, Kelly said, \"I\n understand it's possible to bring a ship sidewise through the Slot at\n Terra.\"\n\n\n \"Please don't try,\" Beliakoff begged, shuddering. \"I knew we should\n have waited for Kyne's replacement at Mala.\"\n\n\n \"We'd still be there, with a cargo of kvash turning sour.\"\n\n\n \"I was afraid it would sour anyhow,\" Beliakoff said, with a worrier's\n knack for finding trouble. \"Mala is the slowest loading port this side\n of the Rift. I must admit, however, they didn't do badly this time.\"\n\n\n \"Noticed that, did you?\" Kelly asked.", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said." ], [ "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "But aside from the location of his hardware store, Drak had other\n qualifications for leadership. For one thing, he looked like an Earth\n general and this had loomed large in Nob's eyes. Drak was over six feet\n tall, strongly built, solidly muscled. His eyes were gray, deep-set and\n fierce; his nose was aquiline; his mouth was firm because he usually\n held nails in it when he was out on a repair job.\n\n\n In his uniform, Drak looked every inch a general; as a matter of fact,\n he looked like several generals, for his cap came from the Earth-Mars\n war of '82, his tunic was a relic of the D'eereli Campaign, his belt\n was in the style of the Third Empire, his pants were a replica of the\n Southern Star Front, while his shoes reminded one of the hectic days of\n the Fanzani Rebellion.", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne.", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "\"You may be right,\" he agreed. \"I'll try to get some back.\"\n\n\n He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Everything had happened so quickly!\nJust a week ago, Nob had walked into his store and inquired, \"Drak, how\n would you like to be a general?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know,\" Drak had confessed honestly. \"What is it and why do we\n need one?\"\n\n\n \"War starting,\" Nob said. \"You've heard of war, haven't you? Earth\n idea,\nvery\nEarthly. I'll explain later how it works. What do you say?\"\n\n\n \"All right. But do you really think I'm the right type?\"\n\n\n \"Absolutely. Besides, your hardware store is perfectly situated for the\n Supreme Command Post.\"", "\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense.", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "\"I'm sorry,\" Nob said. \"Extremely sorry. Personally, I sympathize with\n you. But the\nBook of Terran Rank Equivalents\nis quite specific. Seven\n shoulder stars are the most—the absolute most—that any general can\n wear. I absolutely cannot allow you to wear eight.\"\n\n\n \"But you gave Frix seven! And he's just Unit General!\"\n\n\n \"That was before we understood the rules completely. We thought there\n was no limit to the number of stars we could give and Frix was sulky.\n I'm sorry, General, you'll just have to be satisfied with seven.\"\n\n\n \"Take one away from Frix, then.\"\n\n\n \"Can't. He'll resign.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I resign.\"", "But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"", "Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"", "\"At once!\"\n\n\n \"But we might come out inside a star or—\"\n\n\n \"That,\" Beliakoff said, his voice filled with righteousness, \"simply\n cannot be helped. We must return at once to Mala!\"\nGeneral Drak, Commander of the Forces of the Empress, Wearer of the\n Gold Star of Mala, sat at his desk in the Supreme Command Post, which\n had recently been converted from a hardware store. He was engaged in a\n fiery argument over the telephone with Nob, the Empress's right-hand\n man.\n\n\n \"But damn it all,\" General Drak shouted, \"I must have it! I am the\n Supreme Commander, the General of All the Armies of the Dictatorship!\n Doesn't that mean anything?\"\n\n\n \"Not under the circumstances,\" Nob answered.\n\n\n Two soldiers, standing guard in the General's quarters, listened\n interestedly." ], [ "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.", "By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.", "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.", "Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "\"Of course they will. But in the meantime, the results can be\n devastating. They always are when a primitive race tries to ape the\n culture of a more advanced people. Look at what happened to the South\n Sea Islanders. All they picked up was the worst of French, British and\n American culture. You hardly see any more South Sea Islanders, do you?\n Same with the American Indians, with the Hottentots, and plenty of\n others.\"\n\n\n \"I still think you're making too much of a fuss about it,\" Kelly\n said. \"All right, I gave them a lot of books on warfare and political\n organization. So what? What in blazes can they do with them?\"\n\n\n \"The Malans,\" Beliakoff said grimly, \"have never had a war.\"\n\n\n Kelly gulped. \"Never?\"\n\n\n \"Never. They're a completely cooperative society. Or were, before they\n started reading those warfare books.\"", "But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"", "\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.", "\"I didn't think so,\" Jusa said sadly. She had been just another Malan\n girl, but had been chosen as Empress on the basis of her looks, which\n were heartbreakingly lovely. It was axiomatic that an Empress should be\n heartbreakingly lovely. The Malans had seen enough Earth films to know\n that.\n\n\n But an Empress should also be cold, calculating, cruel, as well as\n gracious, headstrong and generous to a fault. She should care nothing\n for her people, while, simultaneously, all she cared for was the\n people. She should act in a manner calculated to make her subjects love\n her in spite of and because of herself.\nJusa was a girl of considerable intelligence and she wanted to be as\n Earthly as the next. But the contradictions in her role baffled her.\n\n\n \"Can't I keep them just for a little while?\" she pleaded, holding a\n single pearl up to the light.", "\"I just hope we'll be in time to salvage something,\" Beliakoff said,\n watching as their freighter plowed its way through the sea of space\n toward the unchanging stars.\nWith evident nervousness, Nob walked down a long, dim corridor toward\n the imperial chambers, carrying a small package in both hands. The\n Prime Minister of the Dictatorship was a small bald man with a great\n bulging forehead and small, glittering black eyes, made smaller by\n steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked the very incarnation of an evil\n genius, which was why he had been chosen as the Power Behind the Throne." ], [ "Head held high, Thrang marched proudly to his destiny.\nThe whole of Mala took to war with a will. Soon books began to appear\n on the stalls:\nWar and You\nfor the masses,\nThe Erotic Release of\n War\nfor the elite,\nThe Inherent Will to Destroy\nfor philosophers,\n and\nWar and Civilization\nfor scholars. Volumes of personal\n experiences sold well. Among them was an account of daring sabotage by\n a former zipper salesman, and the dramatic story of the Martyrdom of\n Thrang.\n\n\n War eliminated a thousand old institutions and unburdened the people of\n the heavy hand of tradition. War demonstrated clearly that everything\n was as temporary as a match-flash except Art and Man, because cities,\n buildings, parks, vehicles, hills, museums, monuments were as whispers\n of dust after the bombers had gone.", "Instantly he ducked. A vase shattered against the wall behind him. Not\n so good, he thought, calculating the distance by which it had missed\n him. The Empress Jusa's aim was improving.\n\"Nob, you dirty swine!\" the Empress shrieked.\n\n\n \"At your service, Majesty,\" Nob answered, bowing low.\n\n\n \"Where are the pearls, you insolent dolt?\"\n\n\n \"Here, Majesty,\" Nob said, handing over the package. \"It strained the\n exchequer, buying them for you. The Minister of the Treasury threatened\n to desert to the enemy. He may still. The people are muttering about\n extravagance in high places. But the pearls are yours, Majesty.\"\n\n\n \"Of course.\" Jusa opened the package and looked at the lustrous gems.\n \"Can I keep them?\" she asked, in a very small voice.\n\n\n \"Of course not.\"", "He went to bed that night with the feeling of a job well done. And\n before he fell asleep, he figured out exactly what he would do about\n the spy situation.\nThe next morning, Nob's orders went out by all means of communication.\n The results were gratifyingly swift, since the people of the\n dictatorship were completely behind the war and dutifully loved and\n hated their Empress, in whose name the order was signed.\n\n\n A typical scene took place in the clubcar of the Char-Xil express. The\n occupants of the car, twenty-three commuting businessmen, sealed the\n doors as soon as they received Nob's order. The best-read among them, a\n salesman by the name of Thrang, was elected spokesman for the group.\n\n\n \"Boys,\" said Thrang, \"I guess I don't have to tell you anything about\n the importance of this order. We all know what war is by now, don't we?\"\n\n\n \"We sure do!\"", "He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. He turned. The Secret Policeman\n had been joined by two tall men in slouch hats and dark glasses. They\n wore badges that said\nStorm Troopers\n.\n\n\n \"You're under arrest,\" said the Secret Policeman.\n\n\n \"Why? What have I done?\"\n\n\n \"Not a thing, as far as we know,\" said a Storm Trooper. \"Not a single\n solitary thing. That's why we're arresting you.\"\n\n\n \"Arbitrary police powers,\" the Secret Policeman explained. \"Suspension\n of search warrants and habeas corpus. Invasion of privacy. War, you\n know. Come along quietly, sir. You have a special and very important\n part to play in the war effort.\"\n\n\n \"What's that?\"\n\n\n \"You have been arbitrarily selected as Martyr,\" said the Secret\n Policeman.", "By then, the train had arrived at the station. The doors were unsealed,\n allowing the commuters to leave for their jobs. Thrang watched the\n zipper salesman depart, then hurried into the crowd. In a moment, he\n found a tall man wearing a slouch hat and dark glasses. On his lapel\n was a silver badge which read\nSecret Police\n.\n\n\n \"See that man?\" Thrang asked, pointing to the zipper salesman.\n\n\n \"You bet,\" the Secret Policeman said.\n\n\n \"He's a spy! A dirty spy! Quick, after him!\"\n\n\n \"He's being watched,\" said the Secret Policeman laconically.\n\n\n \"I just wanted to make sure,\" Thrang said, and started to walk off.", "Flattered by the importance of her task, she set to work with a will.\n\n\n Several hours later, she awakened her husband, who was slumbering on\n the couch.\n\n\n \"I've got them all finished except these,\" she said. \"In this one, I'm\n afraid I don't understand that word.\"\n\n\n Nob glanced at the paper. \"Oh, propaganda. That means giving the people\n the facts, whether true or false. It's very important in any war.\"\n\n\n \"I don't see why.\"\n\n\n \"It's obvious. To have a genuine Earth-style war, you need ideological\n differences. That's why we chose a dictatorship and the other continent\n chose a democracy. The job of propaganda is to keep us different.\"", "\"War is hell!\"\n\n\n \"The war that the enemy thrust on us!\"\n\n\n \"The war to start all wars!\"\n\n\n \"That's right,\" Thrang said. \"And I guess we've all felt the pinch\n since the war started. Eh, boys?\"\n\n\n \"I've done my part,\" said a man named Draxil. \"When the Prime Minister\n called for a cigarette shortage, I dumped twenty carloads of tobacco in\n the Hunto River. Now we got cigarette rationing!\"\n\n\n \"That's the spirit,\" Thrang said. \"I know for a fact that others among\n you have done the same with sugar, canned goods, butter, meat and a\n hundred items. Everything's rationed now; everyone feels the pinch.\n But, boys, there's still more we have to do. Now a spy situation has\n come up and it calls for quick action.\"", "In point of fact, however, Nob was a mild, near-sighted, well-meaning\n little man, a lawyer by occupation, known throughout Mala for his\n prize rose gardens and his collection of Earth stamps. In spite of a\n temperamental handicap, he didn't find his new job too difficult. The\n Earth books were there and Nob simply interpreted them as literally as\n possible. Whenever a problem came up, Nob thought: how would they solve\n it on Earth? Then he would do the same, or as near the same as possible.\n\n\n But dealing with the Empress presented problems of a unique nature.\n Nob couldn't find a book entitled\nWays and Means of Placating\n Royalty\n. If such a book were obtainable, Nob would have paid any price\n for it.\n\n\n He took a deep breath, knocked and opened the door into the Royal\n Chambers.", "His wife shrugged her shoulders. \"Well, of course, if it's Earthlike,\n it must be right. Come eat supper, dear.\"\nAfter eating, Nob attacked his mounds of paperwork. But soon he was\n yawning and his eyes burned. He turned to his wife, who was just\n finishing the dishes.\n\n\n \"My dear,\" he said, \"do you suppose you could help me?\"\n\n\n \"Is it proper?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Oh, absolutely. The books state that the Prime Minister's wife tries\n in every way possible to relieve her husband of the burden of power.\"\n\n\n \"In that case, I'll be happy to try.\" She sat down in front of the\n great pile of papers. \"But, dear, I don't know anything about these\n matters.\"\n\n\n \"Rely on instinct,\" Nob answered, yawning. \"That's what I do.\"", "\"Good. Now there are some problems of state which you must decide upon.\n Prisoners of war, for one thing. We have several possible means for\n disposing of them. First, we could—\"\n\n\n \"You take care of it.\"\n\n\n \"Now, now,\" Nob chided. \"Mustn't shirk your duty.\"\n\n\n \"I'm not. I am simply being arbitrary and dictatorial.\nYou\nsolve it,\n pig. And bring me diamonds.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, Excellency,\" Nob said, bowing low. \"Diamonds. But the people—\"\n\n\n \"I love the people. But to hell with them!\" she cried, fire in her eyes.\n\n\n \"Fine, fine,\" Nob said, and bowed his way out of the room.", "\"Now to work. Boys, I'm calling for volunteers. Who'll be a spy?\"\n\n\n No one responded.\n\n\n \"Really now!\" said Thrang. \"That's no attitude to take. Come on, some\n of you must be harboring treasonous thoughts. Don't be ashamed of it.\n Remember, it takes all kinds to make a war.\"\n\n\n Little Herg, a zipper salesman from Xcoth, cleared his throat. \"I have\n a cousin who's Minister of War for the Allies.\"\n\n\n \"An excellent motive for subversion!\" Thrang cried.\n\n\n \"I rather thought it was,\" the zipper salesman said, pleased. \"Yes, I\n believe I can handle the job.\"\n\n\n \"Splendid!\" Thrang said.", "Jusa stood for a few moments in thought, then picked up a vase and\n shattered it on the floor. She made a mental note to order several\n dozen more.\n\n\n Then she flung herself upon the royal couch and began to weep bitterly.\n\n\n She was quite a young Empress and she had the feeling of being in\n beyond her depth. The problems of the war and of royalty had completely\n ended her social life.\n\n\n She resented it; any girl would.\nNob, meanwhile, left the palace and went home in his armored car.\n The car had been ordered to protect him against assassins, who,\n according to the Earth books, aimed a good deal of their plots at\n Prime Ministers. Nob could see no reason for this, since if he weren't\n Prime Minister, any one of a thousand men could do the job with equal\n efficiency. But he supposed it had a certain symbolic meaning.", "But at least all his clothes were soldiers' clothes. His honor\n guard had to piece out their uniforms with personal articles. They\n had complained bitterly about the injustice of this, and had come\n close to deserting. But Drak, after some hasty reading in Smogget's\nLeadership\n, told them about the Terran doctrine of the Privileges of\n Rank.\n\n\n In front of him now was a report from the Allani Battle Front. He\n wasn't sure what it said, since it was coded and he had neglected to\n write down the code. Was it ENEMY REPULSED US WITH HEAVY LOSSES or\n should it read US REPULSED ENEMY WITH HEAVY LOSSES?\n\n\n He wished he knew. It made quite a difference.\n\n\n The door burst open and a young corporal rushed in. \"Hey, General, take\n a look out the window!\"", "\"Think he'll get it?\" one asked.\n\n\n \"Not a chance,\" the other answered.\n\n\n Drak glared them into silence, then returned to the argument. \"Will\n you please attempt to understand my position?\" he said hoarsely. \"You\n put me in command. At my orders, the Armies of the Dictatorship move\n against the Allied Democracies. All the other generals obey me.\nMe!\nCorrect?\"\n\n\n \"He's got a point,\" one soldier said.\n\n\n \"He'll never get it,\" the other replied.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you two!\" Drak roared. \"Nob, aren't I right? It's the Earthly\n way, Nob. Authority must be recognized!\"", "He reached his home and his wife kissed him on the cheek. \"Hard day at\n the palace, dear?\" she asked.\n\n\n \"Quite hard,\" Nob said. \"Lots of work for after supper.\"\n\n\n \"It just isn't fair,\" complained his wife. She was a plump, pleasant\n little person and she worried continually about her husband's health.\n \"They shouldn't make you work so hard.\"\n\n\n \"But of course they should!\" said Nob, a little astonished. \"Don't\n you remember what I told you? All the books say that during a war, a\n Prime Minister is a harried, harassed individual, weighed down by the\n enormous burden of state, unable to relax, tense with the numerous\n strains of high office.\"\n\n\n \"It isn't fair,\" his wife repeated.\n\n\n \"No one said it was. But it's extremely Earthlike.\"", "Drak started to rise, then reconsidered. Rules were rules.\n\n\n \"Hey, what?\" he demanded.\n\n\n \"Forgot,\" the corporal said. \"Hey,\nsir\n, take a look out the window,\n huh?\"\n\n\n \"Much better.\" Drak walked to the window and saw, in the distance, a\n mass of ascending black smoke.\n\n\n \"City of Chando,\" the corporal said proudly. \"Boy, we smacked it today!\n Saturation bombing for ten hours. They can't use it for anything but a\n gravel pit now!\"\n\n\n \"Sir,\" Drak reminded.\n\n\n \"Sir. The planes are fueled up and waiting. What shall we flatten next,\n huh, sir?\"", "\"You aren't allowed to. The book,\nMilitary Leadership\n, specifically\n states that a Supreme Commander never resigns during hostilities. An\n Earthman would find the very thought inconceivable.\"\n\n\n \"All right!\" Drak furiously slammed down the telephone.\n\n\n The two soldiers exchanged winks.\n\n\n \"At attention, you two,\" Drak said. \"You're supposed to be honor\n guards. Why can't you act like honor guards?\"\n\n\n \"We haven't got weapons,\" one of the soldiers pointed out.\n\n\n \"Can't be helped. I sent what we had to the front.\"\n\n\n \"But we need them here,\" the soldier said earnestly. \"It's bad for\n morale, us not having weapons, and morale is vital for victory.\"\n\n\n Drak hated to be lectured, but he had to accept textbook truth when it\n was quoted at him.", "\"It isn't possible,\" Nob said. \"We need guns, tanks, planes. Therefore\n you sell your jewelry. There are many Terran precedents.\"\n\n\n \"But why did I have to insist upon the pearls in the first place?\" Jusa\n asked.\n\n\n \"I explained! As Empress, you must be flighty, must possess a whim of\n iron, must have no regard for anyone else's feelings, must lust for\n expensive baubles.\"\n\n\n \"All right,\" Jusa said.\n\n\n \"All right, what?\"\n\n\n \"All right, swine.\"\n\n\n \"That's better,\" Nob said. \"You're learning, Jusa, you really are. If\n you could just fluctuate your moods more consistently—\"\n\n\n \"I really will try,\" promised the Empress. \"I'll learn, Nob. You'll be\n proud of me yet.\"", "\"I know, I know,\" Kelly grumbled, adjusting the dial. \"I was just\n touching it for luck. Here we go!\"\n\n\n He depressed the kissoff switch. Beliakoff shut his eyes as the ship\n lurched Slotward, wishing that Kyne, their government-inspected,\n college-graduated astrogator was still aboard. Kyne had been an expert\n at the job. But then, three planets back, he had suddenly gone after\n a native stevedore with a micro-edge cleaver, screaming that no dirty\n alien would ever marry\nhis\ndaughter.\n\n\n Kyne had no daughter.\n\n\n Currently he was confined in Azolith, awaiting transportation\n Earthside, to a padded little homy room in the Spaceman's Snug Port.\n\"How about that?\" Kelly asked proudly, once the ship was locked in\n hyperspace. \"Superior intelligence and steel nerves do the trick every\n time.\"", "\"I see,\" she said dubiously. \"Well, this other paper is from General\n Heglm of Security. He asks what you are doing about the spy situation.\n He says it's very serious.\"\n\n\n \"I had forgotten about that. He's right, it's reached a crisis point.\"\n He put the paper in his pocket. \"I'm going to take care of that\n personally, first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\n In the last few hours, his wife had made no less than eight Major\n Policy Decisions, twenty Codifications, eight Unifications, and three\n Clarifications. Nob didn't bother to read them over. He trusted his\n wife's good judgment and common sense." ] ]
test	51380	[ "To what does \"uninj\" refer?", "Why was The Butcher initially prevented from entering the Time Theater?", "Why can't people from the Dawn Era exit the Time Bubble supposedly?", "Why was Butch allowed to stay in the Time Theater after all?", "What is the main reason the warriors were able to exit the Time Bubble?", "How was the Butcher able to so defeat the past men?", "What was the primary function of the interpreter?", "Why was Brute growling at the entrance of the Time Theater?", "Why would Brute and Darter never attack Butch, Joggy, and Hal?" ]	[ [ "The species of dog bred for the new civilization.", "The inability of robotic dogs to rationalize and remember.", "The hyperplastic compound embedded in the bodies of dogs.", "The robotic canines' inability to be physically harmed. " ], [ "He was too young to be allowed on the premises.", "The usher detected his interest in violence.", "He was stopped by an electrical forcefield. ", "The usher did not like his appearance." ], [ "They can, but they can only walk along the vista.", "The dogs prevent them from leaving the Dawn Era, and the uninjes prevent them from entering the new civilization.", "The Bubble is a hole in time that can emit photons, but it cannot be penetrated by humans or any other object. ", "People can only enter the Time Bubble, they cannot exit from it." ], [ "He snuck into the theater with the two cold-eyed girls.", "The Time Bubble drew him in because of his impulsive mentality.", "He tricked a gullible adult, and the interpreter trusted the man's judgment. ", "He lied to the usher about his age." ], [ "The Butcher's impetuous nature triggered the Bubble's time-traveling properties.", "The interpreter's safeguards failed.", "The sorcerer conducted a spell and pushed them through the cross-section.", "They were summoned by the Butcher and his sense-memory." ], [ "The past men were confused and horrified by the futuristic weapons and technology and retreated.", "He had trained the uninjes to attack when they felt threatened.", "The repulsor field protected him as he commanded the dogs.", "He was protected by the levitator as the dogs' instincts kicked in." ], [ "To read thoughts, answer questions, and offer security around the Time Bubble.", "To translate languages for the adult and youth audiences that visited the Time Theater.", "To explain the history of past civilizations.", "To usher in audiences who were qualified to enter the Time Theater and eject those who were not qualified." ], [ "He was reacting to the metal tube the Butcher used to spit fluids at the girls.", "The two chattering girls nearby were bothering him.", "He could sense the over-age teacher spying on them through the hole.", "He could sense the wolflike dogs of the barbaric Dawn Era." ], [ "They were loyal pets and loved their owners.", "They were wired against harming them.", "They were programmed to only attack real dogs.", "The repulsor fields protected Butch, Joggy, and Hal from all harm." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"", "\"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded\n scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits\n and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with\n guarded wistfulness.\n\n\n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is\n programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically\n has racial memory.\"\n\n\n \"I mean if you\ncould\nhurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut\n up—I want to think.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n\n\n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he\n said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "\"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "\"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.", "Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at\n shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a\n wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes\n avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking\n up inquiringly at his master.\n\n\n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy\n ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of\n his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher\n climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during\n which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.", "There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.", "\"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n\n\n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging\n pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a\n black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n\n\n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups\n wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up\n or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the\n crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF\n THE GRASS.\n\n\n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the\n others.", "Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first", "The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"", "The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied\n the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and\n poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his\n grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony\n pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip\n and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff\n tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an\n upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long\n black tongue lolled.\n\n\n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube\n with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone\n called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along\n securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after\n his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few\n minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to\n climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n\n\n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the\n Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he\n was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\nIt was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking\n and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor\n hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would\n be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the\n simplest way to make progress.\n\n\n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were\n among the most prized of toys.", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "\"A kid can't do anything any more,\" he announced dramatically. \"Can't\n break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose.\n Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that\n when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj—it's contraprogrammed.\"\n\n\n \"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?\" Hal asked in a gentle voice\n acquired from a robot adolescer.\n\n\n \"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,\" the\n Butcher replied airily. \"A swell book. That guy got dirtier than\n anything.\" His eyes became dreamy. \"He even ate out of a garbage pail.\"\n\n\n \"What's a garbage pail?\"\n\n\n \"I don't know, but it sounds great.\"", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"" ], [ "The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "\"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"", "\"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"", "\"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"", "\"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.", "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "\"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A\n red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair\n had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat\n Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the\n grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n\n\n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n\n\n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the\n skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the\n Navies.\"\n\n\n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even\n if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n\n\n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "\"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.", "\"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out." ], [ "\"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric\n cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that\n Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply,\n whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that,\n Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development\n and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers.\n But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion\n microtapes, though.\"\n\n\n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time\n in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived\n by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We\n believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces\n of nature and see into the future.\"", "\"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"", "\"Will it be about Napoleon?\" the Butcher asked eagerly. \"Or Hitler?\" A\n red-headed adult heard and smiled and paused to watch. A lock of hair\n had fallen down the middle of the Butcher's forehead, and as he sat\n Joggy like a charger, he did bear a faint resemblance to one of the\n grim little egomaniacs of the Dawn Era.\n\n\n \"Wrong millennium,\" Hal said.\n\n\n \"Tamerlane then?\" the Butcher pressed. \"He killed cities and piled the\n skulls. Blood-bath stuff. Oh, yes, and Tamerlane was a Scand of the\n Navies.\"\n\n\n Hal looked puzzled and then quickly erased the expression. \"Well, even\n if it is about Tamerlane, you can't see it. How about it, Joggy?\"\n\n\n \"They won't let me in, either.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, they will. You're five years old now.\"", "\"That's right.\" Hal cleared his throat and recited: \"The bubble is the\n locus of an infinite number of one-way holes, all centering around two\n points in space-time, one now and one then. The bubble looks completely\n open, but if you tried to step inside, you'd be stopped—and so would\n an atom beam. It takes more energy than an atom beam just to maintain\n the bubble, let alone maneuver it.\"\n\n\n \"I see, I guess,\" Joggy whispered. \"But if the hole works for light,\n why can't the people inside the bubble step out of it into our world?\"\n\n\n \"Why—er—you see, Joggy—\"", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way\n for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward\n you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the\n opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked\n away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\nAs if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on\n their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For\n an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing\n silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the\n bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the\n back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on\n the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some\n time.\n\n\n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n\n\n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice\n cut in.", "The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "\"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted. \"I bet somebody'll figure out\n someday how to use the bubble for time traveling.\"\n\n\n \"You can't travel in a point of view,\" Hal contradicted, \"and that's\n all the bubble is. Besides, some scientists think the bubble isn't real\n at all, but a—uh—\"\n\n\n \"I believe,\" the interpreter cut in smoothly, \"that you're thinking\n of the theory that the Time Bubble operates by hypermemory. Some\n scientists would have us believe that all memory is time traveling and\n that the basic location of the bubble is not space-time at all, but\n ever-present eternity. Some of them go so far as to state that it is\n only a mental inability that prevents the Time Bubble from being used\n for time traveling—just as it may be a similar disability that keeps\n a robot with the same or even more scopeful memories from being a real\n man or animal.", "Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the\n other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n\n\n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he\n knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light,\n can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of\n the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other\n way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the\n way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n\n\n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's\n a kind of hole through time?\"", "\"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"", "Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.", "\"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"", "\"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "\"The light that comes from the bubble is an isotope. Like atoms of\n one element, photons of a single frequency also have isotopes. It's\n more than a matter of polarization. One of these isotopes of light\n tends to leak futureward through holes in space-time. Most of the\n light goes down the vistas visible to the other side of the audience.\n But one isotope is diverted through the walls of the bubble into the\n Time Theater. Perhaps, because of the intense darkness of the theater,\n you haven't realized how dimly lit the scene is. That's because we're\n getting only a single isotope of the original light. Incidentally, no\n isotopes have been discovered that leak pastward, though attempts are\n being made to synthesize them.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, explanations!\" murmured one of the newly arrived girls. \"The cubs\n are always angling for them. Apple-polishers!\"", "\"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force." ], [ "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "\"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"", "The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"", "\"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "\"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"", "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.", "The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "\"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "\"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.", "\"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.", "\"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc." ], [ "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.", "The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "\"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric\n cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that\n Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply,\n whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that,\n Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development\n and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers.\n But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion\n microtapes, though.\"\n\n\n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time\n in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived\n by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We\n believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces\n of nature and see into the future.\"", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way\n for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward\n you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the\n opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked\n away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\nAs if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on\n their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For\n an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing\n silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the\n bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the\n back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on\n the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some\n time.\n\n\n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n\n\n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice\n cut in.", "\"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and\n tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But\n then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the\n face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and\n touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.", "Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first", "\"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the\n other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n\n\n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he\n knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light,\n can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of\n the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other\n way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the\n way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n\n\n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's\n a kind of hole through time?\"", "The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"", "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again." ], [ "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "\"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always\n playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come\n from those dirty past men.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening\n to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of\n reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute\n licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically\n on his mouth.\n\n\n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We\n came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "\"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.", "There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.", "The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"", "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the\n luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,\n except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n\n\n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n \"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\nThe gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks\n so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a\n fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and\n one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n\n\n Butch yawned.\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog\n fights, Butch.\"", "\"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied\n the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and\n poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his\n grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony\n pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip\n and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff\n tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an\n upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long\n black tongue lolled.\n\n\n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube\n with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone\n called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"", "\"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"", "\"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"" ], [ "The interpreter took over. \"The holes are one-way for light, but no-way\n for matter. If one of the individuals inside the bubble walked toward\n you, he would cross-section and disappear. But to the audience on the\n opposite side of the bubble, it would be obvious that he had walked\n away along the vista down which they are peering.\"\nAs if to provide an example, a figure suddenly materialized on\n their side of the bubble. The wolflike dogs bared their fangs. For\n an instant, there was only an eerie, distorted, rapidly growing\n silhouette, changing from blood-red to black as the boundary of the\n bubble cross-sectioned the intruding figure. Then they recognized the\n back of another long-haired warrior and realized that the audience on\n the other side of the bubble had probably seen him approaching for some\n time.\n\n\n He bowed to the hooded figure and handed him a small bag.\n\n\n \"More atavistic cubs, big and little! Hold still, Cynthia,\" a new voice\n cut in.", "The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "There was no need for the last injunction. The scene within the bubble\n had acquired a gripping interest. The shaggy warriors were taking up\n their swords, gathering about the hooded sorcerer. The hood fell back,\n revealing a face with hawklike, disturbing eyes that seemed to be\n looking straight out of the bubble at the future.\n\n\n \"This is getting good,\" the Butcher said, squirming toward the edge of\n his seat.\n\n\n \"Stop being an impulsive mentality,\" Hal warned him a little nervously.\n\n\n \"Hah!\"\n\n\n The sorcerer emptied the small bag on the fire and a thick cloud of\n smoke puffed toward the ceiling of the bubble. A clawlike hand waved\n wildly. The sorcerer appeared to be expostulating, commanding. The\n warriors stared uncomprehendingly, which seemed to exasperate the\n sorcerer.", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "\"The Time Bubble has been brought to rest in one of the barbaric\n cultures of the Dawn Era,\" a soft voice explained, so casually that\n Joggy looked around for the speaker, until Hal nudged him sharply,\n whispering with barely perceptible embarrassment: \"Don't do that,\n Joggy. It's just the electronic interpreter. It senses our development\n and hears our questions and then it automats background and answers.\n But it's no more alive than an adolescer or a kinderobot. Got a billion\n microtapes, though.\"\n\n\n The interpreter continued: \"The skin-clad men we are viewing in Time\n in the Round seem to be a group of warriors of the sort who lived\n by pillage and rapine. The hooded figure is a most unusual find. We\n believe it to be that of a sorcerer who pretended to control the forces\n of nature and see into the future.\"", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "Here and there were scattered weapons and armor—long swords glistening\n with oil to guard them from rust, crudely painted circular shields, and\n helmets from which curved the horns of beasts. Back and forth, lean,\n wolflike dogs paced with restless monotony.\nSometimes the men seemed to speak together, or one would rise to peer\n down the misty forest vistas, but mostly they were motionless. Only\n the hooded figure, which they seemed to regard with a mingled wonder\n and fear, swayed incessantly to the rhythm of some unheard chant.", "\"That's right,\" the Butcher approved loudly. \"Sock it to 'em!\"\n\n\n \"Butcher!\" Hal admonished.\n\n\n Suddenly the bubble grew very bright, as if the Sun had just shone\n forth in the ancient world, though the rain still dripped down.\n\n\n \"A viewing anomaly has occurred,\" the interpreter announced. \"It may be\n necessary to collapse the Time Bubble for a short period.\"\n\n\n In a frenzy, his ragged robes twisting like smoke, the sorcerer rushed\n at one of the warriors, pushing him backward so that in a moment he\n must cross-section.\n\n\n \"Attaboy!\" the Butcher encouraged.\n\n\n Then the warrior was standing outside the bubble, blinking toward the\n shadows, rain dripping from his beard and furs.\n\n\n \"Oh,\nboy\n!\" the Butcher cheered in ecstasy.", "\"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.", "Joggy whispered: \"How is it that we can't see the audience through the\n other side of the bubble? We can see through this side, all right.\"\n\n\n \"The bubble only shines light out,\" Hal told him hurriedly, to show he\n knew some things as well as the interpreter. \"Nothing, not even light,\n can get into the bubble from outside. The audience on the other side of\n the bubble sees into it just as we do, only they're seeing the other\n way—for instance, they can't see the fire because the tree is in the\n way. And instead of seeing us beyond, they see more trees and sky.\"\n\n\n Joggy nodded. \"You mean that whatever way you look at the bubble, it's\n a kind of hole through time?\"", "\"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "Hal turned and saw that two cold-eyed girls had been ushered into the\n cubicle. One was wiping her close-cropped hair with one hand while\n mopping a green stain from her friend's back with the other.\n\n\n Hal nudged Joggy and whispered: \"Butch!\"\n\n\n But Joggy was still hypnotized by the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Then how is it, Hal,\" he asked, \"that light comes out of the bubble,\n if the people don't? What I mean is, if one of the people walks toward\n us, he shrinks to a red blot and disappears. Why doesn't the light\n coming our way disappear, too?\"\n\n\n \"Well—you see, Joggy, it isn't real light. It's—\"\n\n\n Once more the interpreter helped him out.", "\"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.", "The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "Then the Butcher got his balance and they began to swim along\n securely, though at a level several inches lower. Brute sprang up after\n his master and was invisibly rebuffed. He retired baffled, but a few\n minutes later, he was amusing himself by furious futile efforts to\n climb the hemispherical repulsor field.\n\n\n Slowly the little cavalcade of boys and uninjes proceeded down the\n Avenue of Wisdom. Hal amused himself by stroking toward a tree. When he\n was about four feet from it, he was gently bounced away.\nIt was really a more tiring method of transportation than walking\n and quite useless against the wind. True, by rocking the repulsor\n hemisphere backward, you could get a brief forward push, but it would\n be nullified when you rocked forward. A slow swimming stroke was the\n simplest way to make progress.\n\n\n The general sensation, however, was delightful and levitators were\n among the most prized of toys.", "But it was the scene within the bubble that riveted the attention of\n the boys.\n\n\n Great brooding trees, the trunks of the nearer ones sliced by the\n bubble's surface, formed the background. Through the dark, wet foliage\n appeared glimpses of a murky sky, while from the ceiling of the bubble,\n a ceaseless rain dripped mournfully. A hooded figure crouched beside a\n little fire partly shielded by a gnarled trunk. Squatting round about\n were wiry, blue-eyed men with shoulder-length blond hair and full blond\n beards. They were clothed in furs and metal-studded leather.", "\"But I don't feel any older,\" Joggy replied doubtfully.\n\n\n \"The feeling comes at six. Don't worry, the usher will notice the\n difference.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy switched off their levitators and dropped to their\n feet. The Butcher came down rather hard, twisting an ankle. He opened\n his mouth to cry, then abruptly closed it hard, bearing his pain in\n tight-lipped silence like an ancient soldier—like Stalin, maybe, he\n thought. The red-headed adult's face twitched in half-humorous sympathy.\n\n\n Hal and Joggy mounted the Ramp and entered a twilit corridor which\n drank their faint footsteps and returned pulses of light. The Butcher\n limped manfully after them, but when he got inside, he forgot his\n battle injury.\nHal looked back. \"Honestly, the usher will stop you.\"" ], [ "\"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.", "TIME IN THE ROUND\nBy FRITZ LEIBER\n\n\n Illustrated by DILLON\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nPoor Butcher suffered more than any dictator\n \nin history: everybody gave in to him because\n \nhe was so puny and they were so impregnable!\nFrom the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace\n Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at\n the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the\n effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of\n civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up\n with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the\n scene was normal again.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "\"There's the Theater,\" Joggy announced.\n\n\n \"I\nknow\n,\" the Butcher said irritably.\n\n\n But even he sounded a little solemn and subdued. From the Great Ramp\n to the topmost airy finial, the Time Theater was the dream of a god\n realized in unearthly substance. It imparted the aura of demigods to\n the adults drifting up and down the ramp.\n\n\n \"My father remembers when there wasn't a Time Theater,\" Hal said softly\n as he scanned the facade's glowing charts and maps. \"Say, they're\n viewing Earth, somewhere in Scandinavia around zero in the B.C.-A.D.\n time scale. It should be interesting.\"", "The Butcher grimly slipped out the metal tube and put it to his lips.\n There were two closely spaced faint\nplops\nand a large green stain\n appeared on the bare back of one girl, while purple fluid dripped from\n the close-cropped hair of the other.\n\n\n They glared at him and one of them said: \"A cub!\" But he had his arms\n folded and wasn't looking at them.\n\n\n Meanwhile, subordinate ushers had guided Hal and Joggy away from the\n main entrance to the Time Theater. A sphincter dilated and they found\n themselves in a small transparent cubicle from which they could watch\n the show without disturbing the adult audience. They unstrapped their\n levitators, laid them on the floor and sat down.\nThe darkened auditorium was circular. Rising from a low central\n platform was a huge bubble of light, its lower surface somewhat\n flattened. The audience was seated in concentric rows around the\n bubble, their keen and compassionate faces dimly revealed by the pale\n central glow.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "\"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always\n playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come\n from those dirty past men.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening\n to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of\n reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute\n licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically\n on his mouth.\n\n\n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We\n came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"", "\"Butcher, you've done it!\" Hal said, aghast.\n\n\n \"I sure did,\" the Butcher agreed blandly, \"but that old guy in the\n bubble helped me. Must take two to work it.\"\n\n\n \"Keep your seats!\" the interpreter said loudly. \"We are energizing the\n safeguards!\"\nThe warriors inside the bubble stared in stupid astonishment after the\n one who had disappeared from their view. The sorcerer leaped about,\n pushing them in his direction.\n\n\n Abrupt light flooded the Time Theater. The warriors who had emerged\n from the bubble stiffened themselves, baring their teeth.\n\n\n \"The safeguards are now energized,\" the interpreter said.\n\n\n A woman in a short golden tunic stood up uncertainly from the front row\n of the audience.", "\"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.", "\"\nI\nlike this show,\" a familiar voice announced serenely. \"They cut\n anybody yet with those choppers?\"\n\n\n Hal looked down beside him. \"Butch! How did you manage to get in?\"\n\n\n \"I don't see any blood. Where's the bodies?\"\n\n\n \"But how\ndid\nyou get in—Butcher?\"\nThe Butcher replied airily: \"A red-headed man talked to me and said it\n certainly was sad for a future dictator not to be able to enjoy scenes\n of carnage in his youth, so I told him I'd been inside the Time Theater\n and just come out to get a drink of water and go to the eliminator, but\n then my sprained ankle had got worse—I kind of tried to get up and\n fell down again—so he picked me up and carried me right through the\n usher.\"", "A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the\n luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,\n except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n\n\n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n \"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\nThe gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks\n so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a\n fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and\n one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n\n\n Butch yawned.\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog\n fights, Butch.\"", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "The Butcher shook his head. \"I'm going to think my way in. I'm going to\n think old.\"\n\n\n \"You won't be able to fool the usher, Butcher. You under-fives\n simply aren't allowed in the Time Theater. There's a good reason for\n it—something dangerous might happen if an under-five got inside.\"\n\n\n \"Why?\"\n\n\n \"I don't exactly know, but something.\"\n\n\n \"Hah! I bet they're scared we'd go traveling in the Time Bubble and\n have some excitement.\"\n\n\n \"They are not. I guess they just know you'd get bored and wander away\n from your seats and maybe disturb the adults or upset the electronics\n or something. But don't worry about it, Butcher. The usher will take\n care of you.\"", "Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first", "The first warrior looked her up and down, took one hesitant step\n forward, then another, then suddenly grabbed her and flung her over his\n left shoulder, looking around menacingly and swinging his sword in his\n right hand.\n\n\n \"I repeat, the safeguards have been fully energized! Keep your seats!\"\n the interpreter enjoined.\n\n\n In the cubicle, Hal and Joggy gasped, the two girls squeaked, but the\n Butcher yelled a \"Hey!\" of disapproval, snatched up something from the\n floor and darted out through the sphincter.\n\n\n Here and there in the audience, other adults stood up. The emerged\n warriors formed a ring of swinging swords and questing eyes. Between\n their legs their wolfish dogs, emerged with them, crouched and snarled.\n Then the warriors began to fan out.\n\n\n \"There has been an unavoidable delay in energizing the safeguards,\" the\n interpreter said. \"Please be patient.\"", "\"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"", "\"You've never been inside the Time Theater—you're not old enough\n yet—so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons\n why it's impossible,\" Hal replied with friendly factuality. \"The Time\n Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into\n the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't\n change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.\"\n\n\n \"I don't care,\" the Butcher asserted obstinately. \"I'm still going to\n have warfare when I'm World Director.\"\n\n\n \"They'll condition you out of the idea,\" Hal assured him.\n\n\n \"They will not. I won't let 'em.\"\n\n\n \"It doesn't matter what you think now,\" Hal said with finality. \"You'll\n have an altogether different opinion when you're six.\"", "\"It is because of this minority theory that under-age individuals and\n other beings with impulsive mentalities are barred from the Time\n Theater. But do not be alarmed. Even if the minority theory should\n prove true—and no evidence for it has ever appeared—there are\n automatically operating safeguards to protect the audience from any\n harmful consequences of time traveling (almost certainly impossible,\n remember) in either direction.\"\n\n\n \"Sissies!\" was the Butcher's comment.\n\"You're rather young to be here, aren't you?\" the interpreter inquired.\nThe Butcher folded his arms and scowled.\n\n\n The interpreter hesitated almost humanly, probably snatching through a\n quarter-million microtapes. \"Well, you wouldn't have got in unless a\n qualified adult had certified you as plus-age. Enjoy yourself.\"", "The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"" ], [ "The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear\n and was whirling him around hilariously.\n\n\n \"Aw,\nquit\nit, Brute,\" the Butcher said in annoyance.\n\n\n Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no\n attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.\n\n\n The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. \"You're making too much\n of a rumpus,\" he said. \"I want to think.\"\nHe kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.\n\n\n \"Look,\" Joggy said, \"you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would\n you?\"", "A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the\n luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,\n except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.\n\n\n Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:\n \"Kill 'em, Brute.\"\nThe gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks\n so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a\n fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and\n one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.\n\n\n Butch yawned.\n\n\n \"What's the matter?\" inquired Darter's master. \"I thought you liked dog\n fights, Butch.\"", "Next moment, the Butcher was on his knees and the warrior was staring\n at him open-mouthed. The sword had rebounded from something invisible\n an arm's length above the gnomelike creature's head. The warrior backed\n a step.\nThe Butcher stayed down, crouching half behind an aisle seat and\n digging for something in his pocket. But he didn't stay quiet. \"Sic\n 'em, Brute!\" he shrilled. \"Sic 'em, Darter! Sic 'em, Pinkie and Whitie\n and Blue!\" Then he stopped shouting and raised his hand to his mouth.\nGrowling quite unmechanically, the five uninjes hurled themselves\n forward and closed with the warrior's wolflike dogs. At the first", "\"Shut up—I'm thinking I'm World Director,\" the Butcher informed them,\n contorting his face diabolically.\n\n\n Hal spoke to the uninjes, pointing to the side of the corridor.\n Obediently four of them lined up.\n\n\n But Brute was peering down the corridor toward where it merged into a\n deeper darkness. His short legs stiffened, his neckless head seemed to\n retreat even further between his powerful shoulders, his lips writhed\n back to show his gleaming fangs, and a completely unfamiliar sound\n issued from his throat. A choked, grating sound. A growl. The other\n uninjes moved uneasily.\n\n\n \"Do you suppose something's the matter with his circuits?\" Joggy\n whispered. \"Maybe he's getting racial memories from the Scands.\"\n\n\n \"Of course not,\" Hal said irritably.", "\"I do like dog fights,\" Butch said somberly, without looking around. \"I\n don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.\n Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you\n talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?\"\n\n\n \"That's not exactly a functional name,\" Hal observed with the\n judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: \"All\n right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people\n were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?\"\n\n\n \"I certainly would,\" the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back\n skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed\n up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He\n squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.", "The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied\n the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and\n poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his\n grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony\n pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip\n and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff\n tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an\n upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long\n black tongue lolled.\n\n\n The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube\n with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone\n called: \"Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!\"", "\"Cubs!\" came a small cold voice from behind Hal and Joggy. \"Always\n playing hero! Say, what's that awful smell, Cynthia? It must have come\n from those dirty past men.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy were shouting at the Butcher, but he wasn't listening\n to them or to the older voices clamoring about \"revised theories of\n reality\" and other important things. He didn't even squirm as Brute\n licked his cheek and the woman in gold planted a big kiss practically\n on his mouth.\n\n\n He smiled dreamily and stroked Brute's muzzle and murmured softly: \"We\n came, we saw, we conquered, didn't we, Brute?\"", "\"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?\" the Butcher demanded\n scathingly. \"An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits\n and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.\" He looked at Brute with\n guarded wistfulness.\n\n\n \"I don't know about that,\" Hal put in. \"I've heard an uninj is\n programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically\n has racial memory.\"\n\n\n \"I mean if you\ncould\nhurt an uninj,\" Joggy amended.\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I wouldn't,\" the Butcher admitted grudgingly. \"But shut\n up—I want to think.\"\n\n\n \"About what?\" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.\n\n\n The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. \"When I'm World Director,\" he\n said slowly, \"I'm going to have warfare again.\"", "encounter, Brute and Pinkie were grabbed by the throats, shaken, and\n tossed a dozen feet. The warriors snarled approval and advanced. But\n then Brute and Pinkie raced back eagerly to the fight—and suddenly the\n face of the leading warrior was drenched with scarlet. He blinked and\n touched his fingers to it, then looked at his hand in horror.", "\"Brute, get over there,\" the Butcher commanded. Unwillingly, eyes still\n fixed on the blackness ahead, Brute obeyed.\n\n\n The three boys started on. Hal and Joggy experienced a vaguely\n electrical tingling that vanished almost immediately. They looked back.\n The Butcher had been stopped by an invisible wall.\n\n\n \"I told you you couldn't fool the usher,\" Hal said.\n\n\n The Butcher hurled himself forward. The wall gave a little, then\n bounced him back with equal force.", "The Butcher spared a second to repeat his command to the uninjes. But\n already the battle was going against the larger dogs. The latter had\n the advantage of weight and could toss the smaller dogs like so many\n foxes. But their terrible fangs did no damage, and whenever an uninj\n clamped on a throat, that throat was torn out.\n\n\n Meanwhile, great bloody stains had appeared on the bodies of all the\n warriors. They drew back in a knot, looking at each other fearfully.\n That was when the Butcher got to his feet and strode forward, hand\n clenching the levitator above his head.\n\n\n \"Get back where you belong, you big jerks! And drop that lady!\"\n\n\n The first warrior pointed toward him and hissed something. Immediately,\n a half dozen swords were smiting at the Butcher.\n\n\n \"We are working to energize the safeguards,\" the interpreter said in\n mechanical panic. \"Remain patient and in your seats.\"", "Joggy and the older boy were swimming lazily through the air at\n shoulder height. In the pavement directly under each of them was a\n wide, saucer-shaped depression which swam along with them. The uninjes\n avoided the depressions. Darter was strutting on his hind legs, looking\n up inquiringly at his master.\n\n\n \"Gimme a ride, Hal, gimme a ride!\" the Butcher called. The older boy\n ignored him. \"Aw, gimme a ride, Joggy.\"\n\n\n \"Oh, all right.\" Joggy touched the small box attached to the front of\n his broad metal harness and dropped lightly to the ground. The Butcher\n climbed on his back. There was a moment of rocking and pitching, during\n which each boy accused the other of trying to upset them.", "\"Well, what if I will?\" the Butcher snapped back. \"You don't have to\n keep\ntelling\nme about it, do you?\"\nThe others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly\n on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said\n in soothing tones: \"Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time\n Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?\"\n\n\n Butch scowled.\n\n\n \"How about it, Butch?\"\n\n\n Still Butch did not seem to hear.\n\n\n The older boy shrugged and said: \"Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?\"\n\n\n The Butcher swung around. \"They won't let me in the Time Theater. You\n said so yourself.\"\n\n\n \"You could walk us over there.\"\n\n\n \"Well, maybe I will and maybe I won't.\"", "\"While you're deciding, we'll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.\"\n\n\n Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging\n pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a\n black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.\n\n\n He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups\n wanted you to do. This grass couldn't be hurt. You couldn't pull it up\n or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the\n crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF\n THE GRASS.\n\n\n With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the\n others.", "\"Brute, come back!\" the Butcher yelled.\nThe gray uninj let go his hold on the leader's ankle and scampered\n out of the Time Bubble, which swiftly dimmed to its original light\n intensity and then winked out.\n\n\n For once in their very mature lives, all of the adults in the\n auditorium began to jabber at each other simultaneously.\n\n\n \"We are sorry, but the anomaly has made it necessary to collapse the\n Time Bubble,\" the interpreter said. \"There will be no viewing until\n further announcement. Thank you for your patience.\"\n\n\n Hal and Joggy caught up with the Butcher just as Brute jumped into his\n arms and the woman in gold picked him up and hugged him fiercely. The\n Butcher started to pull away, then grudgingly submitted.", "The uninjes leaped into the melee, at first tearing more fur than\n flesh. Swords caught them and sent them spinning through the air. They\n came yapping back for more. Brute fixed on the first warrior's ankle.\n He dropped the woman, stamped unavailingly on the uninj, and let out a\n screech.\n\n\n Swords were still rebounding from the invisible shield under which the\n Butcher crouched, making terrible faces at his attackers. They drew\n back, looked again at their bloodstains, goggled at the demon dogs.\n At their leader's screech, they broke and plunged back into the Time\n Bubble, their leader stumbling limpingly after them. There they wasted\n no time on their own ragged sorcerer. Their swords rose and fell, and\n no repulsor field stayed them.", "At that moment, the Butcher entered the main auditorium, brandishing a\n levitator above his head and striding purposefully down the aisle. At\n his heels, five stocky forms trotted. In a definitely pre-civilization\n voice, or at least with pre-civilization volume, he bellowed: \"Hey,\n you! You quit that!\"\n\n\n The first warrior looked toward him, gave his left shoulder a shake to\n quiet his wriggling captive, gave his right shoulder one to supple his\n sword arm, and waited until the dwarfish challenger came into range.\n Then his sword swished down in a flashing arc.", "\"I bet it'll be a bum time view anyway,\" the Butcher said, not giving\n up, but not trying again. \"And I still don't think the usher can tell\n how old you are. I bet there's an over-age teacher spying on you\n through a hole, and if he doesn't like your looks, he switches on the\n usher.\"\nBut the others had disappeared in the blackness. The Butcher waited and\n then sat down beside the uninjes. Brute laid his head on his knee and\n growled faintly down the corridor.\n\n\n \"Take it easy, Brute,\" the Butcher consoled him. \"I don't think\n Tamerlane was really a Scand of the Navies anyhow.\"\n\n\n Two chattering girls hardly bigger than himself stepped through the\n usher as if it weren't there.", "\"Butcher, that wasn't honest,\" Hal said a little worriedly. \"You\n tricked him into thinking you were older and his brain waves blanketed\n yours, going through the usher. I really\nhave\nheard it's dangerous\n for you under-fives to be in here.\"\n\n\n \"The way those cubs beg for babying and get it!\" one of the girls\n commented. \"Talk about sex favoritism!\" She and her companion withdrew\n to the far end of the cubicle.\n\n\n The Butcher grinned at them briefly and concentrated his attention on\n the scene in the Time Bubble.\n\n\n \"Those big dogs—\" he began suddenly. \"Brute must have smelled 'em.\"\n\n\n \"Don't be silly,\" Hal said. \"Smells can't come out of the Time Bubble.\n Smells haven't any isotopes and—\"", "\"I will not!\" the Butcher countered hotly. \"I'm not going to be a\n sissy.\" Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. \"And what if we\n were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?\"\n\n\n \"The Space Fleet would take care of them,\" Hal replied calmly. \"That's\n what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to\n problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to\n viruses.\"\n\n\n \"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?\"\n\n\n \"They can't. It's impossible.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but suppose they did all the same.\"" ] ]
test	20039	[ "What does Larry contend was the reason the labor movement began?", "What is the \"two cultures\" problem?", "Why does the author invoke the \"harm principle\"?", "Why does the author believe Larry is wrong about his warnings that Internet commerce may threaten liberty?", "Why does the author appreciate Larry's theft of car radios example?", "What is the dichotomy of researchers' involvement in the development of cyberspace?", "Why does the author believe Larry focuses so heavily on the regulation aspect of cyberspace commerce?", "How does the author suggest researchers approach the contradiction of working simultaneously in private and public spaces?" ]	[ [ "It began as a response to the market's structure, which limits freedom and sometimes encourages low pay.", "It began as a movement hoping to replace the free market system. ", "It started intending to compete with the market system as a social organization.", "It started as a means of draining the market of its resources and transferring all of the power over to the people." ], [ "The dichotomies of physical space versus cyberspace.", "The conflict between understanding the Internet through an academic lens versus a legal one.", "The tension between confidentiality and First Amendment rights in an emerging digital environment.", "The persistence of the issues of privacy and defamation regarding encryption on the Internet." ], [ "To show that a unified public opinion can threaten to overrule a person's rights.", "In order to show that law back by force is always a threat to one's personal freedom.", "To question whether public opinion limits personal freedoms in the same way rule of law by force does.", "To demonstrate that regulation may become a harmful action on Internet commerce over time." ], [ "He does not believe an increase in government regulation will necessarily follow the emergence of commercial portals.", "The Internet is a homogenous entity that can stand firm against any intrusion from outside forces that may wish to regulate it.", "Whatever regulation might occur would be limited thanks to the abundance of private, public, commercial, and charitable spaces that live online.", "Just like in our physical world, the world of cyberspace can accommodate a variety of spaces that can co-exist in a competitive market." ], [ "Just like higher penalties for crimes in our physical world result in fewer crimes and less violent crimes, so will great penalties for Internet crimes yield similar results in a digital space.", "Larry's car radio theft example illustrates the ease with which one can break into a car and steal a radio with violence. The author suggests building strong counter-measures to fight back against \"violent\" Internet attacks.", "The card radio theft example provides a template for proper regulation and protection of Internet privacy: Higher penalties will reduce the number of attempts to steal confidential information and solve the problem.", "Larry contends using technology to render the radio useless after it has been stolen could potentially limit violent thefts; the author believes this principle could be applied to the Internet in regards to privacy issues." ], [ "While the commercial research community values a free market system, the greater research community understands the value of keeping research hidden to protect trade secrets.", "Academic researchers tend to give more leeway to government involvement in such matters while commercial researchers want to keep the government at arm's reach.", "Academic researchers are interested in the architecture of cyberspace while commercial researchers are interested only in its profit potential.", "While the greater research community values an open exchange of information, commercial research necessitates greater privacy to avoid competition swooping in." ], [ "Larry is passionate about this subject because he is a libertarian and is against government interference. ", "He is attempting to cast a wider net for his readership.", "He wants to ensure the model is sustainable for future generations.", "Larry's expertise is in the regulation of cyberspace commerce." ], [ "Establishing strict protocols that oversee potential losses of liberty.", "Creating regulations that examine the formation of new commercial portals to ensure they have privacy guidelines in place.", "Developing clear procedures that limit or eliminate corrupt behavior such as conflicts of interest.", "Ensuring government oversight to prevent the development of a monopoly in the world of Internet commerce." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out", "of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace." ], [ "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come" ], [ "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple", "on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come" ], [ "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems.", "of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple" ], [ "on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "of the car by someone who does not know the code (old-fashioned sense) for their release. Here I might add that the second remedy is, in conventional terms, a better one that the first. The higher penalties will have multiple", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just" ], [ "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems.", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86)." ], [ "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems.", "effects: One is to reduce the number of thefts, but another is to encourage more violent action by the thieves that remain when faced with the risk of capture. The marginal cost of killing an innocent party would be quite low if", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should" ], [ "So we come to the third point: Larry mentions that the original architecture of cyberspace was given to us by researchers and hackers. And so it was. The usual ethic among both groups is for the public dissemination of information. With researchers, the community I know best, the free interchange of ideas of critical for the advancement of knowledge. There are no secrets in this world. But many of the best researchers also have jobs that require them to work for industry, where the protection of innovation via trade secrets and patents is the norm, and for equally good reason: Business cannot turn a profit if all its improvements are instantly appropriable by others. \n\n Now, it happens that the best minds are frequently used for both research and commerce, and we have to develop protocols, and we do develop protocols, that deal with the potential conflict of interest as they move from one regime to another. And in ordinary space we have both public and private property, with the same individuals participating in both regimes.", "original enclaves can hold firm as new people open up new territory. The Net is not some single homogenous object that admits to only a single culture. We can have private and public, commercial and charitable, spaces on the Net, just", "I thought (and still think) that one of the great strengths of Larry's book is the way in which he integrates nice examples from physical space with those from cyberspace. Thus he is right", "I think that Larry is trying to reach a larger audience with his book, and to do so, he has to explain why under the influence of commerce, cyberspace is becoming highly regulable for those who do not participate in that commerce, and why the regulation that commerce imposes on those who voluntarily join into it should be a bad thing. Stated otherwise, the task that I think remains is to translate the language and sentiments of those within the Internet culture so that their positions can be better understood by those of us who do not yet understand what is so distinctive and special about the Net.", "the guidelines to deal with conflicts-of-interest regulations that allow most people to participate in both. I see no reason why that cannot happen in cyberspace as well. Those people who wish to set up commercial portals through which others must come", "while others can run free over a commons on some other part of the Net. There is no more loss of freedom here in any intelligible sense that there is a loss of freedom when my neighbor erects a new house to", "What So Different About Cyberspace? \n\n It seems as though the initial round of discussion between Larry and myself has produced a \"two cultures\" problem, which it is worth setting out briefly here. Over the past several years I have had extensive contact with the Internet, not only as an academic but also as a lawyer. But it is not because of any affection for, or preoccupation with its technical architecture, or with its internal folkways. Rather, I have come to it by indirection. If you have an expertise in privacy and defamation, then someone will ask you to testify on the question of whether one should allow strong encryption by private parties on the Net, or whether the publication online of confidential information obtained by fraud or trickery is protected under the First Amendment. For someone who sees the Internet as the latest advance in technology, which is not all that different from the radio, the cell phone, or the fax machine, there is a strong tendency to see issues on the Internet as though they were outgrowths of familiar problems elsewhere.", "do not violate the liberty of those who choose not to enter. The different values are certainly there, but the Net is a richer and not a poorer place by virtue of the fact that some folks can live in gated communities", "That said, I don't think that Larry has tried in Code to respond to the popular sentiment on the street. The passages I quoted in the first round come from Chapter 7 of his book, \"What Things Regulate,\" which begins with a reference to that most ivory-towered individual John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty , who articulated the famous \"harm principle\" with which libertarian thought of all stripes has grappled since he wrote. Mill, as Larry points out, did believe that public opinion was one counterweight to private action, and it has been a hard question since that time, whether popular sentiment is an equal obstacle to individual freedom as law backed by force, or whether it works with sufficient cohesion to influence conduct in a single direction. That is a fair and important set of questions to ask, but again, it is not one that is unique to cyberspace.", "work well in cyberspace to avoid similar problems.", "In ordinary affairs, I do not think that the rise of commerce results in the loss of liberty. As a member of the university community, I have worked over the years in setting out", "So far so good. No one could doubt that architecture matters in cyberspace. The ability to limit the number of times that someone can resort to a computer program, for example, means that technology allows for a form of price discrimination that eliminates some of the unwelcome cross-subsidies associated with the sale of certain programs, just as an accurate billing system means that pricing for phones is not subject to flat fees only. Here again, the point is useful to make but does not get us to the question of the proper approach for understanding the distinctive use and regulation of cyberspace.", "as we do anywhere else. If in so doing we change the character of the Net, we do so by proper means, and so be it.", "which he invites only his friends. Of course, the values in commerce are different from those in the code (i.e., practices) of the Internet. But these new arrivals will not, as Larry suggests, \"flip\" the character of the Net. The", "These conclusions follow, I think, from any account of libertarianism that pays attention to the views within the ivory tower. It is, I might add, relatively close to that which is given the idea of liberty by the ordinary man. \"Your freedom to use your fist stops at the edge of my face\" is a recognition of the universal duties of forbearance that lie at the heart of the libertarian code. But I am told that there is a different world out there that represents some present and powerful political reality: It is a world in which it is wrong to think about defamation, wrong to think about trade secrets, wrong to think about blackmail. That would make me a Red. So here is the irony. To take a traditional libertarian position makes one a Red. If this libertarianism has the message keep government out, then perhaps it is wrong to describe this as a form of anarchy. Rather, it starts to resemble a self-appointed militia that wants to keep out others who do not want to share in their values. It is the most unlibertarian position of a monopoly on custom and mores to the early arrivals.", "the sanction for stealing radios were life imprisonment for first-time offenders. But the puzzles of marginal deterrence are not invoked if the radios are disabled when removed, and so architecture, or technology, works nicely in real space, and it should", "So here is where I am left. I do not understand how the market is the enemy of liberty, at least if the competitive market is understood. I do not see why low wages could ever be regarded as a threat to liberty, even if workers would prefer, ceteris paribus , higher ones. I do not know what it means to say that \"the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom.\" At most, the competition of new forms of social organization draw people away from older forms of association. So that said, the passages that I quote do not reflect a non-academic view of liberty by guys on the street. It reflects at least in part the conception of liberty that was championed earlier in this century by such writers as Robert Lee Hale, who found coercion in every refusal to deal. Or, to the extent that it really means keep the government out, it sounds like an attempt by the earlier settlers of the new domain to monopolize its structure at the expense of later comers who wish to play by a different set of rules in some portion of that space.", "That said, how does this tie into the grander questions of what a libertarian does or should believe. Larry says that his point was really that the attitude of \"leave the Net alone\" will lead to a loss of liberty. His words are ominous: \"My argument is that this response will lead to a Net with far less liberty than the Net we know now, with a potential to be far more regulated than any world we have known--ever.\" I don't get it. In one sense, the statement is right. If folks can defame at will on the Internet and escape through anonymity, there is something deeply amiss. But if the argument is that commercialization poses the same dreaded threat to the Net as defamation, then I think that he is wrong, given that the two could live side by side in the manner just described.", "Larry then goes astray in my view when he writes, \"Threats to liberty change. ... The labor movement was founded on the idea that the market is sometimes a threat to liberty--not just because of low wages but also because the market form of organization itself disables a certain form of freedom. In other societies, at other times, the market is the key, not the enemy, of liberty.\" (Page 85-86).", "on to say that there are two ways in which to reduce the theft of car radios (Page 90), one of them is to increase the punishment for theft, and the other is to render them useless once they are taken out" ] ]
test	50566	[ "What is the relationship between Mike Kenscott and Adric?", "Why did the eagle break off from the engagement with Mike?", "Why is Andy so angry about the incident with the eagle?", "What does Mike do to convince Andy that he is not a mental case?", "What can Mike do that other people cannot do?", "How did the military establishment handle Mike in the aftermath of his accident?", "What triggers Mike to hear voices during the night after the incident with the eagle?", "Why does Andric end up lying on the bed?", "What does the fact that the main character is evidently the \"Lord of the Crimson Tower\" explain, that he had seemed puzzled about?", "What do Mike and Andric have in common?" ]	[ [ "Adric is Mike's half-brother who lives far up in the Sierra Madre mountains. Mike doesn't seem him very often.", "Adric lives in the future. Mike is Adric's ancestor, back in the genealogical mists of time.", "This tale has two separate substories, and the Mike and Adric characters are each the main character of their own story line, one having nothing to do with the other.", "Mike and Adric are two personalities, or people, occupying the same brain space." ], [ "His brother stabbed it with his hunting knife.", "The eagle didn't start it in the first place, so when Mike lost his grip on the bird, it left immediately.", "His brother beat it off with his camera.", "He pulled at its pinion feathers and broke its wing." ], [ "Andy is disgusted at this evidence of cruelty toward animals displayed by his brother, and he remembers some other incidents too, like the cat that Mike skinned and left for dead.", "He is afraid that his brother is mentally unbalanced, possibly as a result of his inability to let go of his work and relax on vacation.", "Eagles are a protected species, and Andy does not want them to get in trouble with the authorities for harming such a majestic bird.", "Mike ruined Andy's chance to take a really unique photo of an eagle that would have been an asset to Andy's portfolio, magazine front cover-quality." ], [ "Mike shows Andy the burn scars on his body from the incident in his lab, which convinced Andy that the military had carried out some unethical bio-engineering experiment on Mike that left him with post-traumatic stress syndrome.", "Mike shows Any documents on the secret projects he worked on in the military, and subsequently at General Electric. He admits the experiments have had some odd side effects, but the documents convince Andy that it is real, not craziness affecting his brother.", "Mike shows Andy an observable, repeatable, physical effect that Mike has on a radio, an effect that is easily understood as being abnormal, because Andy can restore normal behavior by touching the device after Mike does.", "Mike buys Andy a new camera and promises to lay off the long work hours and go fishing with Andy the next day." ], [ "Communicate with Martians.", "Absorb electric current into his body without it harming his body.", "Switch electrical equipment on and off just by thinking \"On\" or \"Off,\" without actually touching the devices.", "Heal his body and make scars disappear using electric current." ], [ "The military tried to give Mike the resources he needed to research what had happened to him, but the incident had profound after effects, and they finally discharged him to a mental hospital for proper care.", "It was military medical experiments that caused Mike's problems in the first place. They tried to hush it up and keep Mike out of the public eye, but everyone could see he was an oddity, so they wiped his memories and gave him a new identity.", "The military knew that Mike had been in communication with aliens, though their public story was a lightning strike on the lab. Sending him to Korea was their last attempt to shut him up about his experience.", "The official report said his lab had been destroyed by a lightning strike, although the military knew this was a lie. They ordered secrecy and transferred Mike first to another type of work, then to a remote outpost in Alaska." ], [ "He had spent the evening thinking about his weird ability to absorb current, trying to understand it, then decided to go to the basement and see if he still had his ability to absorb all the electricity from the dynamo. When he touched it, he started hearing voices.", "After the uncomfortable fight with Andy in the afternoon and the heart-to-heart conversation in the evening, Mike was exhausted and switched off the lights and fell asleep. As soon as he fell into REM sleep, he started hearing the voices.", "He had spent the evening thinking about his weird ability to absorb current, trying to understand it, then decided to go to bed and in a moment of inattention, he touched an electronic device - the light switch. This triggered the voices.", "He had spent the evening thinking about his erratic and obsessive behavior, and how it was hurting the people around him, and after a sufficient amount of \"self-medicating\" with the whiskey the brothers kept at the cabin, he heard voices." ], [ "He went to bed in the late evening and slept restlessly.", "He fainted and hit his head and the other people in the room put him in bed.", "He always lay on his back in his bed when he intended to travel the time ellipse.", "He and Gamine had a few moments to make love before Narayan entered the room and she leaped out of bed so no one would know what they'd done." ], [ "It explains why he is wearing a crimson flannel nightshirt. It doesn't explain why the nightshirt only comes down to his loins.", "It explains why he is being served by a man in a blue robe.", "It explains why his nightshirt has a crimson \"A\" (for Andric) embroidered on the left shoulder.", "It explains why the handsome Evarin comes to see him wearing green." ], [ "Each of them, in his world, is thought to be insane by others around him.", "They like to wear red flannel shirts.", "They both speak English.", "They both live in the town of Narabedia, at the foot of the Sierra Madre mountains." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 ]	[ [ "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.", "\"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"", "The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"", "\"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.", "Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"", "I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"", "It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me.\n \"Where have I gotten, to? Where—\nwhen\nam I? Two suns—those\n mountains—\"\n\n\n The change in Gamine's voice was swift; the veiled face lifted\n questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it\n seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features\n so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but\n no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there\n was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the\n invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my\n shoulders. \"You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun?\n Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?\"\n\n\n \"Wait—\" I begged. \"You mean I've travelled in time?\"", "He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"", "The exultation faded from Gamine's voice imperceptibly. \"Never mind. It\n is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were\n only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that\n other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that\n you think you are he?\"\n\n\n \"I'm not Adric—\" I raged. \"Adric sent me here—\"\n\n\n I saw the blurring around Gamine's invisible features twitch in a\n headshake. \"It's never been proven that two minds can be interchanged\n like that. Adric's body. Adric's brain. The brain convolutions, the\n memory centers, the habit patterns—you'd still be Adric. The idea that\n you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It\n will wear off.\"\n\n\n I shook my head, puzzled. \"I still don't believe it. Where am I?\"", "The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"" ], [ "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream.", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily." ], [ "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"", "I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"" ], [ "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"", "I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "\"Neither drug nor poison,\" said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice\n was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a\n woman's or a boy's. \"Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing.\"\n\n\n I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look\n and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me\n variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of\n shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in\n the Lama costume." ], [ "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.", "I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.", "\"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"", "It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas." ], [ "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "I knew the lab hadn't been struck by lightning. The Major knew it\n too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time\n we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his\n log-book, and he talked without raising his head to look at me.\n\n\n \"I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the\n vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—\" his jaw\n grew stubborn, \"the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We've got to\n have something for the record.\"\n\n\n I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated\n me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division\n and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up\n those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook\n while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they\n could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of\n that.", "The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane\n to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty.\n \"I'd let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We\n can't bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it,\n you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage\n out of the blue. We've done everything but stand on our heads trying\n to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But\n we've marked that whole line of research\nclosed\n, Kenscott. If I\n were you, I'd keep my mouth shut about it.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a message from Mars,\" I suggested unsmiling, and he didn't\n think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left\n the office and went to clean out my drawer.", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster\n than the doctor liked. I didn't mind the hospital part, except\n that I couldn't walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without\n burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered\nbefore\nI woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But\n the\nkind\nand\ntype\nof scars on my body didn't ring true.\n Electricity—even freak lightning—doesn't make that kind of burns. And\n my corner of the world doesn't make a habit of branding people.\n\n\n But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they\n were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic's\n face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn't\n think I was crazy; he thought\nhe\nwas.", "It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—", "\"Try another station;\" the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the\n buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel\n light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. \"And\n reception was perfect at noon,\" I told him, \"You were listening to the\n news.\" I took my hand away again. \"I don't want to blow the thing up.\"\n\n\n Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light\n glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the\n room ... \"now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth\n or 'Fate' symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...\" the noise of mixed\n applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering\n through the rooms of the cabin.\n\n\n \"Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"" ], [ "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive\n short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By\n the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got\n a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I'd ever seen\n before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very\n old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn't a receiver\n in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn't sure myself, because\n right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes\n later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through\n the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and\n I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs,\n and a feeling as if I'd had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in\n the report that I'd been struck by lightning.", "I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. \"There's your\n eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.\" I started to reel\n in my line, knowing what my brother's next move would be. \"Get the\n camera, and we'll try for a picture.\"\n\n\n We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird\n of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy\n was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest,\n his eyes glued in the image-finder. \"Golly—\" he whispered, almost\n prayerfully, \"six foot wing spread—maybe more—\"\n\n\n The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to\n leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The\n eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the\n cougar's head. Andy's camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its\n beak—", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "\"Gamine—\" the second voice stopped. After a long time, \"You are old,\n and a fool, Rhys,\" it said. \"What is Gamine to me?\"\n\n\n Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the\n voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around\n me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that\n held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the\n field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung\n free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into\n the abyss....", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"" ], [ "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars.\n I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top\n of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision\n there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched\n wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber\n black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger\n figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where\n the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh\n through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a\n slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I", "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right.\n Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting\n here wouldn't help. If it didn't let up, I'd take the first train home\n and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was\n going to hit the sack.\n\n\n My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.\n\n\n \"Damn!\" I thought incredulously. I'd shorted the dynamo again. The\n radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light\n in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled\n with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my\n body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.\n\n\n And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an\n excited voice, shouting.", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—", "My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "together. He wasn't going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A\n tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. \"It started up again\n the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following\n me around. It can't knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the\n lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and\n blew out five fuses trying to change one.\"", "\"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.", "The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "\"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.", "Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"" ], [ "Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore.\n Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid\n it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment\n in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the\n mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like\n a leaping fish. \"Lord of the Crimson Tower.\" Well, I looked it. There\n had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it,\n and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I\n stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of\n the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly\n and a man stood looking at me.", "\"You're—Rhys?\" I said. \"Where in hell have I gotten to?\" At least,\n that's what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself\n asking—in a language I'd never heard, but understood perfectly—\"To\n which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?\" At the same\n moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an\n old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in\n color. \"Red flannels yet!\" I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked\n my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?\n\n\n \"You might have the decency to explain where I am,\" I said. \"If you\n know.\"", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "Wrath—Adric's wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely\n backward. \"I am not Gamine,\" he warned. \"And I will not be served like\n Gamine has been served. Take care.\"\n\n\n \"Take care yourself,\" I muttered, knowing little else I could have\n said. Evarin drew back thin lips. \"Why? You have been sent out on the\n Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is\n beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off\n all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come\n and go as you please. Karamy—\" his lips formed a sneer. \"If you call\nthat\nfreedom!\"\n\n\n I said slowly, \"You think I'm not crazy?\"", "My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a\n jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back\n to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very\n pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched\n flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a\n lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my\n knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the\n window.", "The tiredness seemed part of Rhys voice. \"Adric,\" he said wearily. \"Try\n to remember.\" He shrugged his lean shoulders. \"You are in your own\n Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.\" His voice\n sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite\n of the weird surroundings, the phrase \"under restraint\" had struck\n home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.\n\n\n The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic\n voice. \"While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be\n explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use\n to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at\n home, in Narabedla.\"", "I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars.\n I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top\n of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision\n there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched\n wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama's, somber\n black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger\n figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where\n the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh\n through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a\n slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I", "Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"", "I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows\n to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a\n hundred miles away. I couldn't have been mistaken. I knew that ridge\n of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested\n expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my\n life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the\n curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape\n was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I\n could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun.\n Then—no, I wasn't dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second\n sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but\n brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.", "\"I wish you meant that—\" a mournfulness breathed in the soft\n contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. \"And what right\n have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place,\n then, spell-singer—\" I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse,\n what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly\n amused. \"Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you\n are the same—and past redemption!\" The robes whispered sibilantly on\n the floor as Gamine moved to the door. \"Karamy is welcome to her slave!\"\n\n\n The door slammed.", "I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson\n nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of\n the mirror a man's face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly\n moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that\n was\nnot\nmine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not\n quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn't be—I opened my\n eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected\n there.", "\"It is real,\" said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. \"He has been\n very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This\n was Karamy's work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into\n the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would\n come back changed, or mad.\" His eyes brooded. \"I think she succeeded.\n Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own\n tower—or die. Will you explain?\"\n\n\n \"I will.\" A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. \"Go,\n Master.\"\n\n\n Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently\n to me again. \"We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!\"", "\"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"", "studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it\n rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft\n sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to\n the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The\n blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby's drinking-cup, at me. I took\n it in my hand hesitated—", "\"Gamine—\" the second voice stopped. After a long time, \"You are old,\n and a fool, Rhys,\" it said. \"What is Gamine to me?\"\n\n\n Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the\n voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around\n me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that\n held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the\n field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung\n free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into\n the abyss....", "\"Neither drug nor poison,\" said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice\n was as noncommittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a\n woman's or a boy's. \"Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy's brewing.\"\n\n\n I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look\n and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me\n variously of anise and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of\n shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in\n the Lama costume.", "I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I'd face this on my feet.\n I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. \"Explain\n this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I'm no more Adric\n than you are!\"\n\n\n \"Adric, you are not amusing!\" The blue-robe's voice was edged with\n anger. \"Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough\nsharig\nantidote to cure a\ntharl\n. Now. Who are you?\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"" ], [ "\"Andy—\" I said.\n\n\n \"It's okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn't wait for the\n fish.\"\n\n\n \"Andy—I'll get you another camera—\"\n\n\n \"I said, it's okay. Now, damn it, eat.\"\n\n\n He didn't speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a\n second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room,\n restlessly. \"Mike—\" he said entreatingly, \"you came here for a rest!\n Why can't you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?\" He\n looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light\n spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. \"You've\n turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!\"", "Gamine moved impatiently. \"Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla;\n and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.\"\n The swathed shoulders moved a little. \"You don't remember? I am a\n spell-singer.\"\n\n\n I jerked my elbow toward the window. \"Those are my own mountains out\n there,\" I said roughly. \"I'm not Adric, whoever he is. My name's Mike\n Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn't impress me. Take off that veil\n and let me see your face.\"", "The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking\n restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles\n over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the\n radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned\n over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy's voice\n came sleepily from the alcove.\n\n\n \"Going to read all night, Mike?\"\n\n\n \"If I feel like it,\" I said tersely and began walking up and down again.\n\n\n \"Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!\" Andy\n exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. \"Sorry, Andy.\"", "I let the knife drop out of my hand. \"Yeah—\" I said heavily, \"Yeah,\n I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I'm sorry—I didn't—\" my voice\n trailed off, helpless. The boy's hand was still on my shoulder; he let\n it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. \"That's\n all right, Mike,\" he said in a dead voice, \"you scared the daylights\n out of me, that's all.\" He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my\n face. \"Darn it, Mike, you've been acting crazy for a week! I don't mind\n the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare\n hands—\" abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run\n down the slope in the direction of the cabin.", "A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of\n cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us\n from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting\n knife in my belt. Andy's shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise\n in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then,\n in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and\n felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife,\n ripped, slashing, hearing the bird's scream of pain and the flapping of\n wide wings. A red haze spun around me—\n\n\n Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy's angry grip was on my\n shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was\n hardly recognizable. \"Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right?\n You must be crazy!\"", "Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly\n concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery\n in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric.\n I would\nnot\nbe. I dared not go to the window and look out at the\n terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra\n Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.\n\n\n But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a\n shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred\n nothingness—beneath Gamine's blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and\n a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon,\n in crimson.", "The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to\n identity. \"Adric—\" I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it?\n Wasn't it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are\n four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls\n is the chemming of twilp—\nstop that!\nMike Kenscott. Summer\n 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head\n in my hands. \"I'm crazy. Or you are. Or we're both sane and this\n monkey-business is all real.\"", "I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn't the same.\n The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the\n States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to\n Andy. \"They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something\n funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments\n they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned.\n Ordinary radio work doesn't mean anything to me any more. It doesn't\n make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or\n whatever they were—and when they talked about weather disturbances\n after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when\n we came down here—\" I paused, trying to fit confused impressions", "started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I'd\n rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A\n smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded\n bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He\n did not turn.", "Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when\n I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the\n hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had\n made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it\n shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn't explode. Radio waves\n are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of\n lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical\n current? I hadn't told Andy about the time I'd deliberately grounded\n the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my\n body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit\n suicide—but I hadn't.", "My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses.\n There was nothing wrong with the radio. \"Mike. What did you do to it?\"\n\n\n \"I wish I knew,\" I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button\n again.\n\n\n Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.\n\n\n I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily\n backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the\n \"Fate\" symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.\n\n\n \"You'd better let it alone!\" Andy said shakily.", "\"Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—\" My brother's\n eyes watched me, uneasy. \"Mike, you're kidding—\"\n\n\n \"I wish I were,\" I said. \"That energy just drains into me, and nothing\n happens. I'm immune.\" I shrugged, rose and walked across to the\n radio I'd put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the\n disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on.\n \"I'll show you,\" I told him.\n\n\n The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the\n speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.\n\n\n \"Turn it up—\" Andy said uneasily.\n\n\n My hand twiddled the dial. \"It's already up.\"", "I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken\n pieces of Andy's cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with\n it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in\n the living hell had I done a thing like that? I'd warned Andy time\n and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency\n of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I\n didn't wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than\n half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally\n promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles,\n carefully stowed them, cleaned our day's catch. It was dark before I", "\"I can't stop now!\" I said violently. \"I'm on the track of\n something—and if I stop I'll never find it!\"\n\n\n \"Must be real important,\" Andy said sourly, \"if it makes you act like\n bughouse bait.\"\n\n\n I shrugged without answering. We'd been over that before. I'd known\n it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big\n blowup. I thought, angrily. I'm heading for another one, but I don't\n care.\n\n\n \"Sit down, Andy,\" I told him. \"You don't know what happened down there.\n Now that the war's over, it's no military secret, and I'll tell you\n what happened.\"\n\n\n I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my\n mouth. \"That is—I will if I can.\"", "\"Rhys!\nRhys!\nThat is the man!\"\nCHAPTER TWO\n\n Rainbow City\n\"\nYou are mad\n,\" said the man with the tired voice.\n\n\n I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned\n space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping\n distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.\n\n\n \"You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know.\"\n\n\n \"Narayan is a fool,\" said the second voice.\n\n\n \"Narayan is the Dreamer,\" the tired voice said. \"He is the Dreamer, and\n where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very\n old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare\n you. But Gamine—\"", "He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his\n face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to\n determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic\n habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. \"Evarin,\" I said,\n warily.\n\n\n He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered\n if he had pads like a cat's on his feet. He wore deep green from head\n to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had\n a flickering, as if he could at a moment's notice raise a barrier of\n invisibility like Gamine's about himself. He didn't look as human as I.\n\n\n \"I have seen Gamine,\" he said. \"She says you are awake, and as sane as\n you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to\n waste even a broken tool like you.\"", "Evarin snorted. \"Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What\n is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good\n hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the\n Toymaker. I need little. But you—\" his voice leaped with contempt,\n \"you ride time at Karamy's bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the\n coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!\"\n\n\n I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words\n seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his\n face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly, \"The falcon\n flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.\"\n He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. \"As\n I say, if you call that freedom.\"", "I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I\n was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird\n blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly, \"What happened?\"\n\n\n My brother's face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling\n wrathfully. \"You tell\nme\nwhat happened! Mike, what in the devil\n were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack\n a man if he's bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped\n out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with\n your knife! You must be clean crazy!\"", "Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a\n government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I\n never finished it, there's no point in going into details; it's enough\n to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I'd\n built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set\n of magnetic coils that wouldn't wind properly. When the thing blew up\n I hadn't had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn't the reason. I\n was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and\n this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions\n that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they\n thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn't blame them. I\n would have liked to think so.", "Somewhere on the Time Ellipse Mike Kenscott became Adric;\n\n and the only way to return to his own identity was to find\n\n the Keep of the Dreamer, and loose the terrible\nFALCONS of NARABEDLA\nBy Marion Zimmer Bradley\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Other Worlds\n\n May 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nContents\nCHAPTER ONE\n\n Voltage—from Nowhere!\nSomewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream." ] ]
test	51184	[ "What type of medical procedure does the narrator have in order to make his skin look more like the Earthlings?", "What is the first clue the narrator gives that his planet runs on a much bigger scale than Earth? ", "What is the narrator's purpose on Earth?", "What is so strange about the approach he is ordered to take in reference to Earth?", "The goal for infiltrating Earth?", "When being briefed on his mission, what information does he receive that seems to surprise him the most?", "What does the narrator hope to achieve by sharing his backstory with the Earthlings he meets?", "What is the irony behind the bond the narrator and Riley develop?", "What is ironic about the psychologist's findings in regards to the tests he ran on the narrator." ]	[ [ "He is given an injection that basically injects him with a permanent dye to make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him a disease to make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him hormones that will make his skin change color.", "He is given an injection that basically gives him vitamins to make his skin change color." ], [ "There are 3 trillion people on his planet, and it has harnessed the technology to expand the planet's surface in order to accommodate them.", "There, one city will span over 1,000 miles and still be considered small.", "He speaks about the small hospital where he was a patient, and he comments that it only has about 80 stories.", "The inhabitants of this planet are two to three times larger than humans, so they would have to have things on a grander scale to support their size." ], [ "He is to go there and incite a war that will, no doubt end with his planet taking over Earth, and that is critical for the survival of his people.", "He is to go there and incite a war where the Earthlings destroy themselves.", "He is to go there in order to help get a particular candidate elected to office, and because he is \"in their pocket,\" they will be able to take over Earth. ", "He is to go there and incite a war that will, no doubt, end the disconnect between the people of Earth." ], [ "He is ordered to go to Earth and being to colonize after he marries their ", "He is ordered to murder the current president so that the politician his people are backing can take over.", "He is ordered to go to Earth as himself in hopes of being captured. They believe that will be the only way to get intel from the Earthlings.", "He is ordered to get the people of Earth to come together by way of their hatred for his people, putting them in harm's way if the Earthlings decide to attract, but they are willing to sacrifice themself for the betterment of the universe." ], [ "They plan to stop Earthlings from feeling any one subset is superior to the other.", "They plan to take over and either kill or enslave all the Earthlings.", "They plan to teach the Earthlings how to properly cultivate their land for the betterment of the universe.", "They are fulfilling a prophecy that was set forth millennia ago." ], [ "They expect him to live like a homeless person.", "The number of people who live on Earth.", "The amount of time he is to spend on Earth.", "The number of Earthlings they expect him to bring back on his return trip." ], [ "He wants them to feel sorry for the life he has had to live.", "He wants to scare them.", "He is hoping to make them angry enough to act.", "He wants them to gain a true respect for the Empire." ], [ "The narrator ends up beating Riley to the point where he blacks out, and then Riley found respect for the narrator.", "The narrator took a job promised to Riley, but that just made Riley want to become a better person.", "They are on total opposite sides of the fence when it comes to the fate of Earth.", "The narrator took Riley's girlfriend from him, but they just became closer through the experience." ], [ "He tells the narrator that he knew what his true mission was all along, he just made him endure the test because he deserved the torture the tests cause.", "The psychologist isn't a psychologist at all. He was sent by the Empire to ensure the narrator didn't talk about his mission.", "He decides that the narrator is fit for the exact same mission the Empire sent him on.", "He tells Riley that his time on Earth has contributed to the contraction of a rare disease, and though he saved others, he is going to die." ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.", "The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked\n out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes,\n and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had\n been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and\n immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were\n hypnotically implanted in my brain—together with a set of habits and\n reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any\n tests that the rebels could think of.\n\n\n I\nwas\nEarthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair\n grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial \"disease.\"\n The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough,\n till I began to age—say, in a century or so—the hair would actually\n thin and turn white as it did with the natives.", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,", "I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.", "own people must come first. But these beings can live well here. Only\n now that we've eliminated famine, plague, and war, they'd breed beyond\n reason, breed till all the old evils came back to throttle them, if we\n didn't have strict population control.\n\"Yeah,\" said her husband bitterly. \"They never even let my cousin have\n kids. Sterilized him damn near right after he was born.\"\nThen he's a moron, or carries hemophilia, or has some other hereditary\n taint\n, I thought.\nCan't they see we're doing it for their own good?\n It costs us fantastically in money and trouble, but the goal is a level\n of health and sanity such as this race never in its history dreamed\n possible.", "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "\"Dirty redskins,\" I muttered. \"Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of\n bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been\n f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that\n slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian—God, to get my hands on\n his throat!\"\n\n\n Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were\n narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like\n this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having\n a Valgolian liver.", "The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights,\n swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished\n copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to\n wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians\n think it is—northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a\n little on the cold side—but it gets hot enough at North America Center\n in midsummer to fry a shilast.\n\n\n A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated—huge,\n shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the\n manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans,\n furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians.\n They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a\n non-military nature one can imagine." ], [ "I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,", "I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.", "The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.", "for work, or spent years fighting their wars, gave their youth to a\n god of battle who only clamored for more blood. And how can we have a\n stable society without educating its members to respect it?\n\"I\nwant\nanother kid,\" said the female cook. \"Two ain't really enough.\n They're good boys, but I want a girl too. Only the Eridanian law says\n if I go over my quota, if I have one more, they'll sterilize me! And\n they'd do it, the meddling devils.\"\nA billion Earthlings are all the Solar System can hold under decent\n standards of living without exhausting what natural resources their own\n culture left us\n, I thought.\nWe aren't ready to permit emigration; our", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "\"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored", "Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine\n town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested\n hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old,\n solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were\n slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled\n here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the\n high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze\n ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of\n my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh.\n\n\n I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any\n drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, \"I'm\n Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me.\"", "The Center swarmed with young recruits off duty, gaping at the sights,\n swaggering in their new uniforms. Their skins shone like polished\n copper in the blistering sunlight, and their crests were beginning to\n wilt a little. All Earth is not the tropical jungle most Valgolians\n think it is—northern Europe is very pleasant, and Greenland is even a\n little on the cold side—but it gets hot enough at North America Center\n in midsummer to fry a shilast.\n\n\n A cosmopolitan throng filled the walkways. Soldiers predominated—huge,\n shy Dacors, little slant-eyed Yangtusans, brawling Gorrads, all the\n manhood of Valgolia. Then there were other races, blue-skinned Vegans,\n furry Proximans, completely non-humanoid Sirians and Antarians.\n They were here as traders, observers, tourists, whatever else of a\n non-military nature one can imagine.", "breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds.", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "\"Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at\n the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture,\n as much as cooperation has been a part of ours.\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet\n and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived.\"\n\n\n The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. \"Of course. And we're\n trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same\n mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate\n us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds\n don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak.\"", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist." ], [ "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "\"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"", "I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really\n ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they\n were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more\n than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them\n into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might\n say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until\n they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in\n only a few generations.\nVorka said, \"The problem of Earth is not quite that simple.\" He leaned\n back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. \"Do\n you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?\"\n\n\n I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work\n had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more\n advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea\n was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion.", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"", "I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.", "\"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "\"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"", "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "\"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII", "Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.", "breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds.", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home." ], [ "\"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "\"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "\"Easy, easy,\" he smiled. \"There's time. We've waited fifty years; we\n can wait a while longer.\" He riffled through the dossier. \"Actually,\n the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the\n use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong\n as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really\n seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do\n best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets\n where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're\n there.\"", "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.", "That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,", "I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.", "breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds." ], [ "\"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"", "\"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII", "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "\"Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at\n the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture,\n as much as cooperation has been a part of ours.\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet\n and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived.\"\n\n\n The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. \"Of course. And we're\n trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same\n mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate\n us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds\n don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak.\"", "I knew. The Samtraks are now the entrepreneurs of the Empire, really\n ingenious traders, but within the memory of some of our older men they\n were a sore-spot. They didn't understand the meaning of Empire any more\n than Earth does, and they never did understand it until we goaded them\n into open rebellion. The very reverse of divide and rule, you might\n say, and it worked. We withdrew trading privileges one by one, until\n they revolted successfully, thus educating themselves sociologically in\n only a few generations.\nVorka said, \"The problem of Earth is not quite that simple.\" He leaned\n back, made a bridge of his fingers, and peered across them at me. \"Do\n you know precisely what a provocateur job is, Conru?\"\n\n\n I said that I did, but only in a hazy way, because until now my work\n had been pretty much restricted to social relations on the more\n advanced Empire planets. However, I told him that I did know the idea\n was to provoke discontent and, ultimately, rebellion.", "The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.", "The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home.", "That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"", "\"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"", "breed to be kicked around misses the whole point of Empire. If, indeed,\n Earth's millions were an inferior breed, I wouldn't have been here at\n all. Valgol needs an economic empire, but if all we had in mind was\n serfdom we'd be perfectly content with the plodding animal life of\n Deneb VII or a hundred other worlds.", "Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged\n to business. \"Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?\"\n\n\n \"Why, of course. I—\" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to\n see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire\n just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to\n indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control.\n\n\n \"You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom\n when they strike?\"\n\n\n \"You bet your obscenity life!\" I snarled. \"When they land on Earth,\n I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle\n with them!\"", "\"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored", "The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked\n out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes,\n and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had\n been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and\n immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were\n hypnotically implanted in my brain—together with a set of habits and\n reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any\n tests that the rebels could think of.\n\n\n I\nwas\nEarthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair\n grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial \"disease.\"\n The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough,\n till I began to age—say, in a century or so—the hair would actually\n thin and turn white as it did with the natives." ], [ "\"Easy, easy,\" he smiled. \"There's time. We've waited fifty years; we\n can wait a while longer.\" He riffled through the dossier. \"Actually,\n the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the\n use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong\n as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really\n seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do\n best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets\n where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're\n there.\"", "In the end he said, still calmly, \"This is amazing. You have an\n IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of\n assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and\n an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule—based on personal pique and\n containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out\n for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd\n never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.\"\n\n\n \"When do I start?\" I asked impatiently.", "The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "\"Yeah.\" Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, \"Look, I\n can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It\n could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians.\"\n\n\n \"I won't.\"\n\n\n His eyes were bleak. \"You damn well better not. If you're caught at\n that—\"\n\n\n He drew a finger sharply across his throat.\n\n\n \"Quit talking like a B-class stereo,\" I bristled. \"If you've got\n something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a\n prospect as we ever came across. If you want to fight the Eridanians\n now—\njoin the Legion\nnow—here's your chance.\"\n\n\n \"My God, you know I do! But who—\"", "\"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII", "I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I\n just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the\n rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I\n worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that\n we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even\n keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of\n course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came\n to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood.\nThe winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how\n long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion\n was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now.\n Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been\n carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service.", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "\"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"", "\"I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize\n this.\" Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and\n address. \"Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to\n this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to\n hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When\n you do arrive, they'll take care of you.\"\n\n\n I nodded, grimly. \"I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Just my job.\" He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his\n overcoat. \"Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink,\n after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here.\"\nIII", "\"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"", "A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.", "The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance,\n muttering of a day of revenge—and some portion of this segment was\n spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons,\n engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with\n the shadowy Legion of Freedom.", "Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged\n to business. \"Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?\"\n\n\n \"Why, of course. I—\" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to\n see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire\n just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to\n indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control.\n\n\n \"You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom\n when they strike?\"\n\n\n \"You bet your obscenity life!\" I snarled. \"When they land on Earth,\n I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle\n with them!\"", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "\"We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might\n logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have\n elected.\"\n\n\n \"A member of one of the despised races?\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a\n minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is\n Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews.\"\n\"How well is this Levinsohn accepted by the movement?\"", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist." ], [ "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,", "I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.", "The biotechnicians had been very thorough. I was already a little\n undersized, which meant that my height and build were suitable—I\n could pass for a big Earthling. And of course my face and hands and so\n on were all right, the Earthlings being a remarkably humanoid race.\n But the technicians had had to remodel my ears, blunting the tips and\n grafting on lobes and cutting the muscles that move them. My crest had\n to go and a scalp covered with revolting hair was now on the top of my\n skull.\n\n\n Finally, and most difficult, there had been the matter of skin color.\n It just wasn't possible to eliminate my natural coppery pigmentation.\n So they had injected a substance akin to melanin, together with a virus\n which would manufacture it in my body, the result being a leathery\n brown. I could pass for a member of the so-called \"white\" subspecies,\n one who had spent most of his life in the open.", "I've always felt a little sorry for the class. They work, and study,\n and toady to us, and try so hard to be like us. It's frustrating,\n because that's exactly what we don't want. Valgolians are Valgolians\n and Earthlings are men of Earth. Well, Terries are important to the\n ultimate aims of the Empire, but not in the way they think they are.\n They serve as another symbol of Valgolian conquest for Earth to hate.\n\n\n I entered the Administration Building. They expected me there and took\n me at once to the office of General Vorka, who's a general only as\n far as this solar system is concerned. Had there been any Earthlings\n around, I would have saluted to conform to the show of militarism, but\n General Vorka sat alone behind his desk, and I merely said, \"Hello,\n Coordinator.\"", "\"Considerable resistance and hostility,\" the Coordinator said. \"That's\n to be expected. However, we've made sure that there is no other\n organization the minority-haters can join, so they have to follow\n him or quit. He's able, all right; one of the most able men they\n have, which helps our aims. Even those who discriminate against Jews\n reluctantly admire him. He's moved the headquarters of the movement\n out into space, and the man's so brilliant that we don't even know\n where. We'll find out, mainly through you, I hope, but that isn't the\n important thing.\"\n\n\n \"What is?\" I asked, baffled.\n\n\n \"To report on the unification of Earth. It's possible that the anarch\n movement can achieve it under Levinsohn. In that case, we'll make sure\n they win, or think they win, and will gladly sign a treaty giving Earth\n equal planetary status in the Empire.\"", "\"And if unity hasn't been achieved?\"\n\n\n \"We simply crush this rebellion and make them start all over again.\n They'll have learned some degree of unity from this revolt and so the\n next one will be more successful.\" He stood up and I got out of my\n chair to face him. \"That's for the future, though. We'll work out our\n plans from the results of this campaign.\"\n\n\n \"But isn't there a lot of danger in the policy of fomenting rebellion\n against us?\" I asked.\n\n\n He lifted his shoulders. \"Evolution is always painful, forced evolution\n even more so. Yes, there are great dangers, but advance information\n from you and other agents can reduce the risk. It's a chance we must\n take, Conru.\"\n\n\n \"Conrad,\" I corrected him, smiling. \"Plain Mr. Conrad Haugen ... of\n Earth.\"\nII", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.", "\"Certainly. Earth is a rich planet, Conru, and a fairly crowded one at\n the same time. Bickering is inevitable. It's a part of their culture,\n as much as cooperation has been a part of ours.\"\n\n\n I nodded. \"We learned the hard way. The old Valgol was a poor planet\n and we had to unite to conquer space or we could not have survived.\"\n\n\n The Coordinator sniffed again at his silver box. \"Of course. And we're\n trying to help these people unite. They don't have to make the same\n mistakes we did, long ago. They don't have to at all. Get them to hate\n us enough, get them to hate us until all their own clannish hatreds\n don't count at all.... Well, you know what happened on Samtrak.\"", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "\"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.", "The Coordinator smiled. \"Well, that's just the starter, Conru. It's a\n lot more complex than that. Each planet has its own special problems.\n The Samtraks, for example, had a whole background of cutthroat\n competition. That was easy: we eliminated that by showing them what\nreal\ncutthroat competition could be like. But Earth is different.\n Look at it this way. They fight among themselves. Because of their\n mythical distinctions, not realizing that there are no inferior races,\n only more or less advanced ones, and that individuals must be judged as\n individuals, not as members of groups, nations or races. A planet like\n Earth can be immensely valuable to the Empire, but not if it has to be\n garrisoned. Its contribution must be voluntary and whole-hearted.\"\n\n\n \"A difficult problem,\" I said. \"My opinion is that we should treat all\n exactly alike—\nforce\nthem to abandon their unrealistic differences.\"", "Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine\n town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested\n hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old,\n solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were\n slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled\n here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the\n high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze\n ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of\n my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh.\n\n\n I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any\n drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, \"I'm\n Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me.\"", "I cringed appropriately, as if I didn't understand Valgolian Universal,\n and slunk past him. But it griped me to be taken for a Terrie. If I was\n to become an Earthling, I would at least be a self-respecting one.\nThere were plenty of Terries—Terrestrials—around, of course, moving\n with their odd combination of slavish deference toward Valgolians and\n arrogant superiority toward mere Earthlings. They have adopted the\n habits and customs of civilization, entered the Imperial service, speak\n Valgolian even with their families. Many of them shave their heads save\n for a scalp lock, in imitation of the crest, and wear white robes\n suggesting those of civil functionaries at home." ], [ "\"I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize\n this.\" Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and\n address. \"Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to\n this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to\n hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When\n you do arrive, they'll take care of you.\"\n\n\n I nodded, grimly. \"I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Just my job.\" He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his\n overcoat. \"Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink,\n after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here.\"\nIII", "Riley came into my room one evening. His face was tight, and he plunged\n to business. \"Con, do you really mean all you've said about the Empire?\"\n\n\n \"Why, of course. I—\" I glanced out the window, as if expecting to\n see a spy. If there were any, I knew he would be native. The Empire\n just doesn't have enough men for a secret police, even if we wanted to\n indulge in that sort of historically ineffective control.\n\n\n \"You'd like to fight them? Like really to help the Legion of Freedom\n when they strike?\"\n\n\n \"You bet your obscenity life!\" I snarled. \"When they land on Earth,\n I'll get a gun somewhere and be right there in the middle of the battle\n with them!\"", "\"Dirty redskins,\" I muttered. \"Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of\n bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been\n f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that\n slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian—God, to get my hands on\n his throat!\"\n\n\n Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were\n narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like\n this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having\n a Valgolian liver.", "Spring had come and almost gone when I wandered into the little Maine\n town which was my destination. It lay out of the way, with forested\n hills behind it and the sea at its foot. Most of the houses were old,\n solidly built, almost like parts of the land, and the inhabitants were\n slow-spoken, steady folk, fishermen and artisans and the like, settled\n here and at home with the darkling woods and the restless sea and the\n high windy sky. I walked down a narrow street with a cool salt breeze\n ruffling my hair and decided that I liked Portsboro. It reminded me of\n my own home, twenty light-years away on the wide beaches of Kealvigh.\n\n\n I made my way to Nat Hawkins' store and asked for work like any\n drifter. But when we were alone in the back room, I told him, \"I'm\n Conrad Haugen. Mike Riley said you'd be looking for me.\"", "A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.", "\"Yeah.\" Riley puffed a cigaret for a while. Then he said, \"Look, I\n can't tell you much. I'm taking a chance just telling you this. It\n could mean my life if you passed it on to the Eridanians.\"\n\n\n \"I won't.\"\n\n\n His eyes were bleak. \"You damn well better not. If you're caught at\n that—\"\n\n\n He drew a finger sharply across his throat.\n\n\n \"Quit talking like a B-class stereo,\" I bristled. \"If you've got\n something to tell me, let's have it. Otherwise get out.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah, sure. We checked up on you, Con, and we think you're as good a\n prospect as we ever came across. If you want to fight the Eridanians\n now—\njoin the Legion\nnow—here's your chance.\"\n\n\n \"My God, you know I do! But who—\"", "Valgolia, the clean bare windswept heights of your mountains, soughing\n trees and thunderous waters and Maara waiting for me to come home!\nRiley often proposed that we find an Eridanian and beat him to death,\n and I would agree, hiccupping, because I knew they didn't go alone\n into native quarters any more. I sat in the smoky reek of the bars,\n half deafened by the clatter and raucousness called music, trying not\n to think of a certain low-ceilinged, quiet tavern amid the gardens of\n Kalariho, and sobbed the bitterness of Conrad Haugen into my beer.", "In the end he said, still calmly, \"This is amazing. You have an\n IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of\n assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and\n an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule—based on personal pique and\n containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out\n for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd\n never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.\"\n\n\n \"When do I start?\" I asked impatiently.", "I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home\n planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at\n all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who\n thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with\n the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.\n The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside.\nThey'd let\nthis\nloose among the stars\n!\nAfter that I was one of the boys and Riley was my best friend. We went\n out together, wenching and drinking, raising hell in the cold dirty\n canyons of steel and stone which the natives called streets.\nValgolia,", "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.", "I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I\n just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the\n rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I\n worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that\n we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even\n keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of\n course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came\n to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood.\nThe winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how\n long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion\n was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now.\n Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been\n carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service.", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior", "I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the\n labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was\n up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal\n of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In\n fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown\n off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the\n Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an\n interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that\n the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and\n I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.", "\"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "I hitched a ride for some hundreds of miles with one of the great\n truck-trains that dominate the western highways. The driver was\n Earthling, and though he complained much about the Valgolian tyranny he\n looked well-fed, healthy, secure. I thought of the wars which had been\n laying the planet waste, the social ruin and economic collapse which\n the Empire had mended, and wondered if Terra would ever be fit to rule\n itself.\n\n\n I came out of the enormous mountainlands into the sage plains of\n Nevada. For a few days I worked at a native ranch, listening to the\n talk and keeping my mouth shut. Yes, there was discontent!", "\"They're stranglin' faith,\" muttered someone else.\nAnyone in the Empire may worship as he chooses, but should permission\n be granted to preach demonstrable falsehoods, archaic superstitions, or\n antisocial nonsense? The old \"free\" Earth was not noted for liberalism.\n\"We want to be free.\"\nFree? Free for what? To loose the thousand Earthly races and creeds\n and nationalisms on each other—and on the Galaxy—to wallow in\n barbarism and slaughter and misery as before we came? To let our\n works and culture be thrown in the dust, the labor of a century be\n demolished, not because it is good or bad but simply because it is\n Valgolian? Epsilon Eridanian!\n\"We'll be free. Not too long to wait, either—\"", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead." ], [ "He nodded calmly. \"I've been expecting you. You can work here a few\n days, sleep at my house, and we'll run the tests after dark.\"\n\n\n He was old for an Earthling, well over sixty, with white hair and lined\n leathery face. But his blue eyes were as keen and steady, his gnarled\n hands as strong and sure as those of any young man. He spoke softly\n and steadily, around the pipe which rarely left his mouth, and there\n was a serenity in him which I could hardly associate with anarch\n fanaticism. But the first night he led me into his cellar, and through\n a well-hidden trapdoor to a room below, and there he had a complete\n psychological laboratory.\n\n\n I gaped at the gleaming apparatus. \"How off Earth—\"", "\"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself,\" he\n smiled. \"There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.\n But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made\n them in the names of many people.\"\n\n\n \"But you—\"\n\n\n \"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this.\"\n\n\n He could. He put me through the mill in the next few\n nights—intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,\n psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He\n did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service\n had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very\n thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.", "In the end he said, still calmly, \"This is amazing. You have an\n IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of\n assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and\n an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule—based on personal pique and\n containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out\n for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd\n never hoped for more recruits of your caliber.\"\n\n\n \"When do I start?\" I asked impatiently.", "It was reassuring to think that once my job was over, I could be\n restored to normal. It would need another series of operations and as\n much time as the original transformation, but it would be as complete\n and scarless. I'd be human again.\n\n\n I put on the clothes they had furnished me, typical Earthly\n garments—rough trousers and shirt of bleached plant fibers, jacket and\n heavy shoes of animal skin, a battered old hat of matted fur known as\n felt. There were objects in my pockets, the usual money and papers, a\n claspknife, the pipe and tobacco I had trained myself to smoke and even\n to like. It all fitted into my character of a wandering, outdoors sort\n of man, an educated atavist.", "\"The leaders,\" I chimed in. \"The idealists. Brave, intelligent,\n patriotic. The kind who probably wouldn't be a part of this racial\n bickering, anyway.\"\n\n\n \"Right,\" said the Coordinator. \"We'll give them the ammunition for\n their propaganda. We've\nbeen\ndoing it. Result: the leaders get mad.\n Races, religions, nationalities, they hate us worse than they hate each\n other.\"\nThe way he painted it, I was hardly needed at all. I told him that.\n\n\n \"Ideally, that would be the situation, Conru. Only it doesn't work\n that way.\" He took out a soft cloth and wiped his forehead. \"Even the\n leaders are too involved in this myth of differences and they can't\n concentrate all their efforts. Luron, of course, would be the other\n alternative—\"", "The sleeves of his tunic rolled up, the heat of North America beading\n his forehead with sweat, the big man looked up at me. \"Ah, yes. I'm\n glad you're finally prepared. The sooner we get this thing started—\"\n He extended a silver galla-dust box. \"Sniff? Have a seat, Conru.\"\n\n\n I inhaled gratefully and relaxed. The Coordinator picked up a sheaf of\n papers on his desk and leafed through them. \"Umm-mm, only fifty-two\n years old and a captain already. Remarkably able, a young man\n like you. And your work hitherto has been outstanding. That Vegan\n business....\"\n\n\n I said yes, I knew, but could he please get down to business. You\n couldn't blame me for being a bit anxious to begin. Disguised as I was\n as an Earthman, I felt uncomfortable, embarrassed, almost, at being\n with my ex-countrymen.", "A few days later, I left North America Center, and in spite of the\n ominous need to hurry, my eastward journey was a ramble. The anarchs\n would be sure to check my movements as far back as they could, and my\n story had better ring true. For the present, I must\nbe\nmy role, a\n vagabond.\n\n\n The city was soon behind me. It was far from other settlement—it is\n good policy to keep the Centers rather isolated, and we could always\n contact our garrisons in native towns quickly enough. Before long I was\n alone in the mountains.\n\n\n I liked that part of the trip. The Rockies are huge and serene, a fresh\n cold wind blows from their peaks and roars in the pines, brawling\n rivers foam through their dales and canyons—it is a big landscape,\n clean and strong and lonely. It speaks with silence.", "Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a\n certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement\n was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,\n its activities mounted almost daily.\nThe illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated\n stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that\n some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to\n spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't\n trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and\n jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so—\nThe day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your\n shackles.... Stand by for freedom!\nI stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native\n cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old\n settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got\n a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.", "That was a very logical statement, but sometimes logic has a way of\n making you laugh, and I was laughing now. Luron considered itself our\n arch-enemy. With a few dozen allies on a path of conquest, Luron\n thought it could wrest Empire from our hands. Well, we let them play.\n And each time Luron swooped down on one of the more primitive planets,\n we let them, for Luron would serve as well as ourselves in goading\n backward peoples to unite and advance. Perhaps Luron, as a social\n entity, grew wiser each time. Certainly the primitive colonials did.\n Luron had started a chain reaction which threatened to overthrow the\n tyranny of superstition on a hundred planets. Good old Luron, our\n arch-enemy, would see the light itself some day.\n\n\n The Coordinator shook his head. \"Can't use Luron here. Technologies are\n entirely too similar. It might shatter both planets, and we wouldn't\n want that.\"", "\"So what do we use?\"\n\n\n \"You, Conru. You get in with the revolutionaries, you make sure that\n they want to fight, you—\"\n\n\n \"I see,\" I told him. \"Then I try to stop it at the last minute. Not so\n soon that the rebellion doesn't help at all—\"\n\n\n The Coordinator put his hand down flat. \"Nothing of the sort. They\nmust\nfight. And they must be defeated, again and again, if necessary,\n until they are ready to succeed. That will be, of course, when they are\ntotally\nagainst us.\"\n\n\n I stood up. \"I understand.\"\n\n\n He waved me back into the chair. \"You'll be lucky to understand it\n by the time you're finished with this assignment and transferred to\n another ... that is, if you come out of this one alive.\"\n\n\n I smiled a bit sheepishly and told him to go ahead.", "\"We have some influence in the underground movement, as you might\n logically expect. The leader is a man we worked very hard to have\n elected.\"\n\n\n \"A member of one of the despised races?\" I guessed.\n\n\n \"The best we could do at this point was to help elect someone from a\n minority sub-group of the dominant white race. The leader's name is\n Levinsohn. He is of the white sub-group known as Jews.\"\n\"How well is this Levinsohn accepted by the movement?\"", "The mimicry was perfect. I hardly recognized the creature that looked\n out of the mirror. My lean, square, blunt-nosed face, gray eyes,\n and big hands were the same or nearly so. But my black crest had\n been replaced with a shock of blond hair, my ears were small and\n immobile, my skin a dull bronze, and several of Earth's languages were\n hypnotically implanted in my brain—together with a set of habits and\n reflexes making up a pseudo-personality which should be immune to any\n tests that the rebels could think of.\n\n\n I\nwas\nEarthling! And the disguise was self-perpetuating: the hair\n grew and the skin color was kept permanent by the artificial \"disease.\"\n The biotechnicians had told me that if I kept the disguise long enough,\n till I began to age—say, in a century or so—the hair would actually\n thin and turn white as it did with the natives.", "\"Their taxes are killing me,\" said the owner. \"What the hell incentive\n do I have to produce if they take it away from me?\" I nodded, but\n thought:\nYour kind was paying more taxes in the old days, and had\n less to show for it. Here you get your money back in public works and\n universal security. No one on Earth is cold or hungry. Can you only\n produce for your own private gain, Earthling?\n\"The labor draft got my kid the other day,\" said the foreman. \"He'll\n spend two good years of his life working for them, and prob'ly come\n back hopheaded about the good o' the Empire.\"\nThere was a time\n, I thought,\nwhen millions of Earthlings clamored", "\"Dirty redskins,\" I muttered. \"Dirty, stinking, bald-headed, sons of\n bitches. Them and their god-damn Empire. Why, y'know, if 't hadn' been\n f' their laws I'd be skipper o' my own ship now. I knew more'n that\n slob o' a captain. But he was born Eridanian—God, to get my hands on\n his throat!\"\n\n\n Riley nodded. Through the haze of smoke I saw that his eyes were\n narrowed. He wasn't drunk when he didn't want to be, and at times like\n this he was suddenly as sober as I was, and that in spite of not having\n a Valgolian liver.", "I went out of the hospital with the long swinging stride of one\n accustomed to walking great distances.\nThe Center was busy around me. Behind me, the hospital and laboratories\n occupied a fairly small building, some eighty stories of stone and\n steel and plastic. On either side loomed the great warehouses, military\n barracks, officers' apartments, civilian concessions, filled with the\n vigorous life of the starways. Behind the monstrous wall, a mile to my\n right, was the spaceport, and I knew that a troopship had just lately\n dropped gravs from Valgolia herself.", "The Coordinator shrugged. \"Well, if you can carry this business\n off—fine. If you fail, you may die quite unpleasantly. That's their\n trouble, Conru: you wouldn't be regarded as an individual, but as a\n Valgolian. Did you know that they even make such distinctions among\n themselves? I mean races and sub-races and social castes and the like;\n it's keeping them divided and impotent, Conru. It's also keeping them\n out of the Empire. A shame.\"\nI knew all that, of course, but I merely nodded. Coordinator Vorka was\n a wonderful man in his field, and if he tended to be on the garrulous\n side, what could I do? I said, \"I know that, sir. I also know I was\n picked for a dangerous job because you thought I could fill the role.\n But I still don't know exactly what the job is.\"", "I bided my time, not too obviously anxious to contact the Legion. I\n just thought they were swell fellows, the only brave men left in the\n rotten, stinking Empire; I'd sure be on their side when the day came. I\n worked in the mill, and when out with the boys lamented the fact that\n we were really producing for the damned Eridanians, we couldn't even\n keep the products of our own sweat. I wasn't obtrusive about it, of\n course. Most of the time we were just boozing. But when the talk came\n to the Empire, I made it clear just where I stood.\nThe winter went. I continued the dreary round of days, wondering how\n long it would take, wondering how much time was left. If the Legion\n was at all interested, they would be checking my background right now.\n Let them. There wouldn't be much to check, but what there was had been\n carefully manufactured by the experts of the Intelligence Service.", "\"Exactly!\" The Coordinator seemed pleased, but, actually, this was\n pretty elementary stuff. \"We're never too rough on the eager lads\n who come here from Valgol and kick the natives around a bit. We even\n encourage it when the spirit of rebelliousness dies down.\"\n\n\n I told him I had met one.\n\n\n \"Irritating, wasn't it, Conru? Humiliating. Of course, these lads\n will be reconditioned to civilization when they finish their military\n service and prepare for more specialized work. Yes, treating all\n Earthlings alike is the solution. We put restrictions on these\n colonials; they can't hold top jobs, and so on. And we encourage wild\n stories about brutality on our part. Not enough to make everybody mad\n at us, or even a majority—the rumored tyranny has always happened to\n someone else. But there's a certain class of beings who'll get fighting\n mad, and that's the class we want.\"", "\"I can't tell you a thing. But if you really want to join, memorize\n this.\" Riley gave me a small card on which was written a name and\n address. \"Destroy it, thoroughly. Then quit at the mill and drift to\n this other place, as if you'd gotten tired of your work and wanted to\n hit the road again. Take your time, don't make a beeline for it. When\n you do arrive, they'll take care of you.\"\n\n\n I nodded, grimly. \"I'll do it, Mike. And thanks!\"\n\n\n \"Just my job.\" He smiled, relaxing, and pulled a flask from his\n overcoat. \"Okay, Con, that's that. We'd better not go out to drink,\n after this, but nothing's to stop us from getting stinko here.\"\nIII", "I made an absent-minded way through the crowds. A sudden crack on the\n side of my head, nearly bowling me over, brought me to awareness. I\n looked up into the arrogant face of one of the new recruits and heard\n him rasp, \"Watch where you're going, Terrie!\"\nThe young blood in the Valgolian military is deliberately trained\n to harshness, even brutality, for our militarism must impress such\n backward colonies as Earth. It goes against our grain, but it is\n necessary. At another time this might have annoyed me. I could have\n pulled rank on him. Not only was I an officer, but such treatment must\n be used with intellectual deliberation. The occasional young garrison\n trooper who comes here with the idea that the natives are an inferior" ] ]
test	60624	[ "Why was Mr. Devoe fascinated by the Captain?", "Bertha and the narrator are…", "Which word best describes Mr. and Mrs. Devoe’s demeanor when they first arrived at Morton’s Misery Farm?", "What was Mr. Devoe’s “moment”?", "Why would someone choose to go “on vacation” to Morton’s Misery Farm?", "Which of the following would be an approved reason to leave Morton’s Misery Farm?", "The road leading to Morton’s Misery Farm was likely described as “corduroy” because…", "Mr. and Mrs. Devoe had reviewed an advertisement for Morton’s Misery Farm, but it did not include:", "Mr. Devoe nearly cried at one point because he..." ]	[ [ "His precise, sharp voice did not match his gaunt appearance.", "He was amazingly plump in such a harsh environment.", "He was particularly cruel.", "His inhuman drawl was hard to understand." ], [ "Brother and sister of the Devoe family", "Poor prisoners", "A well-to-do married couple", "An adventurous young couple" ], [ "Triumphant", "Fatigued", "Giddy", "Apprehensive" ], [ "Meeting Bertha for their first 15-minute visit", "Being impressed by the Cheer Up Entertainment", "Being branded as Number 109", "Leading others in a difficult team task at the rock quarry" ], [ "To overcome a sense of void in an otherwise pampered life", "To visit new places on a budget", "As an alternative to prison for breaking the law", "To feel first-hand how those less fortunate live" ], [ "Local weather such as flooding", "Request of the resident", "Death of a family member", "Petition signed by a court" ], [ "It was winding and long", "It had pits and potholes", "It was brown and muddy", "It had deep ruts which caused the tires to blow out" ], [ "Pricing information", "Allowance for severe violence", "Conditions of release", "Photographs" ], [ "Was not allowed to leave", "Saw his wife being harassed", "Was not allowed to smoke", "Was not allowed to see his wife" ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.", "The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"", "\"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to,\" he\n said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound\n relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet\n language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise,\n clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope\n was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting\n misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and\n the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp,\n immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even\n contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.\n\n\n \"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?\" he snapped at me.\n\n\n \"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of\n work a month,\" I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of\n humility.", "It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "\"Why—this thing is nothing but a huge writing slate,\" I said to a\n small, bald inmate beside me. He made a feeble noise in reply. The\n Captain left, and the only other guard now relaxed in the shade of a\n boulder nearly fifty yards away. He was smoking a forbidden cigar.\n Suddenly and unaccountably, I felt a little taller than the others,\n and everything looked unnaturally clear. The slab was less than six\n inches wide at the top!\n\n\n \"If we work this thing right, this job will practically do itself.\n We'll be through here before sundown,\" I heard myself snap out. The\n others, accustomed now to obeying any imperative voice, fell to with\n crowbars and peaveys as I directed them. \"Use them as levers,\" I said.\n \"Don't just flail and hack—pry!\" No one questioned me. When all of the\n tools were in position I gave the count:\n\n\n \"\nOne—two—HEAVE!\n\"", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n*\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.", "\"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "\"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed." ], [ "It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of\n brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and\n desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than\n the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier,\n a little less responsive.\n\n\n When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off\n our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic\n controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted\n tours to the Himalayas now, or to the \"lost\" cities of the South\n American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We\n will bide our time, much as others do.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "\"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "\"Hah! Another low-hour man. I don't see how the hell you could afford\n to come here. Well, anyway—we've got work for climbers like you. Real\n work, shnook. I know climbers like you hope you'll meet aristocracy\n in a place like this—ten hour men or even weekly workers, but I\n can promise you, shnook, that you'll be too damned tired to disport\n yourself socially, and too damned busy looking at your toes. Don't\n forget that!\"\n\n\n Remembering, I looked down quickly, but not before one of the matrons\n behind me had fetched me a solid clout on the side of the head with her\n sap." ], [ "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "\"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge." ], [ "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"", "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.", "\"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to,\" he\n said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound\n relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet\n language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise,\n clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope\n was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting\n misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and\n the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp,\n immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even\n contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.\n\n\n \"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?\" he snapped at me.\n\n\n \"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of\n work a month,\" I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of\n humility.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.", "The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.", "But we will survive these things: I still have my four hours per month\n at Central Computing and Control; Bertha has her endless and endlessly\n varying work on committees (the last one was dedicated to the abolition\n of gambling at Las Vegas in favor of such wholesome games as Scrabble\n and checkers).\n\n\n We cannot soften and slough away altogether, for when all else fails,\n when the last stronghold of the spirit is in peril, there is always the\n vision of year's end and another glorious vacation.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "\"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty" ], [ "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "I will go back to my five kinds of cigars and my sixteen kinds of\n brandy; Bertha will return to her endless fantasy of pastries and\n desserts—an endless, joyous parade of goodies, never farther away than\n the nearest dumb-waiter door. And we will both become softer, heavier,\n a little less responsive.\n\n\n When, as sometimes happens, the sweet lethargy threatens to choke off\n our breath, we will step into our flying platform and set its automatic\n controls for Miami, Palm Beach, or the Cote d'Azur. There are conducted\n tours to the Himalayas now, or to the \"lost\" cities of the South\n American jungles, or to the bottom of any one of the seven seas. We\n will bide our time, much as others do.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "\"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"", "\"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty" ], [ "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.", "\"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "\"Read and sign, shnook!\" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty\n boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.\n\n\n The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed\n the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible\n about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical\n complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were\n paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.\n\n\n Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the\n bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had\n seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear." ], [ "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same\n futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock\n had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then\n reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other\n end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced\n working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of\n trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have\n never fully stopped. A guard indicated a wheelbarrow to me and uttered\n a sharp sound ... something like HUP! I picked up the smooth handles of\n the barrow, and time turned its back upon us again.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.", "\"Strip and pack your clothes here, shnooks,\" said the woman with the\n empty suitcase. We did, though it was pretty awkward ... standing there\n in the aisle of the bus with those two gorgons staring at us. I started\n to save out a pack of cigarettes, but was soon disabused of this idea.\n The older of the two women knocked the pack from my hand, ground it\n under her heel on the floor and let me have one across the face with\n what I am almost certain must have been an old sock full of rancid hog\n kidneys.\n\n\n \"What the hell was that?\" I protested.\n\n\n \"Sock fulla hog kidneys, shnook. Soft but heavy, know what I mean? Just\n let us do the thinkin' around here. Git outa line just once an' you'll\n see what we can do with a sock fulla hog kidneys.\"", "\"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty", "The eyes were perhaps the worst feature. They burned like tiny\n phosphorescent creatures, dimly visible deep inside a cave under dark,\n overhanging cliffs—the brows. The skin of the face was drawn over the\n bones so tautly that you felt a sharp rap with a hard object would\n cause the sharp cheekbones to break through. There was a darkness about\n the skin that should have been, yet somehow did not seem to be the\n healthy tan of outdoor living. It was a coloring that came from the\n inside and radiated outwards; perhaps pellagra—a wasting, darkening\n malnutritional disease which no man had suffered for three hundred\n years. I wondered where, where on the living earth, they had discovered\n such a specimen.", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "\"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already." ], [ "The gate was exactly as the brochure had pictured it: solid and\n massive, it was let into a board fence about ten feet high which\n extended as far as you could see in either direction and lost itself on\n either side in a tangle of briers, elder bushes and dark trees. There\n were two strands of barbed wire running along the top. A sign over the\n gate—stark, black lettering on a light gray background—read:\nSilence!—No admission without\n \nauthority—No smoking!\n\nMORTON'S MISERY FARM\n*\n30 acres of swamp—Our own rock\n \nquarry—Jute Mill—Steam laundry\nHarshest dietary laws in the\n \nCatskills\nA small door opened at one side of the gate and a short, stocky,\n well-muscled woman in a black visored cap and a shapeless black uniform\n came out and boarded the bus. She had our releases with her, fastened\n to a clipboard. She thrust this under my nose.", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBertha and I were like a couple of city kids on their first country\n outing when we arrived at Morton's place. The weather was perfect—the\n first chill of autumn had arrived in the form of a fine, needle-shower\n rain of the type that doesn't look very bad through a window, but when\n you get out in it, it seeks out every tiny opening between the warp\n and weft of your clothing and runs through your hair and eyebrows,\n under your collar and over the surfaces of your body until, as though\n directed by some knowing, invisible entity, it finds its way to your\n belly-button.\n\n\n It was beautifully timed: the ancient motor-bus had two blowouts on the\n way up the last half-mile of corduroy road that led to the place, and\n of course we were obliged to change the tires ourselves. This was a new\n experience for both of us, and on the very first day! Everything was as\n advertised, and we hadn't even arrived at the admission gate yet.", "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through.", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "She told me that she had been put to work in the jute mill, but had\n passed out and had been transferred to the steam laundry. Her job in\n the laundry was to sort out the socks and underwear that were too bad\n to go in with the rest of the wash. We speculated on where the socks\n and underwear could have come from, as such fripperies were denied to\n us at the Farm. We also wondered about the manure, considering that\n no animals were in evidence here. Both, we concluded, must have been\n shipped in specially from the Outside. We found it in us to giggle,\n when the end of the visit was announced, over our own choice of\n conversational material for that precious quarter hour. Thereafter,\n when we could catch glimpses of each other during the day, we would\n exchange furtive signals, then go about our work exhilarated by the\n fiction that we shared some priceless Cabalistic knowledge.", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "We didn't dare talk. On the way from the heliport we had seen some of\n the other folks at work in the swamp that surrounded the camp proper.\n They were digging out stumps with mattocks, crowbars and axes, and some\n of them stood waist-deep in the dark water. Bertha had said \"Looky\n there!\" and had made some remark about the baggy gray coveralls they\n wore—\"Just like convicts,\" she said. The driver, a huge, swinelike\n creature with very small, close-set eyes, had yanked the emergency\n brake and wheeled around at us then.\n\n\n \"You shnooks might just as well get outa the habit o' talkin' right\n here an' now. One more peep outa ya, 'n ya git clobbered!\"\n\n\n All we could do was look at each other and giggle like a couple of kids\n in the back pew of Sunday School, after that. Bertha looked ten years\n younger already.", "My toes hadn't changed in the slightest respect.\nIt must have been then, or soon after that, that my sense of time went\n gently haywire. I was conducted to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain,\" which\n turned out to be a Brobdingnagian manure heap. Its forbidding bulk\n overshadowed all other features of the landscape except some of the\n larger trees.\n\n\n A guard stood in the shadow of a large umbrella, at a respectable and\n tolerable distance from the nitrogenous colossus, but not so distant\n that his voice did not command the entire scene. \"\nHut-ho! hut-ho!\n Hut-ho HAW!\n\" he roared, and the wretched, gray-clad figures, whose\n number I joined without ceremony or introduction, moved steadily at\n their endless work in apparent unawareness of his cadenced chant.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "\"Read and sign, shnook!\" she said in a voice that sounded like rusty\n boiler plate being torn away from more rusty boiler plate.\n\n\n The releases were in order. Our hands shook a little when we signed\n the papers; there was something so terribly final and irreversible\n about it. There would be no release except in cases of severe medical\n complaint, external legal involvement or national emergency. We were\n paid up in advance, of course. There was no turning away.\n\n\n Another attendant, who also looked like a matron of police, boarded the\n bus with a large suitcase and two of the baggy gray garments we had\n seen the others wearing in the swamp. No shoes, socks or underwear.", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "\"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty", "\"Mark 'em and put 'em to work,\" he barked at the guards. Two uniformed\n men, who must have sneaked in while I was fascinated by the man behind\n the desk, seized me and started painting my forehead with an acrid\n fluid that stung like strong disinfectant in an open wound. I squinted\n my eyes and tried to look blank.\n\n\n \"This is indelible,\" one of them explained. \"We have the chemical to\n take it off, but it doesn't come off till we say so.\"\n\n\n When I had been marked, one of the guards took his ink and brush and\n advanced upon Bertha. The other addressed himself to me. \"There is a\n choice of activities. There is the jute mill, the rock quarry, the\n stump-removal detail, the manure pile....\"" ], [ "\"You are more fortunate than most,\" he went on, still standing between\n me and the mess hall. \"Some people come here year after year, or they\n go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined\n in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves\n to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves\n to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing\n really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation\n of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment';\n only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have\n been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe.\"\n\n\n Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of\n my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered\n recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into\n meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks\n could have passed so swiftly?", "I had nothing to say. My toes, I noted, looked much the same. Then,\n behind my back, I heard a sharp squeal from Bertha. \"Stop that! Oh\n stop! Stop! The brochure said nothing about—\"\n\n\n \"Take it easy lady,\" said the other guard in an oily-nasty voice. \"I\n won't touch you none. Just wanted to see if you was amenable.\"\n\n\n I would like more than anything else in the world to be able to say\n honestly that I felt a surge of anger then. I didn't. I can remember\n with terrible clarity that I felt nothing.", "If I had hoped for respite after \"supper,\" it was at that time that I\n learned not to hope. Back to \"The Big Rock Candy Mountain\" we went, and\n under the bleak, iridescent glare of the lights we resumed our labor\n of no reward. One by one I felt my synapses parting, and one by one,\n slowly and certainly, the fragile membranes separating the minute from\n the hour, the Now from the Then, and the epoch out of unmeasured time\n softened and sloughed away. I was, at last, Number 109 at work on a\n monstrous manure pile, and I labored with the muscles and nerves of an\n undifferentiated man. I experienced change.", "and finally. Picture the archetype of every chain-gang captain who\n has been relieved for inhumanity to prisoners; imagine the naked\n attribute Meanness, stripped of all accidental, incongruous, mitigating\n integument; picture all kindness, all mercy, all warmth, all humanity\n excised or cauterized, or turned back upon itself and let ferment into\n some kind of noxious mash; visualize the creature from which all the\n gentle qualities had been expunged, thus, and then try to forget the\n image.", "\"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you\n prefer,\" said the Captain.\nBertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in\n the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the\n moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes,\n that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron\n whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma\n of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.\n\n\n We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor\n of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our\n three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers,\n our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our\n library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all\n impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.", "The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then\n fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust\n settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was\n already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm\n that was new.\n\n\n Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine\n and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work\n would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped\n me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his\n face, and I had grown to fear novelty.\n\n\n \"You had a moment,\" he said, simply and declaratively. \"You didn't miss\n it, did you?\"\n\n\n \"No,\" I replied, not fully understanding. \"No, I didn't miss it.\"", "\"I am in full charge here. You will speak only when spoken to,\" he\n said. His voice came as a surprise and, to me at least, as a profound\n relief. I had expected an inarticulate drawl—something not yet\n language, not quite human. Instead his voice was clipped, precise,\n clear as new type on white paper. This gave me hope at a time when hope\n was at a dangerously low mark on my personal thermometer. My mounting\n misgivings had come to focus on this grim figure behind the desk, and\n the most feared quality that I had seen in the face, a hard, sharp,\n immovable and imponderable stupidity, was strangely mitigated and even\n contradicted by the flawless, mechanical speech of the man.\n\n\n \"What did you do on the Outside, shnook?\" he snapped at me.\n\n\n \"Central Computing and Control. I punched tapes. Only got four hours of\n work a month,\" I said, hoping to cover myself with a protective film of\n humility.", "We were led into a small office at one end of a long, wooden, one-story\n building. A sign on the door said, simply, \"\nAdmissions. Knock and\n Remove Hat.\n\" The lady guard knocked and we entered. We had no hats to\n remove; indeed, this was emphasized for us by the fact that the rain\n had by now penetrated our hair and brows and was running down over our\n faces annoyingly.\nAs soon as I'd blinked the rain from my eyes, I was able to see the\n form of the person behind the desk with more clarity than I might\n have wished. He was large, but terribly emaciated, with the kind of\n gauntness that should be covered by a sheet—tenderly, reverently", "The grim Captain made an appearance in the rock quarry one morning\n just as we were beginning work. He stood on top of a pile of stones,\n swinging his kidney-sap from his wrist and letting his eyes sweep over\n us as though selecting one for slaughter.\n\n\n When the silence had soaked in thoroughly, he announced in his cold,\n incisive tone that \"there will be no rest periods, no chow, no\n 'Beddy-by,' until this entire rock face is reduced to ballast rock.\"\n He indicated a towering slab of stone. We raised our heads only long\n enough to reassure ourselves of the utter hopelessness of the task\n before us. Not daring to look at each other closely, fearing to see our\n own despair reflected in the faces of others, we picked up our hammers\n and crowbars and crawled to the top of the monolithic mass. The film\n must have cleared from my eyes then, momentarily.", "I didn't press the matter further. All I could think of was how I\n wanted a smoke just then. When I thought of the fresh, new pack of\n cigarettes with its unbroken cellophane and its twenty, pure white\n cylinders of fragrant Turkish and Virginia, I came as close to weeping\n as I had in forty years.\nThe ground was slimy and cold under our bare feet when we got down from\n the bus, but the two viragos behind us gave us no time to pick our way\n delicately over the uneven ground. We were propelled through the small\n door at the side of the gate, and at last we found ourselves within the\n ten-foot barriers of the Misery Camp. We just looked at each other and\n giggled.", "It was that night—or perhaps the following night—that Bertha and I\n had our first fifteen-minute visit with each other. She was changed:\n her face glowed with feverish vitality, her hair was stringy and moist,\n and her eyes were serenely glassy. She had not been more provocative\n in twenty-five years. An old dormant excitement stirred within\n me—microscopically but unmistakably.", "I knew now that my identity, my ego, was an infinitesimal thing which\n rode along embedded in a mountain of more or less integrated organisms,\n more or less purposeful tissues, fluids and loosely articulated bones,\n as a tiny child rides in the cab of a locomotive. And the rain came\n down and the manure bags broke and we scrabbled with our hands to\n refill new ones.", "I do not remember that anyone spoke to me directly or, at least,\n coherently enough so that words lodged in my memory, but someone must\n have explained the general pattern of activity. The object, it seemed,\n was to move all this soggy fertilizer from its present imposing site\n to another small but growing pile located about three hundred yards\n distant. This we were to accomplish by filling paper cement bags with\n the manure and carrying it, a bag at a time, to the more distant pile.\n Needless to say, the bags frequently dissolved or burst at the lower\n seams. This meant scraping up the stuff with the hands and refilling\n another paper bag. Needless to say, also, pitchforks and shovels\n were forbidden at the Farm, as was any potentially dangerous object\n which could be lifted, swung or hurled. It would have been altogether\n redundant to explain this rule.", "\"You'll be sah-reeeee,\" he yelped. I saw him go down into the mud under\n a blow with a kidney-sock from a burly male guard who had been standing\n in the center of the cheerless little circle.\n\n\n \"Leave the welcoming ceremonies to us, knoedelhead!\" barked the guard.\n The improvident guest rose painfully and resumed his plodding with the\n rest. I noticed that he made no rejoinder. He cringed.", "\"Beddy-by\" was one of a row of thirty-odd slightly padded planks like\n ironing boards, which were arranged at intervals of less than three\n feet in another long, low-ceilinged barracks. I knew that I would find\n no real release in \"Beddy-by\"—only another dimension of that abiding\n stupor which now served me for consciousness. I may have groaned,\n croaked, whimpered, or expressed myself in some other inarticulate way\n as I measured the length of the board with my carcass; I only remember\n that the others did so. There was an unshaded light bulb hanging\n directly over my face. To this day, I cannot be sure that this bleak\n beacon was ever turned off. I think not. I can only say with certainty", "Impressions of this character have a way of entrenching themselves,\n perhaps at the cost of more meaningful ones. Conversation at the Farm\n was monosyllabic and infrequent, so it may merely be that I recall\n most lucidly those incidents with which some sort of communication was\n associated. A small man sitting opposite me in the mess hall gloomily\n indicated the dumpling at which I was picking dubiously.\n\n\n \"They'll bind ya,\" he said with the finality of special and personal\n knowledge. \"Ya don't wanta let yaself get bound here. They've got a—\"\n\n\n I don't now recall whether I said something or whether I merely held up\n my hand. I do know that I had no wish to dwell on the subject.", "\"So he wants a nice inside job in the steam laundry?\" said the man\n behind the desk—\"the captain,\" we were instructed to call him. Another\n gust of wet wind joined his comments. \"Put him on 'The Big Rock Candy\n Mountain.'\" He fixed me then with those deep-set, glow-worm eyes,\n coldly appraising. The two Sisters of Gorgonia, meanwhile, seized\n Bertha's arms and dragged her from the room. I did not try to follow. I\n knew the rules: there were to be three husband-and-wife visiting hours\n per week. Fifteen minutes each.\n\n\n The Captain was still scrutinizing me from under the dark cliff of his\n brow. A thin smile now took shape on his lipless mouth. One of the\n guards was beating a slow, measured, somewhat squudgy tattoo on the\n edge of the desk with his kidney-sock.\n\n\n \"You wouldn't be entertaining angry thoughts, would you shnook?\" asked\n the Captain, after what seemed like half an hour of sickly pause.", "Inside the yard, about twenty other guests shuffled around and around\n in a circle. Their gray coveralls were dark and heavy with the rain and\n clung to their bodies in clammy-looking patches. All moved sluggishly\n through the mud with their arms hanging slack at their sides, their\n shoulders hunched forward against the wet chill, and their eyes turned\n downward, as though they were fascinated with the halting progress of\n their own feet. I had never seen people look so completely dispirited\n and tired. Only one man raised his head to look at us as we stood\n there. I noticed that his forehead had bright purple marks on it. These\n proved to be \"\nNo. 94, Property of MMF\n,\" in inch-high letters which\n ran from temple to temple just above his eyebrows. Incredibly enough\n the man grinned at us.", "that it was burning just as brightly when the raucous signal sounded\n again, and the unoiled voice from the loudspeaker announced that it was\n time for the morning Cheer-Up Entertainment.\nThese orgies, it turned out, were held in the building housing\n the admission office. There was a speech choir made up of elderly\n women, all of whom wore the black uniform of the Farm matrons. The\n realization that a speech choir still existed may have startled me into\n a somewhat higher state of awareness; I had assumed that the speech\n choir had gone out with hair-receivers and humoristic medicine. The\n things they recited were in a childishly simple verse form:\nOne and\n two and three and four; One and two and THREE.\nThese verses had to do", "I have absolutely no way of knowing how long we labored at this Augean\n enterprise; my watch had been taken from me, of course, and of the\n strange dislocation of my normal time-sense I have already spoken. I\n do remember that floodlights had been turned on long before a raucous\n alarm sounded, indicating that it was time for supper.\n\n\n My weariness from the unaccustomed toil had carried me past the\n point of hunger, but I do remember my first meal at the Farm. We had\n dumplings. You usually think fondly of dumplings as being\nin\nor\nwith\nsomething. We had just dumplings—cold and not quite cooked\n through." ] ]
test	25644	[ "What does Clayton dislike the most about Mars?", "How does Clayton get on the spaceship back to Earth?", "What is the relationship between Clayton and Parks?", "Who is Parks?", "What is likely to happen to Clayton?", "What likely happened to Parks?", "Why is Clayton on Mars?", "How does Clayton explain why he is on the STS-52?", "What best describes Clayton?", "What is a theme of the story?" ]	[ [ "The food", "The beer", "The lack of oxygen", "The cold" ], [ "He pretends to be Parks by wearing his uniform and taking his identification. ", "He persuades Lieutenant Harris to let him go back to Earth.", "He is allowed to go back to Earth after finishing his 15 year sentence on Mars.", "He forges Lieutenant Harris’ signature on papers that say he can go back to Earth. " ], [ "They flew to Mars together.", "They are strangers who met in a bar.", "Parks is Clayton’s boss in the mines.", "They met in prison on Earth. " ], [ "He is a pilot for the STS-52 spaceship.", "He is the bartender in The Recreation Building.", "He is a steward on the STS-52 spaceship. ", "He is another convict colonist. " ], [ "He is sentenced to prison on Earth. ", "Parks’ mother welcomes Clayton to Indiana.", "He is shipped back to Mars.", "He is celebrated as a hero. " ], [ "He is charged with treason and sentenced to stay on Mars. ", "He dies from no oxygen. ", "His crewmates on the STS-52 find him. ", "He freezes to death." ], [ "He chose to go to Mars instead of going to prison on Earth. ", "He volunteered to colonize Mars. ", "He was sentenced to 10 years on Mars because the prisons on Earth were overcrowded.", "He chose to go to Mars and work in the mines because he thought it would pay well. " ], [ "He has finished his 10 year sentence on Mars. ", "He made a bet with Parks that he would be able to get on the ship.", "He has signed papers that say he can go back to Earth.", "Parks wanted to stay on Mars and asked Clayton to take his place on the ship." ], [ "He uses his cleverness to get out of bad situations.", "He is malicious to others for fun. ", "He uses humor to get other people to like him.", "He resorts to violence when he is treated unfairly. " ], [ "Where there's a will, there's a way. ", "Desperation makes people behave immorally. ", "Extreme punishment changes people. ", "The grass is always greener on the other side. " ] ]	[ -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.", "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE", "The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.", "The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”", "“\nShut up!\n” the woman\n snapped harshly. “I’m getting\n sick of it! I personally think\n you should have been locked\n up—permanently. I think this\n idea of forced colonization is\n going to breed trouble for\n Earth someday, but it is about\n the only way you can get anybody\n to colonize this frozen\n hunk of mud.\n\n\n “Just keep it in mind that\n I don’t like it any better than\n you do—\nand I didn’t strong-arm\n anybody to deserve the\n assignment!\nNow get out of\n here!”\n\n\n She moved a hand threateningly\n toward the manual controls\n of the stun beam.\n\n\n Clayton retreated fast. The\n trackers ignored anyone walking\n away from the desk; they\n were set only to spot threatening\n movements toward it.", "It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.", "“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”" ], [ "Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.", "The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.", "It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”", "“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE", "No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "Quite suddenly, there was\n no gravity. He had felt nothing,\n but he knew that the\n bombs had exploded. He\n punched the LAUNCH switch\n on the control board of the\n lifeboat, and the little ship\n leaped out from the side of the\n greater one.\n\n\n Then he turned on the\n drive, set it at half a gee, and\n watched the STS-52 drop behind\n him. It was no longer\n decelerating, so it would miss\n Earth and drift on into space.\n On the other hand, the lifeship\n would come down very\n neatly within a few hundred\n miles of the spaceport in\n Utah, the destination of the\n STS-52." ], [ "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”", "“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.", "He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”" ], [ "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”", "“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet." ], [ "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.", "Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.", "Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.", "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.", "He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.", "The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it." ], [ "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.", "“Not much. We only keep it\n at six pounds in the ships.\n Half helium and half oxygen.\n Only thing that bothers me is\n the oxy here. Or rather, the\n oxy that\nisn’t\nhere.” He took\n a deep breath through his\n nose tube to emphasize his\n point.\n\n\n Clayton clamped his teeth\n together, making the muscles\n at the side of his jaw stand\n out.\n\n\n Parks didn’t notice. “You\n guys have to take those pills,\n don’t you?”\n\n\n “Yeah.”", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered." ], [ "“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.", "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "A voice next to him said:\n “I’ll have a whiskey.”\nThe voice sounded as if the\n man had a bad cold, and Clayton\n turned slowly to look at\n him. After all the sterilization\n they went through before they\n left Earth, nobody on Mars\n ever had a cold, so there was\n only one thing that would\n make a man’s voice sound\n like that.\n\n\n Clayton was right. The fellow\n had an oxygen tube\n clamped firmly over his nose.\n He was wearing the uniform\n of the Space Transport Service.\n\n\n “Just get in on the ship?”\n Clayton asked conversationally.\n\n\n The man nodded and grinned.\n “Yeah. Four hours before\n we take off again.” He poured\n down the whiskey. “Sure cold\n out.”\n\n\n Clayton agreed. “It’s always\n cold.” He watched enviously\n as the spaceman ordered\n another whiskey.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "And all the time, he was\n thinking.\n\n\n Parkinson must be dead;\n he knew that. That meant the\n Chamber. And even if he wasn’t,\n they’d send Clayton back\n to Mars. Luckily, there was no\n way for either planet to communicate\n with the ship; it was\n hard enough to keep a beam\n trained on a planet without\n trying to hit such a comparatively\n small thing as a ship.\n\n\n But they would know about\n it on Earth by now. They\n would pick him up the instant\n the ship landed. And the best\n he could hope for was a return\n to Mars.", "Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.", "The Recreation Building\n was just ahead; at least it\n would be warm inside. He\n pushed in through the outer\n and inner doors, and he heard\n the burst of music from the\n jukebox. His stomach tightened\n up into a hard cramp.\n\n\n They were playing Heinlein’s\nGreen Hills of Earth\n.\n\n\n There was almost no other\n sound in the room, although\n it was full of people. There\n were plenty of colonists who\n claimed to like Mars, but even\n they were silent when that\n song was played.\n\n\n Clayton wanted to go over\n and smash the machine—make\n it stop reminding him.\n He clenched his teeth and his\n fists and his eyes and cursed\n mentally.\nGod, how I hate\n Mars!\nWhen the hauntingly nostalgic\n last chorus faded away,\n he walked over to the machine\n and fed it full of enough coins\n to keep it going on something\n else until he left.", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.", "No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.", "The iciness didn’t seem to\n go away immediately. It was\n like the mine. Little old Mars\n was cold clear down to her\n core—or at least down as far\n as they’d drilled. The walls\n were frozen and seemed to\n radiate a chill that pulled the\n heat right out of your blood.\n\n\n Somebody was playing\nGreen Hills\nagain, damn them.\n Evidently all of his own selections\n had run out earlier than\n he’d thought they would.\n\n\n Hell! There was nothing to\n do here. He might as well go\n home.\n\n\n “Gimme another beer,\n Mac.”\n\n\n He’d go home as soon as he\n finished this one.\n\n\n He stood there with his eyes\n closed, listening to the music\n and hating Mars.", "The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.", "“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over." ], [ "It took them the better part\n of an hour to get Clayton\n awake enough to realize what\n was going on and where he\n was. Even then, he was\n plenty groggy.\nIt was the First Officer of\n the STS-52 who finally got the\n story straight. As soon as\n Clayton was in condition, the\n medic and the quartermaster\n officer who had found him\n took him up to the First Officer’s\n compartment.\n\n\n “I was checking through\n the stores this morning when\n I found this man. He was\n asleep, dead drunk, behind the\n crates.”\n\n\n “He was drunk, all right,”\n supplied the medic. “I found\n this in his pocket.” He flipped\n a booklet to the First Officer.\n\n\n The First was a young man,\n not older than twenty-eight\n with tough-looking gray eyes.\n He looked over the booklet.\n\n\n “Where did you get Parkinson’s\n ID booklet? And his uniform?”", "Landing the lifeship would\n be the only difficult part of\n the maneuver, but they were\n designed to be handled by beginners.\n Full instructions\n were printed on the simplified\n control board.\nClayton studied them for\n a while, then set the alarm to\n waken him in seven hours and\n dozed off to sleep.\n\n\n He dreamed of Indiana. It\n was full of nice, green hills\n and leafy woods, and Parkinson\n was inviting him over to\n his mother’s house for chicken\n and whiskey. And all for free.\n\n\n Beneath the dream was the\n calm assurance that they\n would never catch him and\n send him back. When the\n STS-52 failed to show up,\n they would think he had been\n lost with it. They would never\n look for him.", "Cheyenne, Wyoming\n\n 20 January 2102\nTo: Space Transport Service\n\n Subject: Lifeship 2, STS-52\n\n Attention Mr. P. D. Latimer\n\n\n Dear Paul,\n\n\n I have on hand the copies\n of your reports on the rescue\n of the men on the disabled\n STS-52. It is fortunate that\n the Lunar radar stations could\n compute their orbit.\n\n\n The detailed official report\n will follow, but briefly, this is\n what happened:\n\n\n The lifeship landed—or,\n rather, crashed—several miles\n west of Cheyenne, as you\n know, but it was impossible\n to find the man who was piloting\n it until yesterday because\n of the weather.\n\n\n He has been identified as\n Ronald Watkins Clayton, exiled\n to Mars fifteen years ago.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "Fifty-two. Space Transport\n Ship Fifty-two.\n\n\n Probably bringing another\n load of poor suckers to freeze\n to death on Mars.\n\n\n That was the thing he hated\n about Mars—the cold. The\n everlasting damned cold! And\n the oxidation pills; take one\n every three hours or smother\n in the poor, thin air.\n\n\n The government could have\n put up domes; it could have\n put in building-to-building\n tunnels, at least. It could have\n done a hell of a lot of things\n to make Mars a decent place\n for human beings.\n\n\n But no—the government\n had other ideas. A bunch of\n bigshot scientific characters\n had come up with the idea\n nearly twenty-three years before.\n Clayton could remember\n the words on the sheet he had\n been given when he was sentenced.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "It didn’t matter. Volunteer\n or convict, there was no place\n Clayton could go. From the\n officer’s viewpoint, he was as\n safely imprisoned in the\n spaceship as he would be on\n Mars or a prison on Earth.\nThe First wrote in the log\n book, and then said: “Well,\n we’re one man short in the\n kitchen. You wanted to take\n Parkinson’s place; brother,\n you’ve got it—without pay.”\n He paused for a moment.\n\n\n “You know, of course,” he\n said judiciously, “that you’ll\n be shipped back to Mars immediately.\n And you’ll have to\n work out your passage both\n ways—it will be deducted\n from your pay.”\n\n\n Clayton nodded. “I know.”\n\n\n “I don’t know what else\n will happen. If there’s a conviction,\n you may lose your\n volunteer status on Mars. And\n there may be fines taken out\n of your pay, too.", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard.", "“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "“Well, that’s all, Cartwright.\n You can report to\n Kissman in the kitchen.”\n\n\n The First pressed a button\n on his desk and spoke into the\n intercom. “Who was on duty\n at the airlock when the crew\n came aboard last night? Send\n him up. I want to talk to him.”\n\n\n Then the quartermaster officer\n led Clayton out the door\n and took him to the kitchen.\n\n\n The ship’s driver tubes\n were pushing it along at a\n steady five hundred centimeters\n per second squared acceleration,\n pushing her steadily\n closer to Earth with a little\n more than half a gravity of\n drive.\nThere wasn’t much for\n Clayton to do, really. He helped\n to select the foods that\n went into the automatics, and\n he cleaned them out after each\n meal was cooked. Once every\n day, he had to partially dismantle\n them for a really thorough\n going-over.", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "The ship was eight hours\n out from Earth and still decelerating\n when Clayton pulled\n his getaway.\nIt was surprisingly easy.\n He was supposed to be asleep\n when he sneaked down to the\n drive compartment with the\n knife. He pushed open the\n door, looked in, and grinned\n like an ape.\n\n\n The Engineer and the two\n jetmen were out cold from the\n chloral hydrate in the coffee\n from the kitchen.\n\n\n Moving rapidly, he went to\n the spares locker and began\n methodically to smash every\n replacement part for the\n drivers. Then he took three\n of the signal bombs from the\n emergency kit, set them for\n five minutes, and placed them\n around the driver circuits.\n\n\n He looked at the three sleeping\n men. What if they woke\n up before the bombs went off?\n He didn’t want to kill them\n though. He wanted them to\n know what had happened and\n who had done it.", "Quite suddenly, there was\n no gravity. He had felt nothing,\n but he knew that the\n bombs had exploded. He\n punched the LAUNCH switch\n on the control board of the\n lifeboat, and the little ship\n leaped out from the side of the\n greater one.\n\n\n Then he turned on the\n drive, set it at half a gee, and\n watched the STS-52 drop behind\n him. It was no longer\n decelerating, so it would miss\n Earth and drift on into space.\n On the other hand, the lifeship\n would come down very\n neatly within a few hundred\n miles of the spaceport in\n Utah, the destination of the\n STS-52.", "“Fifteen years. Fifteen\n long, long years.”\n\n\n “Did you—uh—I mean—”\n Parks looked suddenly confused.\n\n\n Clayton glanced quickly to\n make sure the bartender was\n out of earshot. Then he grinned.\n “You mean am I a convict?\n Nah. I came here because\n I wanted to. But—” He\n lowered his voice. “—we don’t\n talk about it around here. You\n know.” He gestured with one\n hand—a gesture that took in\n everyone else in the room.\n\n\n Parks glanced around\n quickly, moving only his eyes.\n “Yeah. I see,” he said softly.\n\n\n “This your first trip?” asked\n Clayton.\n\n\n “First one to Mars. Been on\n the Luna run a long time.”\n\n\n “Low pressure bother you\n much?”", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "“But it isn’t fair! The most\n I’d have got on that frame-up\n would’ve been ten years. I’ve\n been here fifteen already!”\n\n\n “I’m sorry, Clayton. It can’t\n be done. You’re here. Period.\n Forget about trying to get\n back. Earth doesn’t want\n you.” Her voice sounded\n choppy, as though she were\n trying to keep it calm.\n\n\n Clayton broke into a whining\n rage. “You can’t do that!\n It isn’t fair! I never did anything\n to you! I’ll go talk to the\n Governor! He’ll listen to reason!\n You’ll see! I’ll—”", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”" ], [ "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.", "Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.", "Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.", "“Mankind is inherently an\n adaptable animal. If we are to\n colonize the planets of the\n Solar System, we must meet\n the conditions on those planets\n as best we can.\n\n\n “Financially, it is impracticable\n to change an entire\n planet from its original condition\n to one which will support\n human life as it exists on\n Terra.\n\n\n “But man, since he is adaptable,\n can change himself—modify\n his structure slightly—so\n that he can live on these\n planets with only a minimum\n of change in the environment.”\nSo they made you live outside\n and like it. So you froze\n and you choked and you suffered.\n\n\n Clayton hated Mars. He\n hated the thin air and the\n cold. More than anything, he\n hated the cold.\n\n\n Ron Clayton wanted to go\n home.", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull.", "“Indiana? That’s nice. Real\n nice.”\n\n\n “Yeah. You talk about\n green hills, we got green hills\n in Indiana. What time is it?”\n\n\n Clayton told him.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise! Ol’ spaship\n takes off in an hour. Ought\n to have one more drink first.”\n\n\n Clayton realized he didn’t\n like Parks. But maybe he’d\n buy a bottle.\n\n\n Sharkie Johnson worked in\n Fuels Section, and he made a\n nice little sideline of stealing\n alcohol, cutting it, and selling\n it. He thought it was real\n funny to call it Martian Gin.\n\n\n Clayton said: “Let’s go over\n to Sharkie’s. Sharkie will sell\n us a bottle.”", "The First shook his head.\n “That sounds like the kind of\n trick Parkinson would pull, all\n right. I’ll have to write it up\n and turn you both in to the\n authorities when we hit\n Earth.” He eyed Clayton.\n “What’s your name?”\n\n\n “Cartwright. Sam Cartwright,”\n Clayton said without\n batting an eye.\n\n\n “Volunteer or convicted\n colonist?”\n\n\n “Volunteer.”\n\n\n The First looked at him for\n a long moment, disbelief in\n his eyes.", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "The medic in the sick bay\n fired two shots from a hypo-gun\n into both arms, but Clayton\n ignored the slight sting.\n\n\n “Where am I?”\n\n\n “Real original. Here, take\n these.” He handed Clayton a\n couple of capsules, and gave\n him a glass of water to wash\n them down with.\n\n\n When the water hit his\n stomach, there was an immediate\n reaction.\n\n\n “Oh, Christ!” the medic\n said. “Get a mop, somebody.\n Here, bud; heave into this.”\n He put a basin on the table\n in front of Clayton.", "When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters", "The uniform fit Clayton\n fine, and so did the nose mask.\n He dumped his own clothing\n on top of Parks’ nearly nude\n body, adjusted the little oxygen\n tank so that the gas would\n flow properly through the\n mask, took the first deep\n breath of good air he’d had\n in fifteen years, and walked\n toward the spacefield.\nHe went into the men’s\n room at the Port Building,\n took a drink, and felt in the\n pockets of the uniform for\n Parks’ identification. He\n found it and opened the booklet.\n It read:\nPARKINSON, HERBERT J.\n\n Steward 2nd Class, STS\n\n\n Above it was a photo, and a\n set of fingerprints.\n\n\n Clayton grinned. They’d\n never know it wasn’t Parks\n getting on the ship.", "To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of\n a crack-proof exile camp—get onto a ship that couldn’t be\n boarded—smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do\n all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he\n wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only—\nThe Man Who Hated Mars\nBy RANDALL GARRETT\n“I want\n you to put me in prison!” the big, hairy man said in\n a trembling voice.\n\n\n He was addressing his request\n to a thin woman sitting\n behind a desk that seemed\n much too big for her. The\n plaque on the desk said:\nLT. PHOEBE HARRIS\n\n TERRAN REHABILITATION SERVICE", "“Yep, I’m from Indiana.\n Southern part, down around\n Bloomington,” Parks said.\n “Gimme the jug. Not Bloomington,\n Illinois—Bloomington,\n Indiana. We really got\n green hills down there.” He\n drank, and handed the bottle\n back to Clayton. “Pers-nally,\n I don’t see why anybody’d\n stay on Mars. Here y’are,\n practic’ly on the equator in\n the middle of the summer, and\n it’s colder than hell. Brrr!\n\n\n “Now if you was smart,\n you’d go home, where it’s\n warm. Mars wasn’t built for\n people to live on, anyhow. I\n don’t see how you stand it.”\n\n\n That was when Clayton\n decided he really hated Parks.\n\n\n And when Parks said:\n “Why be dumb, friend? Whyn’t\n you go home?” Clayton\n kicked him in the stomach,\n hard." ], [ "Parks was nodding vaguely.\n Clayton looked up at the clock\n above the bar and realized\n that they had been talking for\n better than an hour. Parks\n was buying another round.\n\n\n Parks was a hell of a nice\n fellow.\n\n\n There was, Clayton found,\n only one trouble with Parks.\n He got to talking so loud that\n the bartender refused to serve\n either one of them any more.\nThe bartender said Clayton\n was getting loud, too, but it\n was just because he had to\n talk loud to make Parks hear\n him.\n\n\n Clayton helped Parks put\n his mask and parka on and\n they walked out into the cold\n night.\n\n\n Parks began to sing\nGreen\n Hills\n. About halfway through,\n he stopped and turned to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “I’m from Indiana.”\n\n\n Clayton had already spotted\n him as an American by his\n accent.", "“Something like that happened\n to me a couple of years\n ago,” Clayton began. “I’m\n supervisor on the third shift\n in the mines at Xanthe, but\n at the time, I was only a foreman.\n One day, a couple of\n guys went to a branch tunnel\n to—”\n\n\n It was a very good story.\n Clayton had made it up himself,\n so he knew that Parks\n had never heard it before. It\n was gory in just the right\n places, with a nice effect at\n the end.\n\n\n “—so I had to hold up the\n rocks with my back while the\n rescue crew pulled the others\n out of the tunnel by crawling\n between my legs. Finally, they\n got some steel beams down\n there to take the load off, and\n I could let go. I was in the\n hospital for a week,” he finished.", "He’d worked in the mines\n for fifteen years. It wasn’t\n that he minded work really,\n but the foreman had it in for\n him. Always giving him a bad\n time; always picking out the\n lousy jobs for him.\n\n\n Like the time he’d crawled\n into a side-boring in Tunnel\n 12 for a nap during lunch and\n the foreman had caught him.\n When he promised never to\n do it again if the foreman\n wouldn’t put it on report, the\n guy said, “Yeah. Sure. Hate\n to hurt a guy’s record.”\n\n\n Then he’d put Clayton on\n report anyway. Strictly a rat.\n\n\n Not that Clayton ran any\n chance of being fired; they\n never fired anybody. But\n they’d fined him a day’s pay.\n A whole day’s pay.", "“And that, that—” Clayton\n said as Parks doubled over.\n\n\n He said it again as he kicked\n him in the head. And in\n the ribs. Parks was gasping\n as he writhed on the ground,\n but he soon lay still.\n\n\n Then Clayton saw why.\n Parks’ nose tube had come off\n when Clayton’s foot struck\n his head.\n\n\n Parks was breathing heavily,\n but he wasn’t getting any\n oxygen.\n\n\n That was when the Big\n Idea hit Ron Clayton. With a\n nosepiece on like that, you\n couldn’t tell who a man was.\n He took another drink from\n the jug and then began to\n take Parks’ clothes off.", "“Okay,” said Parks. “We’ll\n get a bottle. That’s what we\n need: a bottle.”\n\n\n It was quite a walk to the\n Shark’s place. It was so cold\n that even Parks was beginning\n to sober up a little. He\n was laughing like hell when\n Clayton started to sing.\n\n“We’re going over to the Shark’s\n \nTo buy a jug of gin for Parks!\n \nHi ho, hi ho, hi ho!”\n \n\n One thing about a few\n drinks; you didn’t get so cold.\n You didn’t feel it too much,\n anyway.\nThe Shark still had his light\n on when they arrived. Clayton\n whispered to Parks: “I’ll go\n in. He knows me. He wouldn’t\n sell it if you were around. You\n got eight credits?”", "Clayton looked down at his\n clothes in wonder. “I don’t\n know.”\n\n\n “You\ndon’t know\n? That’s a\n hell of an answer.”\n\n\n “Well, I was drunk,” Clayton\n said defensively. “A man\n doesn’t know what he’s doing\n when he’s drunk.” He frowned\n in concentration. He knew\n he’d have to think up some\n story.\n\n\n “I kind of remember we\n made a bet. I bet him I could\n get on the ship. Sure—I remember,\n now. That’s what\n happened; I bet him I could\n get on the ship and we traded\n clothes.”\n\n\n “Where is he now?”\n\n\n “At my place, sleeping it\n off, I guess.”\n\n\n “Without his oxy-mask?”\n\n\n “Oh, I gave him my oxidation\n pills for the mask.”", "When the alarm rang,\n Earth was a mottled globe\n looming hugely beneath the\n ship. Clayton watched the\n dials on the board, and began\n to follow the instructions on\n the landing sheet.\n\n\n He wasn’t too good at it.\n The accelerometer climbed\n higher and higher, and he felt\n as though he could hardly\n move his hands to the proper\n switches.\n\n\n He was less than fifteen\n feet off the ground when his\n hand slipped. The ship, out of\n control, shifted, spun, and\n toppled over on its side,\n smashing a great hole in the\n cabin.\n\n\n Clayton shook his head and\n tried to stand up in the wreckage.\n He got to his hands and\n knees, dizzy but unhurt, and\n took a deep breath of the fresh\n air that was blowing in\n through the hole in the cabin.\n\n\n It felt just like home.\nBureau of Criminal Investigation\n\n Regional Headquarters", "Nobody on the ship liked\n him; they couldn’t appreciate\n his position. He hadn’t done\n anything to them, but they\n just didn’t like him. He didn’t\n know why; he’d\ntried\nto get\n along with them. Well, if they\n didn’t like him, the hell with\n them.\n\n\n If things worked out the\n way he figured, they’d be\n damned sorry.\n\n\n He was very clever about\n the whole plan. When turn-over\n came, he pretended to\n get violently spacesick. That\n gave him an opportunity to\n steal a bottle of chloral hydrate\n from the medic’s locker.\n\n\n And, while he worked in the\n kitchen, he spent a great deal\n of time sharpening a big carving\n knife.\n\n\n Once, during his off time,\n he managed to disable one of\n the ship’s two lifeboats. He\n was saving the other for himself.", "“I had to take them once.\n Got stranded on Luna. The cat\n I was in broke down eighty\n some miles from Aristarchus\n Base and I had to walk back—with\n my oxy low. Well, I\n figured—”\nClayton listened to Parks’\n story with a great show of attention,\n but he had heard it\n before. This “lost on the\n moon” stuff and its variations\n had been going the rounds for\n forty years. Every once in a\n while, it actually did happen\n to someone; just often enough\n to keep the story going.\n\n\n This guy did have a couple\n of new twists, but not enough\n to make the story worthwhile.\n\n\n “Boy,” Clayton said when\n Parks had finished, “you were\n lucky to come out of that\n alive!”\n\n\n Parks nodded, well pleased\n with himself, and bought another\n round of drinks.", "At the bar, he ordered a\n beer and used it to wash down\n another oxidation tablet. It\n wasn’t good beer; it didn’t\n even deserve the name. The\n atmospheric pressure was so\n low as to boil all the carbon\n dioxide out of it, so the brewers\n never put it back in after\n fermentation.\n\n\n He was sorry for what he\n had done—really and truly\n sorry. If they’d only give him\n one more chance, he’d make\n good. Just one more chance.\n He’d work things out.\n\n\n He’d promised himself that\n both times they’d put him up\n before, but things had been\n different then. He hadn’t really\n been given another chance,\n what with parole boards and\n all.\n\n\n Clayton closed his eyes and\n finished the beer. He ordered\n another.", "“Sure. I got the bottle.\n Want a drink?”\n\n\n Parks took the bottle, opened\n it, and took a good belt out\n of it.\n\n\n “Hooh!” he breathed.\n “Pretty smooth.”\n\n\n As Clayton drank, Parks\n said: “Hey! I better get back\n to the field! I know! We can\n go to the men’s room and\n finish the bottle before the\n ship takes off! Isn’t that a\n good idea? It’s warm there.”\n\n\n They started back down the\n street toward the spacefield.", "He tapped his glass on the\n bar, and the barman came\n over with another beer. Clayton\n looked at it, then up at\n the barman. “Put a head on\n it.”\n\n\n The bartender looked at\n him sourly. “I’ve got some\n soapsuds here, Clayton, and\n one of these days I’m gonna\n put some in your beer if you\n keep pulling that gag.”\n\n\n That was the trouble with\n some guys. No sense of humor.\n\n\n Somebody came in the door\n and then somebody else came\n in behind him, so that both\n inner and outer doors were\n open for an instant. A blast\n of icy breeze struck Clayton’s\n back, and he shivered. He\n started to say something, then\n changed his mind; the doors\n were already closed again,\n and besides, one of the guys\n was bigger than he was.", "She had thought he was\n going to jump her.\nLittle rat!\nhe thought,\nsomebody ought\n to slap her down!\nHe watched her check\n through the heavy dossier in\n front of her. Finally, she looked\n up at him again.\n\n\n “Clayton, your last conviction\n was for strong-arm robbery.\n You were given a choice\n between prison on Earth and\n freedom here on Mars. You\n picked Mars.”\n\n\n He nodded slowly. He’d\n been broke and hungry at the\n time. A sneaky little rat\n named Johnson had bilked\n Clayton out of his fair share\n of the Corey payroll job, and\n Clayton had been forced to\n get the money somehow. He\n hadn’t mussed the guy up\n much; besides, it was the\n sucker’s own fault. If he hadn’t\n tried to yell—\n\n\n Lieutenant Harris went on:\n “I’m afraid you can’t back\n down now.”", "Clayton couldn’t afford\n whiskey. He probably could\n have by this time, if the mines\n had made him a foreman, like\n they should have.\n\n\n Maybe he could talk the\n spaceman out of a couple of\n drinks.\n\n\n “My name’s Clayton. Ron\n Clayton.”\n\n\n The spaceman took the offered\n hand. “Mine’s Parkinson,\n but everybody calls me\n Parks.”\n\n\n “Sure, Parks. Uh—can I\n buy you a beer?”\n\n\n Parks shook his head. “No,\n thanks. I started on whiskey.\n Here, let me buy you one.”\n\n\n “Well—thanks. Don’t mind\n if I do.”\n\n\n They drank them in silence,\n and Parks ordered two more.\n\n\n “Been here long?” Parks\n asked.", "Clayton wasn’t drunk—he\n was sick. His head felt like\n hell. Where the devil was he?\n\n\n “Get up, bud. Come on, get\n up!”\n\n\n Clayton pulled himself up\n by holding to the man’s arm.\n The effort made him dizzy\n and nauseated.\n\n\n The other man said: “Take\n him down to sick bay, Casey.\n Get some thiamin into him.”\n\n\n Clayton didn’t struggle as\n they led him down to the sick\n bay. He was trying to clear\n his head. Where was he? He\n must have been pretty drunk\n last night.\n\n\n He remembered meeting\n Parks. And getting thrown\n out by the bartender. Then\n what?\n\n\n Oh, yeah. He’d gone to the\n Shark’s for a bottle. From\n there on, it was mostly gone.\n He remembered a fight or\n something, but that was all\n that registered.", "Lieutenant Harris glanced\n at the man before her for only\n a moment before she returned\n her eyes to the dossier on the\n desk; but long enough to verify\n the impression his voice\n had given. Ron Clayton was a\n big, ugly, cowardly, dangerous\n man.\n\n\n He said: “Well? Dammit,\n say something!”\n\n\n The lieutenant raised her\n eyes again. “Just be patient\n until I’ve read this.” Her voice\n and eyes were expressionless,\n but her hand moved beneath\n the desk.\nThe frightful carnage would go down in the bloody history of space.\n\n\n Clayton froze.\nShe’s yellow!\nhe thought. She’s turned on\n the trackers! He could see the\n pale greenish glow of their\n little eyes watching him all\n around the room. If he made\n any fast move, they would cut\n him down with a stun beam\n before he could get two feet.", "No, by God! He wouldn’t\n go back to that frozen mud-ball!\n He’d stay on Earth,\n where it was warm and comfortable\n and a man could live\n where he was meant to live.\n Where there was plenty of\n air to breathe and plenty of\n water to drink. Where the\n beer tasted like beer and not\n like slop. Earth. Good green\n hills, the like of which exists\n nowhere else.\n\n\n Slowly, over the days, he\n evolved a plan. He watched\n and waited and checked each\n little detail to make sure nothing\n would go wrong. It\ncouldn’t\ngo wrong. He didn’t want\n to die, and he didn’t want to\n go back to Mars.", "“Sure I got eight credits.\n Just a minute, and I’ll give\n you eight credits.” He fished\n around for a minute inside his\n parka, and pulled out his\n notecase. His gloved fingers\n were a little clumsy, but he\n managed to get out a five and\n three ones and hand them to\n Clayton.\n\n\n “You wait out here,” Clayton\n said.\n\n\n He went in through the\n outer door and knocked on the\n inner one. He should have\n asked for ten credits. Sharkie\n only charged five, and that\n would leave him three for\n himself. But he could have got\n ten—maybe more.\n\n\n When he came out with the\n bottle, Parks was sitting on\n a rock, shivering.\n\n\n “Jeez-krise!” he said. “It’s\n cold out here. Let’s get to\n someplace where it’s warm.”", "Parks was a steward, too.\n A cook’s helper. That was\n good. If he’d been a jetman or\n something like that, the crew\n might wonder why he wasn’t\n on duty at takeoff. But a steward\n was different.\n\n\n Clayton sat for several minutes,\n looking through the\n booklet and drinking from the\n bottle. He emptied it just before\n the warning sirens keened\n through the thin air.\n\n\n Clayton got up and went\n outside toward the ship.\n\n\n “Wake up! Hey, you! Wake\n up!”\n\n\n Somebody was slapping his\n cheeks. Clayton opened his\n eyes and looked at the blurred\n face over his own.\n\n\n From a distance, another\n voice said: “Who is it?”\n\n\n The blurred face said: “I\n don’t know. He was asleep\n behind these cases. I think\n he’s drunk.”", "Outside the Rehabilitation\n Service Building, Clayton\n could feel the tears running\n down the inside of his face\n mask. He’d asked again and\n again—God only knew how\n many times—in the past fifteen\n years. Always the same\n answer. No.\n\n\n When he’d heard that this\n new administrator was a\n woman, he’d hoped she might\n be easier to convince. She\n wasn’t. If anything, she was\n harder than the others.\n\n\n The heat-sucking frigidity\n of the thin Martian air whispered\n around him in a feeble\n breeze. He shivered a little\n and began walking toward the\n recreation center.\n\n\n There was a high, thin\n piping in the sky above him\n which quickly became a\n scream in the thin air.\n\n\n He turned for a moment to\n watch the ship land, squinting\n his eyes to see the number on\n the hull." ] ]
train	62349	[ "Why does Shannon reach for his gun when Beamish introduces himself?", "Why is it so important for Jig and Shannon to find Gertrude a mate?", "Who does Jig suspect wants them dead, and let loose the vapor snakes?", "What is Ahra referring to when she says \"something has been taken?\"", "How does Shannon feel about the circus?", "Why does Jig bluff to Beamish initially?" ]	[ [ "The sound of the chair being pulled back sets him on high alert. \n", "He sees that Beamish has something in his hands. \n", "Shannon is prone to suspicion after being hunted down by people they owe money to, and thinks Beamish is one of them. ", "Beamish tells them he's there to collect money from them. " ], [ "They want to preserve her species, and they're close to extinction. Her species is too valuable to let die out. \n", "They need another \"cansin\" for their show. ", "She feels alone in her cage and in the circus, and they feel badly for her. ", "Her crying and loneliness without one is affecting the entire crew, and they can't afford to have her out of commission. " ], [ "Beamish and the crew. The circus has not been doing well, and Beamish may be unhappy with the deal they cut. ", "The crew. They resent how little money they make. ", "Beamish, because he knows they cut him a bad deal.", "Gow. He didn't call back the snakes as they attacked them, and is beside himself because of Gertrude. \n" ], [ "Gertrude's happiness. ", "Beamish's money.", "The cansin male. ", "Jig and Shannon's safety. " ], [ "He needs it for money, nothing more. ", "He resents that he's stuck with it, and gets angry when people insult it. \n", "Despite it's quality, he truly cares about it. ", "He believes in it's quality, and has faith in it. " ], [ "He knows he can get away with it - Beamish has the money to match what they ask.", "He doesn't trust Shannon to close a good deal. ", "He doesn't trust Beamish, and wants to see if he's committed to the idea. ", "For them to start a new tour would be costly for them, and Jig wants to get the maximum price. " ] ]	[ 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 1 ]	[ 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.", "\"I'm not much of a bargainer. One hundred Universal Credits will be\n agreeable to me.\" He dragged out a roll as big as my two fists, peeled\n off half a dozen credit slips, and laid them on the table.\n\n\n \"By way of a retainer, gentleman. My attorney and I will call on you in\n the morning with a contract and itinerary. Good night.\"\n\n\n We said good night, trying not to drool. Beamish went away. Bucky made\n grab for the money, but I beat him to it.\n\n\n \"Scram,\" I said. \"There are guys waiting for this. Big guys with clubs.\n Here.\" I gave him a small-denomination slip I'd been holding out. \"We\n can get lushed enough on this.\"\n\n\n Shannon has a good vocabulary. He used it. When he got his breath back\n he said suddenly,\n\n\n \"Beamish is pulling some kind of a game.\"", "The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.", "Shannon got up. He got up slowly. I had plenty of time to see his\n grey-green eyes get sleepy, and hear the quarter-Earth-blood Martian\n girl wailing about love over by the battered piano, and watch the\n slanting cat-eyes of the little dark people at the tables swing round\n toward us, pleased and kind of hungry.\n\n\n I had plenty of time to think how I only weigh one-thirty-seven to\n Shannon's one-seventy-five, and how I'm not as young as I used to be.\n\n\n I said, \"Bucky. Hold on, fella. I....\"\n\n\n Somebody said, \"Excuse me, gentlemen. Is one of you Mister Buckhalter\n Shannon?\"\n\n\n Shannon put his hands down on his belt. He closed his eyes and smiled\n pleasantly and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Would you be collecting for the feed bill, or the fuel?\"", "I shot a glance at the newcomer. He'd saved me from a beating, even if\n he was a lousy bill-collecter; and I felt sorry for him. Bucky Shannon\n settled his shoulders and hips like a dancer.\n\n\n The stranger was a little guy. He even made me look big. He was dressed\n in dark-green synthesilk, very conservative. There was a powdering of\n grey in his hair and his skin was pink, soft, and shaved painfully\n clean. He had the kind of a face that nice maiden-ladies will trust\n with their last dime. I looked for his strong-arm squad.\n\n\n There didn't seem to be any. The little guy looked at Shannon with pale\n blue eyes like a baby, and his voice was softer than Bucky's.\n\n\n He said, \"I don't think you understand.\"", "Shannon stared at me. Beamish started to get indignant. \"Shut up,\" I\n told him. \"We got a contract.\" I yanked the curtains shut and walked\n over to the bar.\n\n\n I began to notice something, then. There were quite a lot of men in the\n place. At first glance they looked okay—a hard-faced, muscular bunch\n of miners in dirty shirts and high boots.\n\n\n Then I looked at their hands. They were dirty enough. But they never\n did any work in a mine, on Venus or anywhere else.\n\n\n The place was awfully quiet, for that kind of a place. The bartender\n was a big pot-bellied swamp-edger with pale eyes and thick white hair\n coiled up on top of his bullet head. He was not happy.\n\n\n I leaned on the bar. \"\nLhak\n,\" I said. He poured it, sullenly, out of a\n green bottle. I reached for it, casually.", "I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"", "Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.", "I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"", "He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.", "Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"", "Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.", "I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"", "Shannon and I did a little quiet sleuthing, but it was a waste of time.\n Anybody in the gang might have let those electric worms out on us. It\n didn't help any to know that somebody, maybe the guy next to you at\n dinner, was busy thinking ways to kill you. By the time we hit Venus, I\n was ready to do a Brodie out the refuse chute.\n\n\n Shannon set the crate down on the edge of Nahru, the first stop on our\n itinerary. I stood beside him, looking out the ports at the scenery. It\n was Venus, all right. Blue mud and thick green jungle and rain, and a\n bunch of ratty-looking plastic shacks huddling together in the middle\n of it. Men in slickers were coming out for a look.\n\n\n I saw Beamish's sleek yacht parked on a cradle over to the left, and\n our router's runabout beside it. Bucky Shannon groaned.", "I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. But he had money. I said,\n \"Howdy. Let's go find a booth. These Marshies make me nervous, looking\n like hungry cats at a mouse-hole.\"\n\n\n The little guy nodded. \"Excellent idea. My name is Beamish. Simon\n Beamish. I wish to—ah—charter your circus.\"\nI looked at Bucky. He looked hungrier than the Marshies did. We didn't\n say anything until we got Beamish into a curtained booth with a fresh\n pitcher of\nthil\non the table. Then I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Beamish?\"\n\n\n Beamish sipped his drink, made a polite face, and put it down. \"I have\n independent means, gentlemen. It has always been my desire to lighten\n the burden of life for those less fortunate....\"", "Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.", "It was awfully lonesome out there, with the desert cold and restless\n under the two moons. There's a smell to Mars, like something dead and\n dried long past decay, but still waiting. An unhappy smell. The blown\n red dust gritted in my teeth.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon walked out into the glare of the light at the entrance to\n the roped-off space around the main lock. He was pretty steady on his\n feet. He waved and said, \"Hiya, boys.\"\n\n\n They got up off the steps, and the packing cases, and came toward us. I\n grinned and got into my brassies. We felt we owed those boys a lot more\n than money. It grates on a man's pride to have to sneak in and out of\n his own property through the sewage lock. This was the first time in\n weeks we'd come in at the front door.", "\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.", "The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars." ], [ "I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"", "Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"", "Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.", "It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"", "He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"", "\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"", "It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"", "Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.", "The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.", "\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.", "\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.", "She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.", "\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.", "Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.", "Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"", "I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"", "The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.", "\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.", "I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"" ], [ "\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"", "I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"", "I started to run, back along the passageway. Bucky weighed on me, limp\n and heavy. The noise burst suddenly in a deafening hell of moans and\n roars and shrieks, packed in tight by the metal walls, and above it all\n I could hear Gertrude's lonely, whistling scream.\n\n\n I thought, \"\nSomebody's down here. Somebody let 'em out. Somebody wants\n to kill us!\n\" I tried to yell again. It strangled in my throat. I\n sobbed, and the sweat was thick and cold on me.\n\n\n One of Bucky's dragging, stumbling feet got between mine. We fell. I\n rolled on top of him, covering his face, and buried my own face in the\n hollow of his shoulder.\n\n\n The first snake touched me. It was like a live wire, sliding along the\n back of my neck. I screamed. It came down along my cheek, hunting my\n mouth. There were more of them, burning me through my clothes.", "\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.", "The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.", "It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"", "Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"", "Shannon and I did a little quiet sleuthing, but it was a waste of time.\n Anybody in the gang might have let those electric worms out on us. It\n didn't help any to know that somebody, maybe the guy next to you at\n dinner, was busy thinking ways to kill you. By the time we hit Venus, I\n was ready to do a Brodie out the refuse chute.\n\n\n Shannon set the crate down on the edge of Nahru, the first stop on our\n itinerary. I stood beside him, looking out the ports at the scenery. It\n was Venus, all right. Blue mud and thick green jungle and rain, and a\n bunch of ratty-looking plastic shacks huddling together in the middle\n of it. Men in slickers were coming out for a look.\n\n\n I saw Beamish's sleek yacht parked on a cradle over to the left, and\n our router's runabout beside it. Bucky Shannon groaned.", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.", "The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.", "Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.", "I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"", "I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.", "I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"", "I heard a noise behind me and looked around. Ahra the Nahali woman was\n standing in the mud with her arms up and her head thrown back, and her\n triangular mouth open like a thirsty dog. She didn't have anything on\n but her blue-green, hard scaled hide, and she was chuckling. It didn't\n sound nice.\n\n\n You find a lot of Nahali people in side-shows, doing tricks with\n the electric power they carry in their own bodies. They're Venusian\n middle-swampers, they're not human, and they never forget it.\n\n\n Ahra opened her slitted red eyes and looked at me and laughed with\n white reptilian teeth.\n\n\n \"Death,\" she whispered. \"Death and trouble. The jungle tells me. I can\n smell it in the swamp wind.\"", "It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"", "Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.", "\"That guy we brought in,\" I said. \"He sure has a skinful. Passed out\n cold. What's he been spiking his drinks with?\"\n\n\n \"\nSelak\n,\" said a voice in my ear. \"As if you didn't know.\"\n\n\n I turned. The man who had given Kapper the cigarette was standing\n behind me. And I remembered him, then.", "Bucky moaned and kicked under me. I remember hanging on and thinking,\n \"This is it. This is it, and oh God, I'm scared!\"\n\n\n Then I went out.\nII\n\n\n Kanza the Martian croaker, was bending over me when I woke up. His\n little brown face was crinkled with laughter. He'd lost most of his\n teeth, and he gummed\nthak\n-weed. It smelt.\n\n\n \"You pretty, Mis' Jig,\" he giggled. \"You funny like hell.\"\n\n\n He slapped some cold greasy stuff on my face. It hurt. I cursed him and\n said, \"Where's Shannon? How is he?\"\n\n\n \"Mis' Bucky okay. You save life. You big hero, Mis' Jig. Mis' Gow come\n nickuhtime get snakes. You hero. Haw! You funny like hell!\"", "Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall." ], [ "I heard a noise behind me and looked around. Ahra the Nahali woman was\n standing in the mud with her arms up and her head thrown back, and her\n triangular mouth open like a thirsty dog. She didn't have anything on\n but her blue-green, hard scaled hide, and she was chuckling. It didn't\n sound nice.\n\n\n You find a lot of Nahali people in side-shows, doing tricks with\n the electric power they carry in their own bodies. They're Venusian\n middle-swampers, they're not human, and they never forget it.\n\n\n Ahra opened her slitted red eyes and looked at me and laughed with\n white reptilian teeth.\n\n\n \"Death,\" she whispered. \"Death and trouble. The jungle tells me. I can\n smell it in the swamp wind.\"", "It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"", "Bucky got up. \"I'll get a doctor,\" he said. \"Stick with him.\" Kapper\n grabbed his wrist. Kapper's nails were blue and the cords in his hands\n stood out like guy wires.\n\n\n \"Don't leave me. Got to tell you—where it is. Got to take it back.\n Promise you'll take it back.\" He gasped and struggled over his\n breathing.\n\n\n \"Sure,\" said Bucky. \"Sure, well take it back. What is it?\"\n\n\n Kapper's face was horrible. I felt sick, listening to him fight for\n air. I wanted to go for a doctor anyway, but somehow I knew it was no\n use. Kapper whispered,\n\n\n \"\nCansin\n. Male. Only one. You don't know...! Take him back.\"\n\n\n \"Where is it, Sam?\"", "Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.", "The cigarette stub fell out of his mouth. He didn't notice it. \"Help\n me,\" he said simply. \"I'm scared.\" His mouth drooled.\n\n\n \"I got it hidden. They want to find out, but I won't tell 'em. It's\n got to go back. Back where I found it. I tried to take it, but they\n wouldn't let me, and I was afraid they'd find it....\"\n\n\n He reached suddenly and grabbed the edge of the table. \"I don't know\n how they found out about it, but they did. I've got to get it back.\n I've got to....\"\n\n\n Bucky looked at me. Kapper was blue around the mouth. I was scared,\n suddenly. I said, \"Get what back where?\"", "The hot rain sluiced over her. She shivered, and the pale skin under\n her jaw pulsed like a toad's, and her eyes were red.\n\n\n \"The deep swamps are angry,\" she whispered. \"Something has been taken.\n They are angry, and I smell death in the wind!\"\n\n\n She turned away, laughing, and I cursed her, and my stomach was tight\n and cold. Bucky said,\n\n\n \"Let's eat if they have a bar in this dump.\"\n\n\n We weren't half way across the mud puddle that passed as a landing\n field when a man came out of a shack on the edge of the settlement. We\n could see him plainly, because he was off to one side of the crowd.\n\n\n He fell on his knees in the mud, making noises. It took him three or\n four tries to get our names out clear enough to understand.", "I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"", "\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.", "It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"", "I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.", "I wouldn't know, of course, but Gertrude looks to me like she got stuck\n some place between a dinosaur and a grizzly bear, with maybe a little\n bird blood thrown in. Anyway, she's big.\n\n\n I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She was crouched in the cage\n with her hands—yeah, hands—hanging over her knees and her snaky head\n sunk into her shoulders, looking out. Just looking. Not at anything.\n Her eyes were way back in deep horny pits, like cold green fire.\n\n\n The lantern light was yellow on her blue-black skin, but it made the\n mane, or crest, of coarse wide scales that ran from between her eyes\n clear down to her flat, short tail, burn all colors. She looked like\n old Mother Misery herself, from way back before time began.\n\n\n Gow said softly, \"She wants a mate. And somebody better get her one.\"", "He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"", "The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.", "\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"", "Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.", "I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"", "\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.", "\"That guy we brought in,\" I said. \"He sure has a skinful. Passed out\n cold. What's he been spiking his drinks with?\"\n\n\n \"\nSelak\n,\" said a voice in my ear. \"As if you didn't know.\"\n\n\n I turned. The man who had given Kapper the cigarette was standing\n behind me. And I remembered him, then.", "\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly." ], [ "\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"", "\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.", "I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. But he had money. I said,\n \"Howdy. Let's go find a booth. These Marshies make me nervous, looking\n like hungry cats at a mouse-hole.\"\n\n\n The little guy nodded. \"Excellent idea. My name is Beamish. Simon\n Beamish. I wish to—ah—charter your circus.\"\nI looked at Bucky. He looked hungrier than the Marshies did. We didn't\n say anything until we got Beamish into a curtained booth with a fresh\n pitcher of\nthil\non the table. Then I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Beamish?\"\n\n\n Beamish sipped his drink, made a polite face, and put it down. \"I have\n independent means, gentlemen. It has always been my desire to lighten\n the burden of life for those less fortunate....\"", "Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"", "Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\"", "Bucky Shannon sniffled again. I said irritably, \"Be reasonable, Gow!\n Nobody's ever seen a male\ncansin\n. There may not even be any.\"\n\n\n Gertrude screamed again. She didn't move, not even to raise her head.\n The sadness just built up inside her until it had to come out. That\n close, the screech was deafening, and it turned me all limp and cold\n inside. The loneliness, the sheer stark, simple pain....\n\n\n Bucky Shannon began to cry. I snarled, \"You'll have to snap her out of\n this, Gow. She's driving the rest of 'em nuts.\"\n\n\n He hammered on his gong, and things quieted down again. Gow stood\n looking out over the tank, sniffing a little, like a hound. Then he\n turned to Gertrude.", "Bucky Shannon lurched against me suddenly. I choked back a yell, and\n then wiped the sweat off my forehead and cursed. The scream came again.\n A high, ragged, whistling screech like nothing this side of hell,\n ripping through the musty darkness. Gertrude, on the wailing wall.", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.", "It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"", "He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"", "the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nBucky Shannon leaned forward across the little hexagonal table. He\n knocked over the pitcher of\nthil\n, but it didn't matter. The pitcher\n was empty. He jabbed me in the breastbone with his forefinger, not\n very hard. Not hard enough to jar the ribs clean loose, just enough to\n spring them.\n\n\n \"We,\" he said, \"are broke. We are finished, through. Washed up and\n down the drain.\" He added, as an afterthought, \"Destitute.\"\n\n\n I looked at him. I said sourly, \"You're kidding!\"\n\n\n \"Kidding.\" Shannon put his elbows on the table and peered at me through\n a curtain of very blond hair that was trying hard to be red. \"He says\n I'm kidding! With Shannon's Imperial Circus, the Greatest Show in\n Space, plastered so thick with attachments....\"", "\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.", "Shannon got up. He got up slowly. I had plenty of time to see his\n grey-green eyes get sleepy, and hear the quarter-Earth-blood Martian\n girl wailing about love over by the battered piano, and watch the\n slanting cat-eyes of the little dark people at the tables swing round\n toward us, pleased and kind of hungry.\n\n\n I had plenty of time to think how I only weigh one-thirty-seven to\n Shannon's one-seventy-five, and how I'm not as young as I used to be.\n\n\n I said, \"Bucky. Hold on, fella. I....\"\n\n\n Somebody said, \"Excuse me, gentlemen. Is one of you Mister Buckhalter\n Shannon?\"\n\n\n Shannon put his hands down on his belt. He closed his eyes and smiled\n pleasantly and said, very gently:\n\n\n \"Would you be collecting for the feed bill, or the fuel?\"", "\"That's tough,\" said Bucky Shannon. His grey-green eyes looked like an\n owl's. He swayed slightly. \"That's sure tough.\" He sniffled.\n\n\n I looked at Gertrude. Her cage is the biggest and strongest in the tank\n and even so she looked as though she could break it open just taking a\n deep breath. I don't know if you've ever seen a\ncansin\n. There's only\n two of them on the Triangle. If you haven't, nothing I can say will\n make much difference.\n\n\n They're what the brain gang calls an \"end of evolution.\" Seems old\n Dame Nature had an idea that didn't jell. The\ncansins\nwere pretty\n successful for a while, it seems, but something gummed up the works and\n now there's only a few left, way in the deep-swamp country, where even\n the Venusians hardly ever go. Living fossils.", "\"I saved her life,\" he said. \"When we bought her out of Hanak's wreck\n and everybody thought she was too hurt to live, I saved her. I know\n her. I can do things with her. But this time....\"\n\n\n He shrugged. He was huge and tough and ugly, and his voice was like a\n woman's talking about a sick child.\n\n\n \"This time,\" he said, \"I ain't sure.\"\n\n\n \"Well for Pete's sake, do what you can. We got a charter, and we need\n her.\" I took Shannon's arm. \"Come to bed, Bucky darlin'.\"\n\n\n He draped himself over my shoulder and we went off. Gow didn't look at\n us. Bucky sobbed.", "The fight had just put the topper on him. I was afraid he'd fall down\n the ladder and break his neck. That's why I went along. If I hadn't....\n Oh, well, what's a few nightmares among friends?\n\n\n It was dark down there in the tank. Way off at the other end, there was\n a dim glow. Gow was evidently holding Gertrude's hand. We started down\n the long passageway between the rows of cages and glassed-in tanks and\n compression units.\n\n\n Our footsteps sounded loud and empty on the iron floor. I wasn't\n near as happy as Shannon, and my skin began to crawl a little. It's\n the smell, I think; rank and sour and wild. And the sound of them,\n breathing and rustling in the dark, with the patient hatred walled\n around them as strong as the cage bars.", "The Blue Behemoth\nBy LEIGH BRACKETT\nShannon's Imperial Circus was a jinxed\n\n space-carny leased for a mysterious tour\n\n of the inner worlds. It made a one-night\n\n pitch on a Venusian swamp-town—to\n\n find that death stalked it from the\n\n jungle in a tiny ball of flame.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories May 1943.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that", "She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.", "The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.", "I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"" ], [ "I said, \"Yeah,\" and pushed him away and got up. I almost fell down\n a couple of times, but presently I made it to the mirror over the\n washstand—I was in my own cell—and I saw what Kanza meant. The damned\n snakes had done a good job. I looked like I was upholstered in Scotch\n plaid. I felt sick.\n\n\n Bucky Shannon opened the door. He looked white and grim, and there was\n a big burn across his neck. He said:\n\n\n \"Beamish is here with his lawyer.\"\n\n\n I picked up my shirt. \"Right with you.\"\n\n\n Kanza went out, still giggling. Bucky closed the door.\n\n\n \"Jig,\" he said, \"those vapor worms were all right when we went in.\n Somebody followed us down and let them out. On purpose.\"", "The little guy looked at me. He hadn't turned a hair. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \"Money. Quite a lot of it. Would you gentlemen permit me to join you?\"\n\n\n Bucky Shannon got up. He grinned his pleasantest grin. \"Delighted. I'm\n Shannon. This is Jig Bentley, my business manager.\" He looked down at\n the table. \"I'm sorry about that. Mistaken identity.\"\n\n\n The little guy smiled. He did it with his lips. The rest of his face\n stayed placid and babyish, almost transparent. I realized with a start\n that it wasn't transparent at all. It was the most complete dead-pan I\n ever met, and you couldn't see into those innocent blue eyes any more\n than you could see through sheet metal.", "\"You were right, Jig,\" he mumbled. \"Circus is no good. I know it. But\n it's all I got. I love it, Jig. Unnerstan' me? Like Gow there with\n Gertrude. She's ugly and no good, but he loves her. I love....\"\n\n\n \"Sure, sure,\" I told him. \"Stop crying down my neck.\"\n\n\n We were a long way from the light, then. The cages and tanks loomed\n high and black over us. It was still. The secret, uneasy motion all\n around us and the scruffing of our feet only made it stiller.\n\n\n Bucky was almost asleep on me. I started to slap him. And then the mist\n rose up out of the darkness in little lazy coils, sparkling faintly\n with blue, cold fire.\n\n\n I yelled, \"Gow! Gow, the Vapor snakes! Gow—for God's sake!\"", "\"I'm not much of a bargainer. One hundred Universal Credits will be\n agreeable to me.\" He dragged out a roll as big as my two fists, peeled\n off half a dozen credit slips, and laid them on the table.\n\n\n \"By way of a retainer, gentleman. My attorney and I will call on you in\n the morning with a contract and itinerary. Good night.\"\n\n\n We said good night, trying not to drool. Beamish went away. Bucky made\n grab for the money, but I beat him to it.\n\n\n \"Scram,\" I said. \"There are guys waiting for this. Big guys with clubs.\n Here.\" I gave him a small-denomination slip I'd been holding out. \"We\n can get lushed enough on this.\"\n\n\n Shannon has a good vocabulary. He used it. When he got his breath back\n he said suddenly,\n\n\n \"Beamish is pulling some kind of a game.\"", "I didn't like him. I didn't like him at all. But he had money. I said,\n \"Howdy. Let's go find a booth. These Marshies make me nervous, looking\n like hungry cats at a mouse-hole.\"\n\n\n The little guy nodded. \"Excellent idea. My name is Beamish. Simon\n Beamish. I wish to—ah—charter your circus.\"\nI looked at Bucky. He looked hungrier than the Marshies did. We didn't\n say anything until we got Beamish into a curtained booth with a fresh\n pitcher of\nthil\non the table. Then I cleared my throat.\n\n\n \"What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Beamish?\"\n\n\n Beamish sipped his drink, made a polite face, and put it down. \"I have\n independent means, gentlemen. It has always been my desire to lighten\n the burden of life for those less fortunate....\"", "Bucky had relaxed. His grey-green eyes began to gleam. He started to\n speak, and I kicked him again.\n\n\n \"That would be expensive, Mister Beamish,\" I said. \"We'd have to cancel\n several engagements....\"\n\n\n He looked at me. I was lying, and he knew it. But he said,\n\n\n \"I quite understand that. I would be prepared....\"\n\n\n The curtains were yanked back suddenly. Beamish shut up. Bucky and I\n glared at the head and shoulders poking in between the drapes.", "I reached across Bucky suddenly and jerked the curtain back. Beamish\n was standing there. Beamish, bent over, with his ear cocked. Kapper\n made a harsh strangling noise and fell across the table.\n\n\n Beamish never changed expression. He didn't move while Bucky felt\n Kapper's pulse. Bucky didn't need to say anything. We knew.\n\n\n \"Heart?\" said Beamish finally.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said Bucky. He looked as bad as I felt. \"Poor Sam.\"\n\n\n I looked at the cigarette stub smoldering on the table. I looked at\n Beamish with his round dead baby face. I climbed over Shannon and\n pushed Beamish suddenly down into his lap.\n\n\n \"Keep this guy here till I get back,\" I said.", "I hurt all over. I growled, \"With that brain, son, you should go far.\n Nobody saw anything, of course?\" Bucky shook his head.\n\n\n \"Question is, Jig, who wants to kill us, and why?\"\n\n\n \"Beamish. He realizes he's been gypped.\"\n\n\n \"One hundred U.C.'s,\" said Bucky softly, \"for a few lousy swampedge\n mining camps. It stinks, Jig. You think we should back out?\"\n\n\n I shrugged. \"You're the boss man. I'm only the guy that beats off the\n creditors.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" Bucky said reflectively. \"And I hear starvation isn't a\n comfortable death. Okay, Jig. Let's go sign.\" He put his hand on the\n latch and looked at my feet. \"And—uh—Jig, I....\"", "\"A blue one, Jig. A morgue if I ever saw one!\"\n\n\n I snarled, \"What do you want, with this lousy dog-and-pony show!\" and\n went out. He followed. The gang was converging on the lock, but they\n weren't happy. You get so you can feel those things. The steamy Venus\n heat was already sneaking into the ship.\n\n\n While we passed the hatchway to the brute tank, I could hear Gertrude,\n screaming.\nThe canvasmen were busy setting up the annex, slopping and cursing in\n the mud. The paste brigade was heading for the shacks. Shannon and I\n stood with the hot rain running off our slickers, looking.", "She was also much younger, but I didn't go into that. Gertrude may be\n a little creaky, but she's still pretty impressive. I only hoped she\n wouldn't die on us, because without her we'd have a sicker-looking\n circus than even I could stand.\n\n\n Beamish looked impressed. \"A\ncansin\n. Well, well! The mystery\n surrounding the origin and species of the\ncansin\nis a fascinating\n subject. The extreme rarity of the animal....\"\n\n\n We were getting off the subject. I said tactfully, \"We'd have to have\n at least a hundred U.C.'s.\"\n\n\n It was twice what we had any right to ask. I was prepared to dicker.\n Beamish looked at me with that innocent dead pan. For a fraction of a\n second I thought I saw something back of his round blue eyes, and my\n stomach jumped like it was shot. Beamish smiled sweetly.", "He looked at me like he was thinking it wouldn't take much timber to\n fit me for a coffin. \"Okay! But Gertrude's unhappy. She's lonesome,\n see? And if she don't get happier pretty soon I ain't sure your tin-pot\n ship'll hold her.\"\n\n\n He pulled the curtains to and departed. Bucky Shannon groaned. Beamish\n cleared his throat and said, rather stiffly,\n\n\n \"Gertrude?\"\n\n\n \"Yeah. She's kind of temperamental.\" Bucky took a quick drink. I\n finished for him.\n\n\n \"She's the star attraction of our show, Mr. Beamish. A real blue-swamp\n Venusian\ncansin\n. The only other one on the Triangle belongs to Savitt\n Brothers, and she's much smaller than Gertrude.\"", "\"Yeah.\"\n\n\n \"It may be crooked.\"\n\n\n \"Sure. And he may be screwball and on the level. For Pete's sake!\" I\n yelled. \"You want to sit here till we all dry up and blow away?\"\n\n\n Shannon looked at me, kind of funny. He looked at the bulge in my tunic\n where the roll was. He raked back his thick light hair.\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" he said. \"I hope there'll be enough left to bribe the jury.\" He\n poked his head outside. \"Hey, boy! More\nthildatum\n!\"\nIt was pretty late when we got back to the broken-down spaceport where\n Shannon's Imperial Circus was crouching beneath its attachments. Late\n as it was, they were waiting for us. About twenty of them, sitting\n around and smoking and looking very ugly.", "Bucky Shannon regarded them possessively, wiping blood from his nose.\n \"They're good guys, Jig. Swell people. They stuck by me, and I've\n rewarded them.\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure,\" rather sourly. Bucky hiccoughed.\n\n\n \"Let's go see Gertrude.\"\n\n\n I didn't want to see Gertrude. I never got over feeling funny going\n into the brute tank, especially at night or out in space. I'm a city\n guy, myself. The smell and sound of wildness gives me goose bumps. But\n Bucky was looking stubborn, so I shrugged.\n\n\n \"Okay. But just for a minute. Then we go beddy-bye.\"\n\n\n \"You're a pal, Jif. Bes' li'l' guy inna worl'....\"", "\"It's no more plastered than you are.\" I was sore because he'd been a\n lot quicker grabbing the pitcher. \"The Greatest Show in Space. Phooey!\n I've wet-nursed Shannon's Imperial Circus around the Triangle for\n eleven years, and I know. It's lousy, it's mangy, it's broken-down!\n Nothing works, from the ship to the roustabouts. In short, it stinks!\"\n\n\n I must have had the pitcher oftener than I thought. Nobody insults\n Buckhalter Shannon's Imperial Circus to Buckhalter Shannon's face\n unless he's tired and wants a long rest in a comfy fracture-frame.", "I felt cold, suddenly, between the shoulders. Somebody scraped a chair\n back. It sounded like he'd ripped the floor open, it was so quiet. I\n got my brassies on, and my hands were sweating. Bucky Shannon sighed,\n and let his fist start traveling, a long, deceptive arc.\n\n\n Then I saw what the little guy was holding in his hand.\n\n\n I yelled and knocked the table over into Bucky. It made a lot of noise.\n It knocked him sideways and down, and the little dark men jumped up,\n quivering and showing their teeth. The Martian girl screamed.\n\n\n Bucky heaved the table off his lap and cursed me. \"What's eating you,\n Jig? I'm not going to hurt him.\"\n\n\n \"Shut up,\" I said. \"Look what he's got there. Money!\"", "Bucky got red around the ears. \"Just a minute,\" he murmured, and\n started to get up. I kicked him under the table.\n\n\n \"Shut up, you lug. Let Mister Beamish finish.\"\n\n\n He sat down, looking like a mean dog waiting for the postman. Beamish\n ignored him. He went on, quietly,\n\n\n \"I have always held that entertainment, of the right sort, is the most\n valuable aid humanity can have in its search for the alleviation of\n toil and boredom....\"\n\n\n I said, \"Sure, sure. But what was your idea?\"\n\n\n \"There are many towns along the Venusian frontiers where no\n entertainment of the—\nproper\nsort has been available. I propose to\n remedy that. I propose to charter your circus, Mister Shannon, to make\n a tour of several settlements along the Tehara Belt.\"", "Bucky said, \"Jig—it's Sam Kapper.\"\n\n\n We started to run. The crowd, mostly big unshaken miners, wheeled\n around to see what was happening. People began to close in on the man\n who crawled and whimpered in the mud.\n\n\n Sam Kapper was a hunter, supplying animals to zoos and circuses and\n carnivals. He'd given us good deals a couple of times, when we weren't\n too broke, and we were pretty friendly.\n\n\n I hadn't seen him for three seasons. I remembered him as a bronzed,\n hard-bitten guy, lean and tough as a twist of tung wire. I felt sick,\n looking down at him.\n\n\n Bucky started to help him up. Kapper was crying, and he jerked all over\n like animals I've seen that were scared to death. Some guy leaned over\n and put a cigarette in his mouth and lighted it for him.", "It had been quiet. Now every brute in the place let go at the same\n time. My stomach turned clear over. I called Gertrude every name I\n could think of, and I couldn't hear myself doing it. Presently a great\n metallic clash nearly burst my eardrums, and the beasts shut up. Gow\n had them nicely conditioned to that gong.\nBut they didn't quiet down. Not really. They were uneasy. You can feel\n them inside you when they're uneasy. I think that's why I'm scared of\n them. They make me feel like I'm not human as I thought—like I wanted\n to put my back-hair up and snarl. Yeah. They were uneasy that night,\n all of a sudden....\n\n\n Gow glared at us as we came up into the lantern light. \"She's gettin'\n worse,\" he said. \"She's lonesome.\"", "I was thinking about Kapper, then, and I didn't pay much attention. I\n only caught a glimpse of the man's face as he straightened up. I didn't\n realize until later that he looked familiar.\n\n\n We got Kapper inside the shack. It turned out to be a cheap bar, with a\n couple of curtained booths at the back. We got him into one and pulled\n the curtain in a lot of curious faces. Kapper dragged hard on the\n cigarette. The man that gave it to him was gone.\n\n\n Bucky said gently, \"Okay, Sam. Relax. What's the trouble?\"\nKapper tried to straighten up. He hadn't shaved. The lean hard lines\n of his face had gone slack and his eyes were bloodshot. He was covered\n with mud, and his mouth twitched like a sick old man's.\n\n\n He said thickly, \"I found it. I said I'd do it, and I did. I found it\n and brought it out.\"", "It was Gow, our zoo-man—a big, ugly son-of-a-gun from a Terran\n colony on Mercury. I was there once. Gow looks a lot like the\n scenery—scowling, unapproachable, and tough. His hands, holding the\n curtains apart, had thick black hair on them and were not much larger\n than the hams of a Venusian swamp-rhino.\n\n\n He said, \"Boss, Gertrude's actin' up again.\"\n\n\n \"Gertrude be blowed,\" growled Bucky. \"Can't you see I'm busy?\"\n\n\n Gow's black eyes were unpleasant. \"I'm tellin' you, Boss, Gertrude\n ain't happy. She ain't had the right food. If something....\"\n\n\n I said, \"That'll all be taken care of, Gow. Run along now.\"" ] ]
train	63631	[ "Why was Charles in the actress's apartment?", "What did Charles decide to do when he realized he was alone?", "Why did Charles think he was the last person alive?", "What was the only thing that mattered to Charles near the end?", "What did Charles probably realize at the end?", "Why did the beings come to Earth?", "What did the beings use to ensure they killed every human?" ]	[ [ "She wanted to be with someone one last time.", "They were working on curing the plague.", "He thought he could find answers there.", "They had been living together." ], [ "Live his best life as long as possible", "Give up and wait for death", "Create a shrine to mark the end of humanity", "Enjoy the things he never had before" ], [ "His sickness was taking longer", "He had some sort of immunity", "He was the reason for the plague", "He was meant for greater things" ], [ "Leaving one last note", "Making it to his cave", "Fighting the disease", "Getting a final meal" ], [ "He could have stopped the plague", "There were more people alive that he hadn't found", "There was an alien on the Empire State Building", "He was the last person because of his last name" ], [ "it was the next planet for them to destroy", "they wanted all of Earth's resources", "they wanted to take over Earth", "they were curious about Earth's creatures" ], [ "Charles's brain-waves", "The Bureau's Index", "A machine they brought from their home planet", "Spies throughout the world" ] ]	[ 1, 3, 2, 2, 4, 1, 2 ]	[ 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 ]	[ [ "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "The whole thing was still like a dream to him, and as yet he couldn't\n decide whether it was a good or a bad dream. A year ago she had been\n unattainable, a face to conjure with in erotic dreams, far beyond his\n ken. A year ago she had been a public idol, the most popular actress of\n the day. And he had been a nobody, full of a nobody's idle hopes and\n schemes.\n\n\n And now he was lying in the bed next to hers in her swank Manhattan\n apartment in the most exclusive hotel in town. The unrealness of the\n situation overwhelmed him. His mind was a picture of confused thoughts.\n Meanings and answers to his questions slithered out of his reach.\n\n\n \"God,\" he said. It was not an exclamation, nor yet an expletive. It was\n a mere statement of fact.", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"", "The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "\"Phone Me in Central Park\"\nBy JAMES McCONNELL\nThere should be an epitaph for every\n\n man, big or little, but a really grand\n\n and special one for Loner Charlie.\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Planet Stories Fall 1954.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nCharles turned over on his side to look at her. She lay quietly in the\n other bed, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was blonde to\n perfection, exquisitely shaped, and the rich promise of her body was\n exposed to his view.\n\n\n \"Why?\" he thought as he looked at her. \"Why did it have to happen like\n this?\"", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.", "Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.", "Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed." ], [ "\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"", "He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,\n alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.\n He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately\n with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of\n physical existence.", "A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "It took him almost an hour to find the proper tools, and better than\n two hours more of hard, nighttime work to get the hole dug to his\n satisfaction. It took almost three hours to find the right sort of\n casket, durable but not too heavy for one man to handle. He carted it\n out to a grassy plot close to the center of the park where the grave\n was. He let the coffin down slowly into the depression, then piled up\n loose dirt on the sloping sides of the hole so that the rain would wash\n it down over him.\n\n\n \"I can't very well bury myself,\" he said. \"I guess it will rain after\n I'm gone.\" He looked carefully down at the metallic container.\n\n\n Wait now. There was something wrong, something missing. It was—oh,\n yes, he caught it. It was the stone. There wasn't any stone to go at\n the head of the grave. \"I'll have to fix that.\"", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"" ], [ "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"", "He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"", "The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller\n screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the\n population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter\n immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area\n being sampled while the screen would show population density by\n individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.\n\n\n \"I'll try New York first,\" he said to himself, knowing that he was a\n coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. \"I'll start\n with New York and work up.\"\n\n\n Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New\n York on the screen. \"There's bound to be somebody else left here. After\n all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago.\" And\n one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,\n not because she liked him, but because....\n\n\n The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a\n recognizable perceptual image.", "Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!" ], [ "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"", "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.", "A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.", "Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.", "He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,\n alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.\n He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately\n with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of\n physical existence.", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!" ], [ "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "Charles was hungry. He got up and started for one of the restaurants\n near the park. Later on, when there was more time, he'd find a piece\n of granite and move it to the plot. He could spend his free time\n carving on it, copying the inscription. He would make it into a real\n shrine; maybe he would practice up a bit and try to carve a statue to\n go with the stone.\n\n\n Somehow, though, since things were ready and it didn't make too much\n difference, it seemed to Charles that he'd probably have a long time\n to wait. \"Maybe it's just a disease, and I'm immune. I was immune to\n smallpox. The vaccination never took. That's probably it.\"", "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "The tantalizing thought of \"why\" puzzled its way back into his mind.\n But it seemed less pressing now that he had almost come to the\n conclusion that he would live for a long time. Later, in a few days\n perhaps, he would think about it. In a little while he'd have plenty of\n opportunity for hunting down the answer. This seemed good to him, for\n now he thought he almost had the answer, if there were an answer. He\n thought he had seen the solution peering out at him from the recesses\n of his mind, and he didn't like the expression on its face. Better to\n forget.\nCharles reached the broad boulevard. There was a large cafe just across\n from him, its front window caved in by a large truck. He stumbled and\n almost fell as he stepped from the curb.\n\n\n \"Look at me, nervous as a cat.\"\n\n\n He was trembling noticeably as he started across the street.", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "A gust of wind from the outside breezed through the shattered opening,\n attacking his olfactory patch with the retching smell of decaying\n flesh. Charles ignored it. Even smells had lost their customary\n meanings.\n\n\n He felt the rage build up inside again, tearing at his viscera. His\n stomach clenched up like an angry fist.\n\n\n \"But I don't want to be the last man alive!\" he shouted. \"I don't know\n what to do! I don't know where to go, how to act! I just don't know—\"\n\n\n A paroxysm of sobbing shook his body. Trembling, he dropped to his\n knees, his head against the cold firmness of the sill, his hands\n clutched tightly around the jagged edges of the window pane. In spite\n of the sharp pain that raced through his system, in spite of the\n bright, warm, red stream that trickled down his face, he knelt by the\n window for several minutes.", "\"So now I'm a hermit, whether or not I like it,\" he said in derision to\n the gravel path as he walked along it. \"A hermit in the midst of a city\n of millions of—No, I forgot. There aren't any more people, are there?\"\n It was hard to realize, even now. \"A hermit, alone—and I haven't even\n got a cave....\"\n\n\n Charles stopped walking suddenly. No cave, he thought. No place to\n sleep out the long one, no place to rest while time came to change\n things around and make them for the better. No place to hide.\n\n\n And suddenly it was the most important thing in life to him to find his\n \"cave.\"", "Average, that's what he was. Height: 5'11\". Weight: 165. Age: 32.\n Status: Married, once upon a time.\n\n\n The Norm, with no significant departures, all down the line. Church\n member, but not a good one. Could that be it? Could the most normal be\n the most perfect? Had he led the best of all possible lives? Was that\n it? Had God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, spared his life, saved\n him, singled him out because he was most nearly a saint, most nearly\n Christ-like, most nearly....\n\n\n Lies—His mind snapped back to reality. He half smiled. Saint? Christ?\n The Second Coming?\n\n\n He was no saint.\n\n\n Charles sighed.", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "He smiled. Strange, but now he wanted very much to go on living,\n alone or not. There were things he could do, ways to keep occupied.\n He wouldn't mind it so much. But he wanted more and more desperately\n with each passing second to retain his foothold on the tenuous path of\n physical existence." ], [ "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "\"I can feel the emptiness of it.\"\n\n\n \"It was very good. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was\n yours?\"\n\n\n \"Beautiful,\" said the first. \"It went according to the strictest\n semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.\n They made it easy for me.\"\n\n\n \"Good.\"\n\n\n \"Well, where to now?\"\n\n\n \"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n \"What's that you have there?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, this?\" replied the first. \"It's a higher neural order compendium\n the Things here made up. It's what I used.\"", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.", "Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets\n began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.\n Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national\n governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to\n cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for\n the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.\n\n\n Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal\n left on earth.\n\n\n The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted\n somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the\n lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the\n coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.\n\n\n Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the\n strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was\n gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained\n in New York. And now....", "\"You can't take it with you, you know. They don't allow souvenirs.\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"\n\n\n \"Well?\"\n\n\n \"All right, all right. You're so good, see if you can compute the\n scatter probability.\"\n\n\n The first being moved imperceptably and the heavy plastoid binding of\n the book disappeared. The thousands of pages dropped softly, caught\n at the wind like hungry sails, separated, and pulled by the fingers of\n gravity, went their disparate ways.\nHere a page scuttled into a broken window of the Chrysler Building\n (read the names: Aabat, Aabbs, Aabbt).\n\n\n Here a page landed upright on the head of one of the library lions\n and sloughed softly to the ground (read the names: Looman, Loomana,\n Loomanabsky).", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau\n during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each\n child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter\n recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years\n before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer\n room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of\n mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life.\n\n\n \"So different now,\" he thought, surveying the room. \"Now it's empty, so\n empty.\" The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness\n of the world. The silence became unbearable.\n\n\n Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired\n dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow\n to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to\n activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns\n of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results.", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky.", "The phonograph was near the door. On sudden impulse he switched it\n on, turned the volume up full, and in grim jest left it playing\n Rachmaninoff's\nIsle of the Dead\non full automatic. The music haunted\n him down the hall to the elevator that he had to run himself.\n\n\n The lobby was littered with debris, human and otherwise. Charles\n ignored it. The street that led towards the Bureau of Vital Statistics\n was a mess of desolate carnage. Charles overlooked it. Shop fronts\n smashed, stores looted, gyro-cars wrecked, proud buildings defaced.\n\n\n \"That was it,\" he said to himself. \"Pride. We called this the 'Proud\n Era.' Everything was better and bigger and nicer to have. Buildings\n were taller, men were healthier, most of the problems of humanity\n seemed licked, or nearly so. It was a time of free power, each small\n unit of population, each section of town operating on perpetual,\n ever-lasting, automatic atomic piles.", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City." ], [ "Instantly the thought struck him with paralyzing devastation. The\n answer to it all poked its face out from the recesses of his mind and\n sapped the last bit of his energy, corroding his nerves and dying\n muscles. Now he knew, and the knowing was the end of it.\n\n\n He collapsed at the edge of the pit. Only one arm hung loosely down\n into it, swinging senseless in the air, pointing accusingly at the\n empty coffin.\n\n\n The world will end, not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with the\n last man's anguished cry at the unreasonableness of it all.\n\n\n Charles screamed.\nThe large, invisible, ovular being that hung suspended over the Empire\n State Building rested from its exertion. Soon it was approached by\n another of its kind.\n\n\n \"It is finished?\" asked the second.\n\n\n \"Yes. Just now. I am resting.\"", "But thinking about \"why\" didn't answer the question itself, Charles\n thought. He looked around him. He was sitting on a bench in Central\n Park, alone except for a few stray corpses. But the park was fairly\n free of bodies.\n\n\n \"You've got about ten minutes warning,\" he said to himself. \"I guess\n that most people wanted to die inside of something—inside of anything.\n Not out in the unprotected open.\"\n\n\n The silence was like a weight hanging around his neck. Not an insect\n noise, not the chirp of a bird, not the sound of a car nor the scream\n of a plane. Not even a breeze to whisper among the leaves, he thought.\n Civilization equals life equals noise. Silence equals....\n\n\n Why. His mind kept returning to the question. Of all the people on\n earth, me. The last. Why me?", "\"We were free. We seemed, almost, to have accomplished something. The\n world was running well. No wonder we called it the 'Proud Era.' Life\n was fun, just a bowl of cherries, until....\"\n\n\n Two years ago the animals had started dying. Strangely enough the\n rats had gone first, to anybody's notice. Sales of poison dropped,\n scientific laboratories chained to a perpetual rodent-cycle began to\n complain bitterly.\n\n\n Then the lovers who hunted out and haunted the lonely lanes through the\n countryside began to remark that the locusts were late that year. The\n Southern states joyously reported that mosquito control was working to\n an unprecedented degree. The largest cotton crop ever was forecast and\n rumors from Mexico had it that no one had died from scorpion bite in\n several weeks.", "A month later the meat animals, the birds and the household pets\n began dropping as rapidly as the flies which had dropped earlier.\n Congress was called into special session, as were all of the national\n governments around the world. The U.N. met at emergency sessions to\n cope with the situation. The president of the world-wide Society for\n the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals committed suicide.\n\n\n Within a year it was obvious to everyone that man was the only animal\n left on earth.\n\n\n The panic which had begun with the death of the animals was quieted\n somewhat by the fact that humans seemed immune to the pandemic. But the\n lakes full of dead fish caused a great stink and residents along the\n coasts began to move inland. Sales of perfumes and deodorants soared.\n\n\n Then just one year ago, the first human became infected with the\n strange malady. Within six months, half of the world's population was\n gone. Less than a month ago no more than a few thousand people remained\n in New York. And now....", "\"I've got to find out,\" Charles told himself. He meant it, of course,\n but in a sense he was afraid—afraid that his trip to the Bureau might\n give him an answer he didn't dare listen to. \"But I've got to try.\" He\n walked on down the bloody street.\n\n\n Before the plague the Bureau of Vital Statistics had been one of man's\n crowning achievements. Housed as it was in a huge metallic globe of\n a building, it contained computers which kept exact account of every\n human on earth.\n\n\n Compulsory registration and the classification of each individual by\n means of the discrete patterns of his brain waves had accomplished for\n man what no ordinary census could have. The machine knew who was alive,\n who was dead, and where everybody was.", "\"Why, it was just yesterday (or was it the day before?) that ten of\n us, at least, met here to check the figures. There were lots of us\n alive then.\" Including the blond young woman who had died just this\n afternoon....\n\n\n Charles stopped talking and forced his eyes upwards. Peripheral vision\n caught first the vague outlines of the lower part of the map. His eyes\n continued to move, slowly, reluctantly. They caught the over-all relief\n of Greater New York City—and then concentrated on the single, shining\n dot at the very heart of the map—and he understood.\n\n\n His eyes stabbed quickly for the counter above the screen.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n He gasped.\n\n\n The counter read\none\n.\n\n\n Charles was by himself, the last person alive in all of New York City.", "He began to tremble violently. The silence of the room began to press\n quickly in on him. His frantic fingers searched for the computer\n controls.\n\n\n New York State. One.\n\n\n The entire United States. One.\n\n\n The western hemisphere, including islands.\n\n\n (Was that a point of light in Brazil? No. Just a ghost image).\n\n\n One.\n\n\n The Pacific area, Asia, Australia, Asia Minor, Russia and the Near\n East, Africa and then Europe.\n\n\n England!\n\n\n There was a light in England! Someone else still lived! The counter\n clicked forward.\n\n\n Two!\n\n\n His trembling stopped. He breathed again.\n\n\n \"Of course. London was at least as populous as New York City before the\n plague. It's only logical that—\"", "\"I can feel the emptiness of it.\"\n\n\n \"It was very good. Where were you?\"\n\n\n \"On the next planet out. No beauty to it at all; no system. How was\n yours?\"\n\n\n \"Beautiful,\" said the first. \"It went according to the strictest\n semantic relationship following the purest mathematical principles.\n They made it easy for me.\"\n\n\n \"Good.\"\n\n\n \"Well, where to now?\"\n\n\n \"There's another system about four thoughts away. We're due there soon.\"\n\n\n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n\n\n \"What's that you have there?\"\n\n\n \"Oh, this?\" replied the first. \"It's a higher neural order compendium\n the Things here made up. It's what I used.\"", "He stopped. For even as he spoke, the light winked out! The counter\n clicked again.\n\n\n One.\n\n\n Alone.\n\n\n Alone!\n\n\n Charles screamed.\n\n\n The bottom dropped out from under him!\nWhy?\n\n\n Such a simple question, but in those three letters lay the essence of\n human nature. Why. The drive of curiosity. Stronger, in a way, than\n the so-called \"basic\" drives: hunger, thirst, sex, shelter, warmth,\n companionship, elimination. Certainly more decisive in the history of\n the race. Man began to think, to differentiate himself from the other\n animals, when he first asked the question: \"Why?\"", "Charles refused to think. Machines, especially half-broken machines, do\n not think; they only work. Sweating, straining, bleeding, retching, he\n pushed himself towards his goal, trying to add one final touch of grace\n and custom to the rude irrationalness of it all.\n\n\n His eyes gave out a few feet from the pit. He felt his way towards it.\n Convulsions shook his body like a cat shakes a captive mouse. He humped\n his body forward between the seizures, hands outstretched, searching\n for the grave.\n\n\n And then he was upon it. One arm reached out for grass, and clutched\n bare space instead.\n\n\n He was home.\n\n\n He gathered energy from his final reservoirs of strength for one final\n movement that would throw him headlong into the shallow grave. He\n tensed his muscles, pulled his limbs up under him and started to roll\n into the hole.", "Once a year the Bureau issued The Index, an exact accounting of Earth's\n four billion inhabitants. Four billion names and addresses, compressed\n into microprint, a tremendous achievement even for the \"Proud Era.\"\n In all of his life, Charles had never once glanced at The Index.\n The average person had little necessity to do so since the Bureau\n information service would answer questions free of charge at any time.\n\n\n Reaching the gigantic building, Charles pushed aside the body of a\n young man and walked into the main foyer. Passing behind once-guarded\n doors, he entered the giant computer room and paused in admiration.\nOnly once, before the plague, had he seen the interior of this room.\n But he still remembered it and he still recalled the powerful emotional\n experience it had been those many years ago.", "A sheet of metal, bent double, served for the monument proper. A nearby\n tool shed yielded up a can of paint and a brush. By the glow of one of\n the streetlights Charles worked out the inscription.\n\n\n \"It ought to be something impressive,\" he thought out loud. \"Something\n fitting the occasion.\"\n\n\n What did one say on these situations? There was so little chance to\n practice up for things like this. But it ought to be good, it ought to\n be proper.\n\n\n \"'In this now hallowed corner of the planet Earth—' No. That sounds\n too ... too....\"\n\n\n Make it simple, he thought. And he finally wrote:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH\n\n\n Yes. That was it. Simple. Let whoever came afterwards figure out the\n rest. Let them decide. He smiled and finished the painting.", "All children had to have a brain-wave recording made by the Bureau\n during the first month of their life. And again at the age of 10 each\n child returned to the Bureau for a recheck. It was for this latter\n recording that Charles had come to the Bureau some twenty-two years\n before and a friendly guard had let him peep briefly into the computer\n room. The impression of intense activity, of organized confusion, of\n mechanical wonder had remained with him the rest of his life.\n\n\n \"So different now,\" he thought, surveying the room. \"Now it's empty, so\n empty.\" The machine seemed to reflect the stillness, the very deadness\n of the world. The silence became unbearable.\n\n\n Charles walked to the master control panel. With newly acquired\n dexterity he switched the computer screens on and watched them glow\n to life. All around the world sensitive receiving stations pulsed to\n activity, sending out searching fingers, hunting for elusive patterns\n of neutral energy, mapping and tabulating the results.", "Here another page crept in between the cracks of a pier on the\n riverfront, dropping gently to the caressing eddies of the water (read\n the names: Smith, Smitha, Smitj).\n\n\n And here two pages danced down into Central Park, pirouetted,\n promenaded, and finally came to rest against a propped-up piece of\n metal (read the names: Whit, Whita, Whitacomb).\n\n\n It was not until the dusty morning sun stirred up the breezes that they\n fluttered down into the shallow hole beneath, unnoticed. The writing on\n the metal, until then partially obscured by the papers, became legible:\nHERE LIES THE BODY OF\n\n THE LAST MAN ON EARTH—\n\n CHARLES J. ZZYZST\n\n GO TO HELL!", "What about—?\nChance. That was it! The laws of probability, the bell-shaped curve,\n normal distribution, rectilinear regression. More people per square\n foot in New York than elsewhere. The first person who died was from New\n York, so the last person who gave way to the disease should come from\n here too. Spin the wheel; throw the dice; toss the coin.\n\n\n So simple to explain by the laws of chance. No need for any underlying\n assumptions about good and evil, no need for teleological arguments\n concerning cause and effect. Simply explain it by chance. Somebody had\n to be the last to go and that was—\n\n\n \"No,\" Charles said, standing up in the quiet of the spring evening.\n \"No, chance won't do it. No man can reckon with chance. The mind\n rejects such things. There must be something beyond mere accident.\n There must be!\"\n\n\n He sighed slowly.", "The main computer screen dominated one wall of the room. Other smaller\n screens clustered around it. On these screens could be graphed the\n population of any and every part of the globe. An illuminated counter\n immediately above it would give the numerical strength of the area\n being sampled while the screen would show population density by\n individual pinpoints of light that merged to form brightness patterns.\n\n\n \"I'll try New York first,\" he said to himself, knowing that he was a\n coward, afraid to check the whole world from the start. \"I'll start\n with New York and work up.\"\n\n\n Charles activated the switches that would flash a schematic map of New\n York on the screen. \"There's bound to be somebody else left here. After\n all, there were at least twenty of us just a couple of days ago.\" And\n one of them, a beautiful woman, had invited him up to her apartment,\n not because she liked him, but because....\n\n\n The main screen focused itself, the patterns shifting into a\n recognizable perceptual image.", "Charles struggled to end his body's disorganized responses, to\n channelize all his energy into one direction. His mind came back into\n action. He set up his goal; everything else seemed irrelevant: he had\n to get back to the park, to his hermit's cave, to his long, narrow\n home. He couldn't die until then.\n\n\n Ten minutes.\n\n\n He was allotted ten minutes before the end.\n\n\n It could have been ten years or ten seconds, for now objective time\n meant nothing to him. It was not a matter of measuring seconds and\n minutes. It was a matter of forgetting time and measuring space.\n\n\n He concentrated on the grave; he forced his body to become an unwilling\n machine. While he could, he walked, forcing himself on. When his legs\n gave way, he crawled. When his knees buckled, he rolled. When his\n stomach protested, he vomited. It made no difference.", "It had been very pleasant that afternoon. She had given of herself\n freely, warmly, and Charles had accepted. But then he had known\n that she would. It was not him, it was the circumstances. Under the\n circumstances, she would have given herself to any man—\n\n\n \"Why did it have to be her—or me? Why should it have to happen to\n anybody! Why!\"\nShe would have given herself to any man—\nHis thoughts beat a rapid crescendo, activating emotions, stimulating\n sensations of angry rage. He wanted to cry, to weep angry tears of\n protest.\n\n\n To any man, WHO HAPPENED TO BE THE LAST MAN ON EARTH!\n\n\n Charles picked up a heavy book end off the table and crashed it through\n the thick pane of window glass.", "\"\nMaybe I'm not the last!\n\"\n\n\n The thought struck him with suddenness, promisingly, edged with\n swelling comfort to fill his emptiness.\n\n\n Charles got up slowly, noticing for the first time that his fingers\n were badly cut. He wrapped a handkerchief around them and forgot them.\n He had to know—he had to find out.\nAs he turned to leave, he noticed again the woman lying in radiant\n state upon the bed. He walked to her side and leaned over, kissing her\n gently on the forehead. As he straightened up, his leg caught against\n her arm, pushing it slightly. The woman's arm slipped from its position\n and dangled from the edge of the bed like a crazy pendulum. Charles\n picked it up and folded it across her now cold breasts. He started\n to pull the sheet over her nude form, then stopped, smiling at his\n conventionality. After all, it didn't make any difference now.", "A thought teased at him. Charles looked at the woman again and decided\n that she still looked beautiful in spite of the harshness of the\n room's lighting. He touched buttons by the edge of the bed and the\n illumination quieted to a soft glow, wrapping her in a radiant halo.\n Charles smiled wanly and got up. He stood by the bed looking at her.\n\n\n \"I could have fallen in love with you once. A year ago, perhaps, or\n longer. But not now. Not now.\" He turned away and walked to the window.\n \"Now the world is dead. The whole world is dead.\"\n\n\n New York lay quietly below him. It was the hour of indecision when\n day has not quite made up its mind to leave and night has not yet\n attacked in force. The streetlights were already on, making geometric\n patterns through the dusk of Central Park. Some of the billboards were\n shining, their relays activated by darkness-sensitized solenoids. A\n reddish-orange pallor hung from the sky." ] ]
train	61090	[ "What would have likely happened if the bank robbers' car tires had not melted?", "What can we infer from the passage that caused Mr. Higgins to go crazy?", "Why did the tear gas that the police were using on Mr. Higgins not work to run him out of the house?", "What caused Judy's yelling to be ignored by the gangs in the schoolyard?", "If the newspapers and the police choose to continue ignoring the letters from The Scorpion, what will likely happen?", "What was the intention of Higgins' lawyer by saying that Higgins had put \"The Scorpion\" on his gun barrel himself?", "Why did the teenagers in the schoolyard all throw their weapons away at the same time?", "Why was Halloween night chosen as the time for the rumble in the schoolyard?", "Had the gun barrel not became extremely hot and burned Higgins, what would have likely happened during his standoff?" ]	[ [ "The car would have wrecked regardless and the robbers would have been caught. ", "The police would have stopped them in a chase. ", "The robbers would have gotten away from the scene. ", "The robbers would have later returned to rob the bank again and get caught. " ], [ "He was no longer happy with his wife hence why he murdered her. ", "He was tired of his job and didn't want to return.", "He was overly tired and delirious. ", "He had flunked an exam and was overwhelmed with stress. " ], [ "He was unaffected by the gas because of his deranged mindset. ", "The windows were either broken or open and he was able to throw them back out. ", "Higgins was too preoccupied by the burns on his hands to care about the tear gas. ", "Higgins was hanging out the windows shooting and was able to breathe fresh air. " ], [ "The surprise of the kids who showed up in costumes trying to return home. ", "They were already fighting and failed to hear her over the shouting. ", "They couldn't hear her over their own hollering because of the intense cold weapons and jackets. ", "They were too distracted by the approaching police lights. " ], [ "The Scorpion will likely retaliate against the newspapers in his own dangerous stunt. ", "The Scorpion will step in again, leaving his signature, and likely send another letter to the newspaper as a warning to criminals. ", "The Scorpion will likely turn evil himself and start antagonizing attacks. ", "Hanks will be proven right and show that there is no such person who is fighting crime and leaving a signature." ], [ "To avoid a trial by admitting fault immediately and getting the job done quickly", "In hopes of the judge and jury seeing the other vigilante acts of The Scorpion and cutting Higgins some slack. ", "In hopes of receiving mercy for the crimes.", "To try to use an insanity defense for Higgins. " ], [ "The police were coming and they needed to get the weapons out of their possession. ", "They didn't want the approaching children to see them holding weapons. ", "Judy was a suitable lookout and kept them distracted by yelling, \"Fuzz!\"", "The weapons became too cold to touch. " ], [ "Because on that particular night, there were no police on patrol because of the recent issues with The Scorpion.", "Because everyone was already dressed in disguise and not easily recognized. ", "Because the police would have a difficult time keeping track of so many children who were out. ", "Because the schoolyard was completely abandoned and they wouldn't need a lookout. " ], [ "Higgins' wife would have eventually been able to convince him to surrender. ", "The police would have eventually given up on their suspect and left the scene. ", "The police would have had to force entry into his home and take him into custody. ", "Higgins' sister would have eventually been able to convince him to surrender. " ] ]	[ 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 4, 4, 3, 3 ]	[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0 ]	[ [ "\"What I can't figure out,\" said Stevenson, \"is exactly what made those\n tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't\nthat\nhot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast\n enough to melt your tires down.\"\n\n\n Pauling shrugged again. \"We got them. That's the important thing.\"\n\n\n \"Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out\n Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes\n blow out and there they are.\" Stevenson shook his head. \"I can't figure\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,\" suggested Pauling. \"They picked\n the wrong car to steal.\"\n\n\n \"And\nthat\ndoesn't make sense, either,\" said Stevenson. \"Why steal a\n car that could be identified as easily as that one?\"", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came\n driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank,\n and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and\n drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police\n cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting\n like the ships in pirate movies.\n\n\n There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers\n were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong\n way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear\n path behind them.\n\n\n Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly\n started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And\n all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers\n when they crawled dazedly out of their car.", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "\"Hey,\" said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. \"Hey, that was something,\n huh, Mom?\"\n\n\n \"Come along home,\" said his mother, grabbing his hand. \"We don't want\n to be involved.\"\n\"It was the nuttiest thing,\" said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. \"An\n operation planned that well, you'd think they'd pay attention to their\n getaway car, you know what I mean?\"\n\n\n Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. \"They always slip up,\" he said.\n \"Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, but their\ntires\n.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" said Pauling, \"it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed\n whatever was handiest.\"", "\"That's right,\" said Hastings. \"I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm\n a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car\n was gone.\"\n\n\n \"You left the keys in it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, why not?\" demanded Hastings belligerently. \"If I'm making just\n a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one\n customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"The car was stolen,\" Stevenson reminded him.\n\n\n Hastings grumbled and glared. \"It's always been perfectly safe up till\n now.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. In here.\"\n\n\n Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. \"It's ruined!\"\n he cried. \"What did you do to the tires?\"", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they\n all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers,\n brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs\n over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled\n low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous.\n\n\n The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two\n calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of\n the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and\n said to him in a low voice, \"Think about retirement, my friend.\" The\n third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor's bag, walked\n quickly around behind the teller's counter and started filling it with\n money.\n\n\n It was just like the movies.", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at\n his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger.\n There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named\n Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and\n Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister\n Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was\n Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their\n joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward\n (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars\n dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father\n in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels,\n withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three\n bank robbers.", "The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man\n went berserk.\n\n\n It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica\n Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood,\n composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a\n Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.\n\n\n Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the\n third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home,\n brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.\n\n\n As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to\n awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he\n really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then\n allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.", "\"Why? What was it, a foreign make?\"\n\n\n \"No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half\n the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had\n burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a\n block away.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car,\" said Pauling.\n\n\n \"For a well-planned operation like this one,\" said Stevenson, \"they\n made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\n \"What do they have to say about it?\" Pauling demanded.\n\n\n \"Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all.\"\n\n\n The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head\n in. \"The owner of that Chevvy's here,\" he said.", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the\n crudely-lettered words, \"The Scorpion\" burned black into the paint of\n the trunk lid. \"I really don't know,\" he said. \"It wasn't there before\n the car was stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not!\"\n\n\n Stevenson frowned. \"Now, why in the world did they do that?\"\n\n\n \"I suggest,\" said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, \"you ask them that.\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking\n about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us.\" He looked at the\n trunk lid again. \"It's the nuttiest thing,\" he said thoughtfully....\n\n\n That was on Wednesday.", "\"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went\n running around Judy and dashing off down the street.\n\n\n \"Hey, Eddie!\" shouted one of the other kids. \"Eddie, come back!\"\n\n\n Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase\n the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would\n come running along after her. She didn't know what to do.\n\n\n A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems.\n \"Cheez,\" said one of the kids. \"The cops!\"\n\n\n \"Fuzz!\" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the\n schoolyard, shouting, \"Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!\"\n\n\n But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the\n schoolyard." ], [ "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man\n went berserk.\n\n\n It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica\n Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood,\n composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a\n Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.\n\n\n Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the\n third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home,\n brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.\n\n\n As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to\n awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he\n really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then\n allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One\n concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors\n and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to\n search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home\n audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and\n undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the\n house.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere,\n and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the\n corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr.\n Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The\n police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they\n had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway.\n Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge\n anyone present to hand-to-hand combat.", "Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the\n crudely-lettered words, \"The Scorpion\" burned black into the paint of\n the trunk lid. \"I really don't know,\" he said. \"It wasn't there before\n the car was stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not!\"\n\n\n Stevenson frowned. \"Now, why in the world did they do that?\"\n\n\n \"I suggest,\" said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, \"you ask them that.\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking\n about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us.\" He looked at the\n trunk lid again. \"It's the nuttiest thing,\" he said thoughtfully....\n\n\n That was on Wednesday.", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "\"That's right,\" said Hastings. \"I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm\n a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car\n was gone.\"\n\n\n \"You left the keys in it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, why not?\" demanded Hastings belligerently. \"If I'm making just\n a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one\n customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"The car was stolen,\" Stevenson reminded him.\n\n\n Hastings grumbled and glared. \"It's always been perfectly safe up till\n now.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. In here.\"\n\n\n Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. \"It's ruined!\"\n he cried. \"What did you do to the tires?\"", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "\"How come the same name showed up each time, then?\" Stevenson asked\n desperately.\n\n\n \"How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these\n things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they\n write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens\n all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?\"\n\n\n \"But there's no explanation—\" started Stevenson.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just\ngave\nyou the\n explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty\n idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there\n was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned\n refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting\n all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch.\n Remember?\"", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "\"What I can't figure out,\" said Stevenson, \"is exactly what made those\n tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't\nthat\nhot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast\n enough to melt your tires down.\"\n\n\n Pauling shrugged again. \"We got them. That's the important thing.\"\n\n\n \"Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out\n Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes\n blow out and there they are.\" Stevenson shook his head. \"I can't figure\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,\" suggested Pauling. \"They picked\n the wrong car to steal.\"\n\n\n \"And\nthat\ndoesn't make sense, either,\" said Stevenson. \"Why steal a\n car that could be identified as easily as that one?\"" ], [ "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One\n concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors\n and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to\n search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home\n audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and\n undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the\n house.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere,\n and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the\n corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr.\n Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The\n police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they\n had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway.\n Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge\n anyone present to hand-to-hand combat.", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man\n went berserk.\n\n\n It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica\n Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood,\n composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a\n Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.\n\n\n Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the\n third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home,\n brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.\n\n\n As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to\n awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he\n really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then\n allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "\"That's right,\" said Hastings. \"I stepped into a bar on my route. I'm\n a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car\n was gone.\"\n\n\n \"You left the keys in it?\"\n\n\n \"Well, why not?\" demanded Hastings belligerently. \"If I'm making just\n a quick stop—I never spend more than five minutes with any one\n customer—I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?\"\n\n\n \"The car was stolen,\" Stevenson reminded him.\n\n\n Hastings grumbled and glared. \"It's always been perfectly safe up till\n now.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir. In here.\"\n\n\n Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. \"It's ruined!\"\n he cried. \"What did you do to the tires?\"", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "\"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went\n running around Judy and dashing off down the street.\n\n\n \"Hey, Eddie!\" shouted one of the other kids. \"Eddie, come back!\"\n\n\n Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase\n the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would\n come running along after her. She didn't know what to do.\n\n\n A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems.\n \"Cheez,\" said one of the kids. \"The cops!\"\n\n\n \"Fuzz!\" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the\n schoolyard, shouting, \"Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!\"\n\n\n But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the\n schoolyard.", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came\n driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank,\n and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and\n drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police\n cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting\n like the ships in pirate movies.\n\n\n There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers\n were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong\n way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear\n path behind them.\n\n\n Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly\n started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And\n all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers\n when they crawled dazedly out of their car.", "He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the\n stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, \"The\n Scorpion.\"\nYou don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political\n connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As\n Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both\n more imaginative than most—\"You gotta be able to second-guess the\n smart boys\"—and to be a complete realist—\"You gotta have both feet\n on the ground.\" If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was\n best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.\n\n\n The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore.\n \"Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?\" he demanded.", "\"I couldn't care less,\" Judy told them callously. \"You can't go down\n that street.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete\n and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt\n and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a\n black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. \"Why can't we go down\n there?\" this apparition demanded.\n\n\n \"Because I said so,\" Judy told him. \"Now, you kids get away from here.\n Take off.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. \"Hey, they're\n fighting down there!\"\n\n\n \"It's a rumble,\" said Judy proudly. \"You twerps don't want to be\n involved.\"" ], [ "\"I couldn't care less,\" Judy told them callously. \"You can't go down\n that street.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete\n and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt\n and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a\n black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. \"Why can't we go down\n there?\" this apparition demanded.\n\n\n \"Because I said so,\" Judy told him. \"Now, you kids get away from here.\n Take off.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. \"Hey, they're\n fighting down there!\"\n\n\n \"It's a rumble,\" said Judy proudly. \"You twerps don't want to be\n involved.\"", "The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving\n their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling\n off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering.\n They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's\n warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both\n schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy\n and the rumble was over.\nJudy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great\n big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in\n the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street.", "\"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went\n running around Judy and dashing off down the street.\n\n\n \"Hey, Eddie!\" shouted one of the other kids. \"Eddie, come back!\"\n\n\n Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase\n the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would\n come running along after her. She didn't know what to do.\n\n\n A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems.\n \"Cheez,\" said one of the kids. \"The cops!\"\n\n\n \"Fuzz!\" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the\n schoolyard, shouting, \"Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!\"\n\n\n But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the\n schoolyard.", "At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the\n street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them\n carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks\n on.\n\n\n They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, \"Hey,\n you kids. Take off.\"\n\n\n One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. \"Who, us?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way.\"\n\n\n \"The subway's this way,\" objected the kid in the red mask.\n\n\n \"Who cares? You go around the other way.\"\n\"Listen, lady,\" said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, \"we got a long\n way to go to get home.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said another kid, in a black mask, \"and we're late as it is.\"", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around\n for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up\n carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on\n your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a\n JD.\n\n\n The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances\n on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and\n the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides\n claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys\n from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that\n had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and\n determined that the matter could only be settled in a war.", "Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen\n years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine,\n gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the\n Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to\n her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street.\n\n\n Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were\n dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark,\n particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone\n pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet\n Raider jacket and waited.\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The\n rumble had started.", "The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard.\n The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no\n pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner\n would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both\n entrances.\n\n\n The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate\n clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play\n chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of\n the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might\n come wandering through.", "\"Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'\" Stevenson told\n him. \"One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the\n Challengers.\"\n\n\n \"So they changed their name,\" said Hanks.\n\n\n \"Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over.\"\n\n\n \"It was a territorial war,\" Stevenson reminded him. \"They've admitted\n that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever\n seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.\"\n\n\n \"A bunch of juvenile delinquents,\" said Hanks in disgust. \"You take\n their word?\"\n\n\n \"Captain, did you read the article in the paper?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced through it.\"", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man\n went berserk.\n\n\n It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica\n Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood,\n composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a\n Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.\n\n\n Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the\n third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home,\n brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.\n\n\n As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to\n awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he\n really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then\n allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.", "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec\n punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to\n worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid\n gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or\n you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business.\n Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson.\"", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"" ], [ "The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the\nDaily News\nbrought a crank\n letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is,\n the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a\n newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address.\n\n\n The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor:\n\n\n The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion\n fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging\n Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS!\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It\n didn't rate a line in the paper.\nII", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the\n crudely-lettered words, \"The Scorpion\" burned black into the paint of\n the trunk lid. \"I really don't know,\" he said. \"It wasn't there before\n the car was stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not!\"\n\n\n Stevenson frowned. \"Now, why in the world did they do that?\"\n\n\n \"I suggest,\" said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, \"you ask them that.\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking\n about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us.\" He looked at the\n trunk lid again. \"It's the nuttiest thing,\" he said thoughtfully....\n\n\n That was on Wednesday.", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "\"Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'\" Stevenson told\n him. \"One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the\n Challengers.\"\n\n\n \"So they changed their name,\" said Hanks.\n\n\n \"Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over.\"\n\n\n \"It was a territorial war,\" Stevenson reminded him. \"They've admitted\n that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever\n seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.\"\n\n\n \"A bunch of juvenile delinquents,\" said Hanks in disgust. \"You take\n their word?\"\n\n\n \"Captain, did you read the article in the paper?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced through it.\"", "freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec\n punk's idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to\n worrying about what's happening in this precinct and forget about kid\n gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or\n you're going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business.\n Now, I don't want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson.\"", "\"How come the same name showed up each time, then?\" Stevenson asked\n desperately.\n\n\n \"How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these\n things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they\n write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens\n all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?\"\n\n\n \"But there's no explanation—\" started Stevenson.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just\ngave\nyou the\n explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty\n idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there\n was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned\n refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting\n all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch.\n Remember?\"", "He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the\n stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, \"The\n Scorpion.\"\nYou don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political\n connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As\n Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both\n more imaginative than most—\"You gotta be able to second-guess the\n smart boys\"—and to be a complete realist—\"You gotta have both feet\n on the ground.\" If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was\n best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.\n\n\n The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore.\n \"Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?\" he demanded.", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "\"Why? What was it, a foreign make?\"\n\n\n \"No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half\n the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had\n burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a\n block away.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car,\" said Pauling.\n\n\n \"For a well-planned operation like this one,\" said Stevenson, \"they\n made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\n \"What do they have to say about it?\" Pauling demanded.\n\n\n \"Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all.\"\n\n\n The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head\n in. \"The owner of that Chevvy's here,\" he said.", "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One\n concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors\n and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to\n search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home\n audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and\n undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the\n house.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere,\n and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the\n corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr.\n Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The\n police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they\n had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway.\n Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge\n anyone present to hand-to-hand combat.", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "CALL HIM NEMESIS\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\nCriminals, beware; the Scorpion is on\n\n your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and,\n\n for that matter, so do the cops!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe man with the handkerchief mask said, \"All right, everybody, keep\n tight. This is a holdup.\"", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving\n their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling\n off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering.\n They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's\n warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both\n schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy\n and the rumble was over.\nJudy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great\n big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in\n the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street." ], [ "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "\"How come the same name showed up each time, then?\" Stevenson asked\n desperately.\n\n\n \"How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these\n things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they\n write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens\n all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?\"\n\n\n \"But there's no explanation—\" started Stevenson.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just\ngave\nyou the\n explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty\n idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there\n was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned\n refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting\n all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch.\n Remember?\"", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the\n crudely-lettered words, \"The Scorpion\" burned black into the paint of\n the trunk lid. \"I really don't know,\" he said. \"It wasn't there before\n the car was stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not!\"\n\n\n Stevenson frowned. \"Now, why in the world did they do that?\"\n\n\n \"I suggest,\" said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, \"you ask them that.\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking\n about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us.\" He looked at the\n trunk lid again. \"It's the nuttiest thing,\" he said thoughtfully....\n\n\n That was on Wednesday.", "\"Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'\" Stevenson told\n him. \"One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the\n Challengers.\"\n\n\n \"So they changed their name,\" said Hanks.\n\n\n \"Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over.\"\n\n\n \"It was a territorial war,\" Stevenson reminded him. \"They've admitted\n that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever\n seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.\"\n\n\n \"A bunch of juvenile delinquents,\" said Hanks in disgust. \"You take\n their word?\"\n\n\n \"Captain, did you read the article in the paper?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced through it.\"", "He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the\n stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, \"The\n Scorpion.\"\nYou don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political\n connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As\n Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both\n more imaginative than most—\"You gotta be able to second-guess the\n smart boys\"—and to be a complete realist—\"You gotta have both feet\n on the ground.\" If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was\n best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.\n\n\n The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore.\n \"Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?\" he demanded.", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "\"Why? What was it, a foreign make?\"\n\n\n \"No, it was a Chevvy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half\n the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had\n burned in 'The Scorpion' in big black letters you could see half a\n block away.\"\n\n\n \"Maybe they didn't notice it when they stole the car,\" said Pauling.\n\n\n \"For a well-planned operation like this one,\" said Stevenson, \"they\n made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn't make any sense.\"\n\n\n \"What do they have to say about it?\" Pauling demanded.\n\n\n \"Nothing, what do you expect? They'll make no statement at all.\"\n\n\n The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head\n in. \"The owner of that Chevvy's here,\" he said.", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the\nDaily News\nbrought a crank\n letter. It was in the crank letter's most obvious form; that is,\n the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a\n newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address.\n\n\n The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor:\n\n\n The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion\n fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging\n Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS!\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It\n didn't rate a line in the paper.\nII", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "CALL HIM NEMESIS\nBy DONALD E. WESTLAKE\nCriminals, beware; the Scorpion is on\n\n your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury—and,\n\n for that matter, so do the cops!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1961.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nThe man with the handkerchief mask said, \"All right, everybody, keep\n tight. This is a holdup.\"" ], [ "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving\n their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling\n off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering.\n They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's\n warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both\n schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy\n and the rumble was over.\nJudy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great\n big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in\n the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street.", "The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard.\n The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no\n pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner\n would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both\n entrances.\n\n\n The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate\n clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play\n chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of\n the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might\n come wandering through.", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around\n for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up\n carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on\n your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a\n JD.\n\n\n The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances\n on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and\n the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides\n claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys\n from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that\n had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and\n determined that the matter could only be settled in a war.", "\"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went\n running around Judy and dashing off down the street.\n\n\n \"Hey, Eddie!\" shouted one of the other kids. \"Eddie, come back!\"\n\n\n Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase\n the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would\n come running along after her. She didn't know what to do.\n\n\n A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems.\n \"Cheez,\" said one of the kids. \"The cops!\"\n\n\n \"Fuzz!\" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the\n schoolyard, shouting, \"Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!\"\n\n\n But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the\n schoolyard.", "\"I couldn't care less,\" Judy told them callously. \"You can't go down\n that street.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete\n and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt\n and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a\n black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. \"Why can't we go down\n there?\" this apparition demanded.\n\n\n \"Because I said so,\" Judy told him. \"Now, you kids get away from here.\n Take off.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. \"Hey, they're\n fighting down there!\"\n\n\n \"It's a rumble,\" said Judy proudly. \"You twerps don't want to be\n involved.\"", "At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the\n street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them\n carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks\n on.\n\n\n They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, \"Hey,\n you kids. Take off.\"\n\n\n One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. \"Who, us?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way.\"\n\n\n \"The subway's this way,\" objected the kid in the red mask.\n\n\n \"Who cares? You go around the other way.\"\n\"Listen, lady,\" said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, \"we got a long\n way to go to get home.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said another kid, in a black mask, \"and we're late as it is.\"", "\"Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'\" Stevenson told\n him. \"One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the\n Challengers.\"\n\n\n \"So they changed their name,\" said Hanks.\n\n\n \"Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over.\"\n\n\n \"It was a territorial war,\" Stevenson reminded him. \"They've admitted\n that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever\n seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.\"\n\n\n \"A bunch of juvenile delinquents,\" said Hanks in disgust. \"You take\n their word?\"\n\n\n \"Captain, did you read the article in the paper?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced through it.\"", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen\n years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine,\n gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the\n Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to\n her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street.\n\n\n Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were\n dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark,\n particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone\n pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet\n Raider jacket and waited.\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The\n rumble had started.", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came\n driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank,\n and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and\n drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police\n cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting\n like the ships in pirate movies.\n\n\n There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers\n were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong\n way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear\n path behind them.\n\n\n Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly\n started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And\n all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers\n when they crawled dazedly out of their car.", "There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at\n his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger.\n There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named\n Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and\n Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister\n Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was\n Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their\n joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward\n (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars\n dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father\n in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels,\n withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three\n bank robbers.", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"" ], [ "The time was chosen: Hallowe'en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard.\n The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no\n pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner\n would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both\n entrances.\n\n\n The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate\n clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play\n chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of\n the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might\n come wandering through.", "Hallowe'en is a good time for a rumble. There's too many kids around\n for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you're picked up\n carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you're on\n your way to a Hallowe'en party and you're in costume. You're going as a\n JD.\n\n\n The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances\n on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and\n the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides\n claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys\n from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that\n had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and\n determined that the matter could only be settled in a war.", "\"I couldn't care less,\" Judy told them callously. \"You can't go down\n that street.\"\n\n\n \"Why not?\" demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete\n and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt\n and a flowing: black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a\n black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. \"Why can't we go down\n there?\" this apparition demanded.\n\n\n \"Because I said so,\" Judy told him. \"Now, you kids get away from here.\n Take off.\"\n\n\n \"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. \"Hey, they're\n fighting down there!\"\n\n\n \"It's a rumble,\" said Judy proudly. \"You twerps don't want to be\n involved.\"", "The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving\n their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling\n off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering.\n They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy's\n warning. They didn't even hear the police sirens. And all at once both\n schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy\n and the rumble was over.\nJudy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great\n big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in\n the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street.", "Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen\n years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine,\n gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the\n Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to\n her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street.\n\n\n Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were\n dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark,\n particularly on Hallowe'en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone\n pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet\n Raider jacket and waited.\n\n\n At eleven o'clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The\n rumble had started.", "At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the\n street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them\n carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe'en masks\n on.\n\n\n They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, \"Hey,\n you kids. Take off.\"\n\n\n One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. \"Who, us?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way.\"\n\n\n \"The subway's this way,\" objected the kid in the red mask.\n\n\n \"Who cares? You go around the other way.\"\n\"Listen, lady,\" said the kid in the red mask, aggrieved, \"we got a long\n way to go to get home.\"\n\n\n \"Yeah,\" said another kid, in a black mask, \"and we're late as it is.\"", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "\"Neither one of them was called 'The Scorpions,'\" Stevenson told\n him. \"One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the\n Challengers.\"\n\n\n \"So they changed their name,\" said Hanks.\n\n\n \"Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?\"\n\n\n \"Why not? Maybe that's what they were fighting over.\"\n\n\n \"It was a territorial war,\" Stevenson reminded him. \"They've admitted\n that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever\n seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.\"\n\n\n \"A bunch of juvenile delinquents,\" said Hanks in disgust. \"You take\n their word?\"\n\n\n \"Captain, did you read the article in the paper?\"\n\n\n \"I glanced through it.\"", "\"Hey!\" cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went\n running around Judy and dashing off down the street.\n\n\n \"Hey, Eddie!\" shouted one of the other kids. \"Eddie, come back!\"\n\n\n Judy wasn't sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase\n the one kid who'd gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would\n come running along after her. She didn't know what to do.\n\n\n A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems.\n \"Cheez,\" said one of the kids. \"The cops!\"\n\n\n \"Fuzz!\" screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the\n schoolyard, shouting, \"Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it's the fuzz!\"\n\n\n But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the\n schoolyard.", "And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.\nCaptain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was\n impatient as well. \"All right, Stevenson,\" he said. \"Make it fast, I've\n got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn't this comic-book thing\n of yours again.\"\n\n\n \"I'm afraid it is, Captain,\" said Stevenson. \"Did you see the morning\n paper?\"\n\n\n \"So what?\"\n\n\n \"Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?\"\n\n\n Captain Hanks sighed. \"Stevenson,\" he said wearily, \"are you going to\n try to connect every single time the word 'scorpion' comes up? What's\n the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?\"", "Stevenson followed Hastings' pointing finger, and saw again the\n crudely-lettered words, \"The Scorpion\" burned black into the paint of\n the trunk lid. \"I really don't know,\" he said. \"It wasn't there before\n the car was stolen?\"\n\n\n \"Of course not!\"\n\n\n Stevenson frowned. \"Now, why in the world did they do that?\"\n\n\n \"I suggest,\" said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, \"you ask them that.\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"It wouldn't do any good. They aren't talking\n about anything. I don't suppose they'll ever tell us.\" He looked at the\n trunk lid again. \"It's the nuttiest thing,\" he said thoughtfully....\n\n\n That was on Wednesday.", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "\"How come the same name showed up each time, then?\" Stevenson asked\n desperately.\n\n\n \"How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these\n things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they\n write 'The Golden Avengers' on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens\n all the time. Why not 'The Scorpion'? It couldn't occur to two people?\"\n\n\n \"But there's no explanation—\" started Stevenson.\n\n\n \"What do you mean, there's no explanation? I just\ngave\nyou the\n explanation. Look, Stevenson, I'm a busy man. You got a nutty\n idea—like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there\n was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned\n refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting\n all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch.\n Remember?\"", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the\n stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, \"The\n Scorpion.\"\nYou don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political\n connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As\n Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both\n more imaginative than most—\"You gotta be able to second-guess the\n smart boys\"—and to be a complete realist—\"You gotta have both feet\n on the ground.\" If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was\n best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.\n\n\n The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore.\n \"Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?\" he demanded.", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder." ], [ "The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day\n and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken.\n Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and\n dramatically.\n\n\n Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of\n shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and\n threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered\n down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell\n barrel first onto the lawn.\n\n\n Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a\n wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall\n into the arms of the waiting police.", "They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually\n trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was\n shouting: \"My hands! My hands!\"\n\n\n They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers\n were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was\n another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.\n\n\n Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn\n ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The\n neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.\n\n\n On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the\n precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William\n Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy\n individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle.\n He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.", "\"I guess,\" said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, \"I\n guess I'm trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made\n that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.\"\n\n\n \"What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are\n you trying to hand me?\"\n\n\n \"All I know,\" insisted Stevenson, \"is what I see.\"\n\n\n \"And all\nI\nknow,\" the captain told him, \"is Higgins put that name on\n his rifle himself. He says so.\"\n\n\n \"And what made it so hot?\"\n\n\n \"Hell, man, he'd been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do\n you\nthink\nmade it hot?\"\n\n\n \"All of a sudden?\"\n\n\n \"He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.\"", "The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One\n concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors\n and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to\n search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home\n audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and\n undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the\n house.\n\n\n The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere,\n and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the\n corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr.\n Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The\n police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they\n had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway.\n Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge\n anyone present to hand-to-hand combat.", "Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming\n out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting,\n \"Murder! Murder!\" At this point, neighbors called the police. One\n neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television\n stations, thereby earning forty dollars in \"news-tips\" rewards.\nBy chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt\n Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild\n Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a\n position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work\n with a Zoomar lens.\n\n\n In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house,\n firing at anything that moved.", "At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence,\n a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of\n similar homes. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted\n from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being\n annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells\n at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the\n hand and shoulder.", "\"I'm not sure,\" admitted Stevenson. \"But we've got these two things.\n First, there's the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for\n no reason at all, and somebody burns 'The Scorpion' onto the trunk.\n Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle\n all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he's got the burn marks to\n prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. 'The Scorpion'.\"\n\n\n \"He says he put that on there himself,\" said the captain.\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"His\nlawyer\nsays he put it on there.\n Higgins says he doesn't remember doing it. That's half the lawyer's\n case. He's trying to build up an insanity defense.\"\n\n\n \"He put it on there himself, Stevenson,\" said the captain with weary\n patience. \"What are you trying to prove?\"", "Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma\n Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins' sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the\n house at nine o'clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked\n bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and\n \"stop acting like a child.\" Neighbors reported to the police that they\n heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, \"Go away! Can't you let a\n man sleep?\"", "\"Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.\"\n\n\n Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. \"Look at that!\n There's melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What\n did you use, incendiary bullets?\"\n\n\n Stevenson shook his head. \"No, sir. When that happened they were two\n blocks away from the nearest policeman.\"\n\n\n \"Hmph.\" Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim,\n \"What in the name of God is that? You didn't tell me a bunch of\nkids\nhad stolen the car.\"\n\n\n \"It wasn't a bunch of kids,\" Stevenson told him. \"It was four\n professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in\n a bank holdup.\"\n\n\n \"Then why did they do\nthat\n?\"", "The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and\n the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man\n stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money\n into the black satchel.\n\n\n The man by the door said, \"Hurry up.\"\n\n\n The man with the satchel said, \"One more drawer.\"\n\n\n The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, \"Keep your\n shirt on.\"\n\n\n That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran\n pelting in her stocking feet for the door.\nThe man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, \"Hey!\" The man\n with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he'd\n been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the\n brass plate on Mr. Featherhall's desk.", "The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man\n went berserk.\n\n\n It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica\n Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood,\n composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a\n Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.\n\n\n Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the\n third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home,\n brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.\n\n\n As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to\n awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he\n really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then\n allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.", "\"I remember,\" said Stevenson.\n\n\n \"Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,\" the captain advised him.\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" said Stevenson....\n\n\n The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a\n crank letter to the\nDaily News\n:\n\n\n Dear Mr. Editor,\n\n\n You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could\n not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is\n safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.\nSincerely yours,\n\n THE SCORPION\n\n\n Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had\n seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the\n same place, and forgotten.\nIII", "\"Now, let\nme\ntell\nyou\nsomething,\" said Hanks severely. \"They heard\n the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they\n threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn't been\n part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before\n they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed\n up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn't have had anything in it\n but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the\n neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not\n bothering anybody.\nThat's\nwhat happened. And all this talk about", "The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did\n her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting\n out the front door and running down the street toward the police\n station in the next block, shouting, \"Help! Help! Robbery!\"\n\n\n The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came\n running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried\n to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with\n the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the\n floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front,\n in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.\n\n\n Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.", "He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the\n stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, \"The\n Scorpion.\"\nYou don't get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political\n connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As\n Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both\n more imaginative than most—\"You gotta be able to second-guess the\n smart boys\"—and to be a complete realist—\"You gotta have both feet\n on the ground.\" If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was\n best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.\n\n\n The realist side of the captain's nature was currently at the fore.\n \"Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?\" he demanded.", "Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came\n driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank,\n and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and\n drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police\n cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting\n like the ships in pirate movies.\n\n\n There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers\n were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong\n way and, as they'd come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear\n path behind them.\n\n\n Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly\n started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And\n all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers\n when they crawled dazedly out of their car.", "\"I don't know. All I know is it's the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And\n what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?\"\n\n\n \"They were defective,\" said Hanks promptly.\n\n\n \"All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the\n trunk?\"\n\n\n \"How do I know?\" demanded the captain. \"Kids put it on before the car\n was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows?\n What do\nthey\nsay?\"\n\n\n \"They say they didn't do it,\" said Stevenson. \"And they say they never\n saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it'd been\n there.\"\n\n\n The captain shook his head. \"I don't get it,\" he admitted. \"What are\n you trying to prove?\"", "\"What I can't figure out,\" said Stevenson, \"is exactly what made those\n tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn't\nthat\nhot. And they weren't going that fast. I don't think you could go fast\n enough to melt your tires down.\"\n\n\n Pauling shrugged again. \"We got them. That's the important thing.\"\n\n\n \"Still and all, it's nutty. They're free and clear, barrelling out\n Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes\n blow out and there they are.\" Stevenson shook his head. \"I can't figure\n it.\"\n\n\n \"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth,\" suggested Pauling. \"They picked\n the wrong car to steal.\"\n\n\n \"And\nthat\ndoesn't make sense, either,\" said Stevenson. \"Why steal a\n car that could be identified as easily as that one?\"", "There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at\n his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger.\n There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named\n Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and\n Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister\n Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was\n Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband's pay check in their\n joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward\n (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars\n dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father\n in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels,\n withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three\n bank robbers.", "\"All right. Here's what they say happened: They say they started\n fighting at eleven o'clock. And they just got going when all at once\n all the metal they were carrying—knives and tire chains and coins and\n belt buckles and everything else—got freezing cold, too cold to touch.\n And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to\n pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later\n collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been\n branded 'The Scorpion.'\"" ] ]
train	61204	[ "Why doesn’t Wayne like his parents? \n", "Which category and description best describes the type of story “The Recruit” is using as its base? \n", "What idea is introduced during the armory scene that becomes a motif throughout the rest of the story? \n", "What is the purpose of “the break out” instituted by the Youth Board? \n", "Which word best describe Wayne’s worst fear?\n", "What is the paradox of Wayne’s “breaking out” experience? \n", "Who is with Red when Wayne enters the Four Aces Club? \n", "What is significant about Wayne’s averse reaction to witnessing the stewbum beating? \n", "What is ironic about Wayne’s laughing in the face of violence?—First when he leaves his parents house and again when he chases Red. \n" ]	[ [ "His parents broke out when they were much younger than the age he is now, and he is embarrassed by this. \n", "His parents want to keep him from breaking out, knowing that the horrors Wayne will face are too much for him. \n", "No reason. Wayne is a bad egg and enjoys tormenting them. \n", "He feels that they are soft and stupid, that they’ve given up on what life has to offer.\n" ], [ "Coming of age: Wayne must kill one person during the break out test in order to become a functioning member of society. Breaking out is a rite of passage. ", "Boy Meets Girl: When Wayne chases Red and attempts to kill her, he realizes that killing isn’t for him and that the rest of his life should\n", "Animal Rights: The story is an exploration of Wayne’s realization that cats and mice should not be subject to violence. \n", "Man vs. Nature: The entire story is dedicated to exploring how a society can kill the animalistic natures within a human body and soul. \n" ], [ "The idea that Wayne's end of curfew will mean more trips to the armory. More weapons always. ", "The idea of cat and mouse games. From this point on Wayne thinks of his duty in terms of hunting. \nThe end of curfew. From this point on Wayne wants to live the rest of his life without curfew.", "The fear of ending up a counter boy like the corporal. From this point on Wayne does everything he can not to end up like the corporal.\n", "The exciting and scary power of the .38 and the switch blade. From this point on Wayne feels more powerful than ever\n" ], [ "Requiring that all youths commit one violent act as a rite of passage to adulthood is the only way the city has found to best fight crime. \n", "Requiring that all youths commit one violent act as a rite of passage to adulthood is thought to eradicate any violent urges that might occur later in life. \n", "Requiring that all youths commit one violent act as a rite of passage to adulthood is thought to show what skillset each teen is most capable of. \n", "Requiring that all youths commit one violent act as a rite of passage to adulthood is thought to be the best way to take care of the city’s mouse and cat infestation. \n" ], [ "Gun", "Cat", "Punk", "Red" ], [ "The fact that Wayne feels bad for the stewbum demonstrates that he feels more for humanity than the Corporal accuses him of. \n", "The fact that Wayne laughs during his chase with Red is paradoxical to the way he demonstrates empathy for his father. \n", "-The fact that Wayne cannot complete his kill suggests that violence is not necessarily an inherent part of humanity, such as the state claims. \n", "The fact that Wayne cannot complete his kills suggests that he will become like how mother, which is the opposite of what he wants for himself. \n" ], [ "A hefty psycho who drinks too much \n", "A hefty psycho who has killed five people \n", "A hefty psycho with a cat’s face \n", "A hefty psycho who has abducted Red \n" ], [ "It foreshadows that Wayne will not be able to go through with his kill\n", "It is symbolic for the inner rage bubbling within Wayne’s teenage brain. \n", "It references the rage he feels toward his cowardly and stupid father\n", "It foreshadows the violence Wayne will do to Red\n" ], [ "His laughs suggest he enjoys violence, but really they are a cry for help. \n", "His real feelings about violence are the opposite of anything comical. He takes his job with the state very seriously.\n", "His real feelings about violence are the opposite of what his maniacal laugh suggests. It turns out he isn’t a heartless killer. \n", "Wayne’s laughing suggests that he is always in control, when in reality it is actually his mother and Red who know the truth about the world.\n" ] ]	[ 4, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1, 3 ]	[ 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1 ]	[ [ "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "\"No, sir,\" Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. \"I'm sorry I punked out.\"\n\n\n \"Give him the treatment,\" the doctor said wearily. \"And send him back\n to his mother.\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split\n open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there\n was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his\n poker-playing pals.\n\n\n They had all punked out.\n\n\n Like him.", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "THE RECRUIT\nBY BRYCE WALTON\nIt was dirty work, but it would\n\n make him a man. And kids had a\n\n right to grow up—some of them!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs.\n\n\n The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut\n and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously\n polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty\n that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all,\n marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out.", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "The old man said, \"He'll be okay. Let him alone.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Hell,\" the old man said. \"Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting\n for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough.\"\n\n\n Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly.\n\n\n \"We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember\n about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to\n go, like they say. You read the books.\"\n\n\n \"But he's unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What\n do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or\n we'll be late.\"", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement.\n \"Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and\n you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes\n are clever hellcats in a dark alley.\"\n\n\n \"You must be a genius,\" Wayne said. \"A corporal with no hair and still\n a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad.\"\n\n\n The corporal sighed wearily. \"You can get that balloon head\n ventilated, bud, and good.\"", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "\"Sure you will, punk,\" smiled Captain Jack. \"She'll be wearing yellow\n slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty\n psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people.\n They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and\n they're your key to the stars.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n \"So run along and make out, punk,\" grinned Captain Jack.\nA copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright\n respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river.\n\n\n Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's\n quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The\n Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away." ], [ "THE RECRUIT\nBY BRYCE WALTON\nIt was dirty work, but it would\n\n make him a man. And kids had a\n\n right to grow up—some of them!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs.\n\n\n The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut\n and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously\n polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty\n that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all,\n marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out.", "\"Wayne Seton. Draft call.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\" The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote\n on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. \"Go to the Armory and\n check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to\n Captain Jack, room 307.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, sarge dear,\" Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory.\n\n\n A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne.\n Finally he said, \"So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid\n breaking out tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Hold your teeth, pop,\" Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a\n cigarette. \"I've decided.\"", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "The cane darted up. A blade snicked from the end and stopped an inch\n from Wayne's nose. He jerked up a shaky hand involuntarily and clamped\n a knuckle-ridged gag to his gasping mouth.\n\n\n Captain Jack chuckled. \"All right, superboy.\" He handed Wayne his\n passcard. \"Curfew's off, punk, for 6 hours. You got 6 hours to make\n out.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West\n Side. Know where that is, punk?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir, but I'll find it fast.\"", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "\"Bad, I know! So get it over with, please. Hurry, hurry.\"\n\n\n She was small and white and quivering. She moaned but kept staring up\n at him.\n\n\n He ripped off his rivet-studded belt and swung once, then groaned and\n shuffled away from her.\n\n\n He kept backing toward the door. She crawled after him, begging and\n clutching with both arms as she wriggled forward on her knees.\n\n\n \"Don't run. Please. Kill me! It'll be someone else if you don't. Oh,\n God, I'm so tired waiting and running!\"\n\n\n \"I can't,\" he said, and sickness soured in his throat.\n\n\n \"Please.\"\n\n\n \"I can't, I can't!\"", "\"Sure you will, punk,\" smiled Captain Jack. \"She'll be wearing yellow\n slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty\n psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people.\n They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and\n they're your key to the stars.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n \"So run along and make out, punk,\" grinned Captain Jack.\nA copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright\n respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river.\n\n\n Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's\n quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The\n Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away.", "The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement.\n \"Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and\n you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes\n are clever hellcats in a dark alley.\"\n\n\n \"You must be a genius,\" Wayne said. \"A corporal with no hair and still\n a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad.\"\n\n\n The corporal sighed wearily. \"You can get that balloon head\n ventilated, bud, and good.\"", "She crouched in the corner panting. He took his time moving in. He\n snickered as he flashed the switchblade and circled it like a serpent's\n tongue. He watched what was left of her nerves go to pieces like rotten\n cloth.\n\"Do it quick, hunter,\" she whispered. \"Please do it quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's that, baby?\"\n\n\n \"I'm tired running. Kill me first. Beat me after. They won't know the\n difference.\"\n\n\n \"I'm gonna bruise and beat you,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Kill me first,\" she begged. \"I don't want—\" She began to cry. She\n cried right up in his face, her wide eyes unblinking, and her mouth\n open.\n\n\n \"You got bad blood, baby,\" he snarled. He laughed but it didn't sound\n like him and something was wrong with his belly. It was knotting up.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"" ], [ "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead.", "\"Wayne Seton. Draft call.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\" The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote\n on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. \"Go to the Armory and\n check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to\n Captain Jack, room 307.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, sarge dear,\" Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory.\n\n\n A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne.\n Finally he said, \"So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid\n breaking out tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Hold your teeth, pop,\" Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a\n cigarette. \"I've decided.\"", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from\n Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind.\n He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale,\n secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted\n potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells.\n Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath\n through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with\n the shadows of mysterious promise.\n\n\n He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously\n into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as\n he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling.\nFOUR ACES CLUB\nHe parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging\n the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass\n filtering through windows painted black.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "She crouched in the corner panting. He took his time moving in. He\n snickered as he flashed the switchblade and circled it like a serpent's\n tongue. He watched what was left of her nerves go to pieces like rotten\n cloth.\n\"Do it quick, hunter,\" she whispered. \"Please do it quick.\"\n\n\n \"What's that, baby?\"\n\n\n \"I'm tired running. Kill me first. Beat me after. They won't know the\n difference.\"\n\n\n \"I'm gonna bruise and beat you,\" he said.\n\n\n \"Kill me first,\" she begged. \"I don't want—\" She began to cry. She\n cried right up in his face, her wide eyes unblinking, and her mouth\n open.\n\n\n \"You got bad blood, baby,\" he snarled. He laughed but it didn't sound\n like him and something was wrong with his belly. It was knotting up.", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's." ], [ "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "The old man said, \"He'll be okay. Let him alone.\"\n\n\n \"But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time.\"\n\n\n \"Hell,\" the old man said. \"Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting\n for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough.\"\n\n\n Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly.\n\n\n \"We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember\n about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to\n go, like they say. You read the books.\"\n\n\n \"But he's unhappy.\"\n\n\n \"Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What\n do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or\n we'll be late.\"", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "\"Too bad,\" the doctor said. \"We all have aggressive impulses, primitive\n needs that must be expressed early, purged. There's murder in all\n of us, Seton. The impulse shouldn't be denied or suppressed, but\neducated\n. The state used to kill them. Isn't it better all around,\n Seton, for us to do it, as part of growing up? What was the matter,\n Seton?\"\n\n\n \"I—felt sorry for her.\"\n\n\n \"Is that all you can say about it?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n The doctor pressed a buzzer. Two men in white coats entered.\n\n\n \"You should have got it out of your system, Seton, but now it's still\n in there. I can't turn you out and have it erupt later—and maybe shed\n clean innocent blood, can I?\"", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "THE RECRUIT\nBY BRYCE WALTON\nIt was dirty work, but it would\n\n make him a man. And kids had a\n\n right to grow up—some of them!\n\n\n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from\n\n Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962.\n\n Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that\n\n the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\nWayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs.\n\n\n The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut\n and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously\n polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty\n that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all,\n marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out.", "The cane darted up. A blade snicked from the end and stopped an inch\n from Wayne's nose. He jerked up a shaky hand involuntarily and clamped\n a knuckle-ridged gag to his gasping mouth.\n\n\n Captain Jack chuckled. \"All right, superboy.\" He handed Wayne his\n passcard. \"Curfew's off, punk, for 6 hours. You got 6 hours to make\n out.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West\n Side. Know where that is, punk?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir, but I'll find it fast.\"", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "\"Sure you will, punk,\" smiled Captain Jack. \"She'll be wearing yellow\n slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty\n psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people.\n They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and\n they're your key to the stars.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n \"So run along and make out, punk,\" grinned Captain Jack.\nA copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright\n respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river.\n\n\n Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's\n quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The\n Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away.", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "\"No, sir,\" Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. \"I'm sorry I punked out.\"\n\n\n \"Give him the treatment,\" the doctor said wearily. \"And send him back\n to his mother.\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split\n open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there\n was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his\n poker-playing pals.\n\n\n They had all punked out.\n\n\n Like him.", "\"Wayne Seton. Draft call.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\" The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote\n on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. \"Go to the Armory and\n check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to\n Captain Jack, room 307.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, sarge dear,\" Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory.\n\n\n A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne.\n Finally he said, \"So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid\n breaking out tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Hold your teeth, pop,\" Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a\n cigarette. \"I've decided.\"", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "\"Bad, I know! So get it over with, please. Hurry, hurry.\"\n\n\n She was small and white and quivering. She moaned but kept staring up\n at him.\n\n\n He ripped off his rivet-studded belt and swung once, then groaned and\n shuffled away from her.\n\n\n He kept backing toward the door. She crawled after him, begging and\n clutching with both arms as she wriggled forward on her knees.\n\n\n \"Don't run. Please. Kill me! It'll be someone else if you don't. Oh,\n God, I'm so tired waiting and running!\"\n\n\n \"I can't,\" he said, and sickness soured in his throat.\n\n\n \"Please.\"\n\n\n \"I can't, I can't!\"" ], [ "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "\"No, sir,\" Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. \"I'm sorry I punked out.\"\n\n\n \"Give him the treatment,\" the doctor said wearily. \"And send him back\n to his mother.\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split\n open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there\n was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his\n poker-playing pals.\n\n\n They had all punked out.\n\n\n Like him.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from\n Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind.\n He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale,\n secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted\n potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells.\n Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath\n through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with\n the shadows of mysterious promise.\n\n\n He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously\n into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as\n he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling.\nFOUR ACES CLUB\nHe parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging\n the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass\n filtering through windows painted black.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet." ], [ "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "\"No, sir,\" Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. \"I'm sorry I punked out.\"\n\n\n \"Give him the treatment,\" the doctor said wearily. \"And send him back\n to his mother.\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split\n open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there\n was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his\n poker-playing pals.\n\n\n They had all punked out.\n\n\n Like him.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from\n Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind.\n He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale,\n secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted\n potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells.\n Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath\n through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with\n the shadows of mysterious promise.\n\n\n He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously\n into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as\n he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling.\nFOUR ACES CLUB\nHe parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging\n the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass\n filtering through windows painted black.", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead.", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "\"Wayne Seton. Draft call.\"\n\n\n \"Oh.\" The sergeant checked his name off a roster and nodded. He wrote\n on a slip of paper, handed the pass to Wayne. \"Go to the Armory and\n check out whatever your lusting little heart desires. Then report to\n Captain Jack, room 307.\"\n\n\n \"Thanks, sarge dear,\" Wayne said and took the elevator up to the Armory.\n\n\n A tired fat corporal with a naked head blinked up at tall Wayne.\n Finally he said, \"So make up your mind, bud. Think you're the only kid\n breaking out tonight?\"\n\n\n \"Hold your teeth, pop,\" Wayne said, coolly and slowly lighting a\n cigarette. \"I've decided.\"" ], [ "The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from\n Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind.\n He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale,\n secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted\n potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells.\n Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath\n through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with\n the shadows of mysterious promise.\n\n\n He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously\n into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as\n he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling.\nFOUR ACES CLUB\nHe parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging\n the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass\n filtering through windows painted black.", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "\"Sure you will, punk,\" smiled Captain Jack. \"She'll be wearing yellow\n slacks and a red shirt. Black hair, a cute trick. She's with a hefty\n psycho who eats punks for breakfast. He's butchered five people.\n They're both on top of the Undesirable list, Seton. They got to go and\n they're your key to the stars.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n \"So run along and make out, punk,\" grinned Captain Jack.\nA copcar stopped Wayne as he started over the bridge, out of bright\n respectable neon into the murky westside slum over the river.\n\n\n Wayne waved the pass card, signed by Captain Jack, under the cop's\n quivering nose. The cop shivered and stepped back and waved him on. The\n Olds roared over the bridge as the night's rain blew away.", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "The cane darted up. A blade snicked from the end and stopped an inch\n from Wayne's nose. He jerked up a shaky hand involuntarily and clamped\n a knuckle-ridged gag to his gasping mouth.\n\n\n Captain Jack chuckled. \"All right, superboy.\" He handed Wayne his\n passcard. \"Curfew's off, punk, for 6 hours. You got 6 hours to make\n out.\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"Your beast is primed and waiting at the Four Aces Club on the West\n Side. Know where that is, punk?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir, but I'll find it fast.\"", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement.\n \"Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and\n you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes\n are clever hellcats in a dark alley.\"\n\n\n \"You must be a genius,\" Wayne said. \"A corporal with no hair and still\n a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad.\"\n\n\n The corporal sighed wearily. \"You can get that balloon head\n ventilated, bud, and good.\"" ], [ "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "\"No, sir,\" Wayne mumbled. He didn't look up. \"I'm sorry I punked out.\"\n\n\n \"Give him the treatment,\" the doctor said wearily. \"And send him back\n to his mother.\"\n\n\n Wayne nodded and they led him away. His mind screamed still to split\n open some prison of bone and lay bare and breathing wide. But there\n was no way out for the trapped. Now he knew about the old man and his\n poker-playing pals.\n\n\n They had all punked out.\n\n\n Like him.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight.", "The air through the open window was chill and damp coming from\n Slumville, but Wayne felt a cold that wasn't of the night or the wind.\n He turned off into a rat's warren of the inferiors. Lights turned pale,\n secretive and sparse, the uncared-for streets became rough with pitted\n potholes, narrow and winding and humid with wet unpleasant smells.\n Wayne's fearful exhilaration increased as he cruised with bated breath\n through the dark mazes of streets and rickety tenements crawling with\n the shadows of mysterious promise.\n\n\n He found the alley, dark, a gloom-dripping tunnel. He drove cautiously\n into it and rolled along, watching. His belly ached with expectancy as\n he spotted the sick-looking dab of neon wanly sparkling.\nFOUR ACES CLUB\nHe parked across the alley. He got out and stood in shadows, digging\n the sultry beat of a combo, the wild pulse of drums and spinning brass\n filtering through windows painted black.", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet.", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead." ], [ "Wayne's breath quickened as he watched, feeling somehow blank wonder\n at finding himself there, free and breaking out at last with no curfew\n and no law but his own. He felt as though he couldn't stop anything.\n Living seemed directionless, but he still would go with it regardless,\n until something dropped off or blew to hell like a hot light-bulb. He\n held his breath, waiting. His body was tensed and rigid as he moved in\n spirit with the hunting teener, an omniscient shadow with a hunting\n license and a ghetto jungle twenty miles deep.\n\n\n The crawling stewbum screamed as the baseball bat whacked. The teener\n laughed. Wayne wanted to shout. He opened his mouth, but the yell\n clogged up somewhere, so that he remained soundless yet with his mouth\n still open as he heard the payoff thuds where the useless wino curled\n up with stick arms over his rheumy face.", "Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless\n noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say.\n Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the\n same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the\n way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with\n eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire\n into limbo.\n\n\n How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One\n thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants\n off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his\n punkie origins in teeveeland.", "The teener laughed, tossed the bat away and began jumping up and down\n with his hobnailed, mail-order air force boots. Then he ran into the\n Cad. A hootch bottle soared out, made a brittle tink-tink of falling\n glass.\n\n\n \"Go, man!\"\n\n\n The Cad wooshed by. It made a sort of hollow sucking noise as it\n bounced over the old man twice. Then the finlights diminished like\n bright wind-blown sparks.\n\n\n Wayne walked over and sneered down at the human garbage lying in\n scummed rain pools. The smell of raw violence, the scent of blood, made\n his heart thump like a trapped rubber ball in a cage.", "But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed\n impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no\n doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion.\n So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone\n waiting for the breakout call from HQ.\n\n\n \"Well, dear, if you say so,\" Mother said, with the old resigned sigh\n that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.\n\n\n They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.\n\n\n \"Relax,\" Wayne said. \"You're not going anywhere tonight.\"\n\n\n \"What, son?\" his old man said uneasily. \"Sure we are. We're going to\n the movies.\"\n\n\n He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't\n answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was\n silent.", "He removed his leather jacket. He slung the holster under his left\n armpit and tested the spring clip release several times, feeling the\n way the serrated butt dropped into his wet palm. He put his jacket\n back on and the switchblade case in his pocket. He walked toward the\n elevator and didn't look back as the corporal said, \"Good luck, tiger.\"\n\n\n Captain Jack moved massively. The big stone-walled office, alive with\n stuffed lion and tiger and gunracks, seemed to grow smaller. Captain\n Jack crossed black-booted legs and whacked a cane at the floor. It had\n a head shaped like a grinning bear.\n\n\n Wayne felt the assured smile die on his face. Something seemed to\n shrink him. If he didn't watch himself he'd begin feeling like a pea\n among bowling balls.\n\n\n Contemptuously amused little eyes glittered at Wayne from a shaggy\n head. Shoulders hunched like stuffed sea-bags.", "\"Do be careful, dear,\" his mother said. She ran toward him as he\n laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed\n the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp\n onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling\n neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed\n the glaring wonders of escape.\nHe burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode\n under a sign reading\nPublic Youth Center No. 947\nand walked casually\n to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a\n pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.\n\n\n \"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?\"\n\n\n Wayne grinned down. \"Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey.\"\n\n\n \"Well,\" the sergeant said. \"How tough we are this evening. You have a\n pass, killer?\"", "\"Okay, go,\" Wayne said. \"If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family\n boltbucket.\"\n\n\n \"But we promised the Clemons, dear,\" his mother said.\n\n\n \"Hell,\" Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. \"I just got my\n draft call.\"\n\n\n He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. \"Oh, my dear boy,\" Mother cried\n out.\n\n\n \"So gimme the keys,\" Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His\n understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.", "He ran laughing under the crazy starlight and glimpsed her now and\n then, fading in and out of shadows, jumping, crawling, running with the\n life-or-death animation of a wild deer.\n\n\n Up and down alleys, a rat's maze. A rabbit run. Across vacant lots.\n Through shattered tenement ruins. Over a fence. There she was, falling,\n sliding down a brick shute.\n\n\n He gained. He moved up. His labored breath pumped more fire. And her\n scream was a rejuvenation hypo in his blood.\nShe quivered above him on the stoop, panting, her eyes afire with\n terror.\n\n\n \"You, baby,\" Wayne gasped. \"I gotcha.\"", "Wayne returned the challenging move but felt a nervous twitch jerk at\n his lips. A numbness covered his brain like a film as he concentrated\n on staring down Red the psycho. But Red kept looking, his eyes bright\n but dead. Then he began struggling it up again with the scared little\n mouse.\n\n\n The waiter sat the Crusher down. Wayne signed a chit; tonight he was in\n the pay of the state.\n\n\n \"What else, teener?\"\n\n\n \"One thing. Fade.\"\n\n\n \"Sure, teener,\" the waiter said, his breathy words dripping like syrup.\n\n\n Wayne drank. Liquored heat dripped into his stomach. Fire tickled his\n veins, became hot wire twisting in his head.", "\"Wayne Seton,\" said Captain Jack as if he were discussing something\n in a bug collection. \"Well, well, you're really fired up aren't you?\n Really going out to eat 'em. Right, punk?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir,\" Wayne said. He ran wet hands down the sides of his chinos.\n His legs seemed sheathed in lead as he bit inwardly at shrinking fear\n the way a dog snaps at a wound. You big overblown son, he thought, I'll\n show you but good who is a punk. They made a guy wait and sweat until\n he screamed. They kept a guy on the fire until desire leaped in him,\n ran and billowed and roared until his brain was filled with it. But\n that wasn't enough. If this muscle-bound creep was such a big boy,\n what was he doing holding down a desk?\n\n\n \"Well, this is it, punk. You go the distance or start a butterfly\n collection.\"", "He hurried into the Four Aces, drawn by an exhilarating vision ... and\n pursued by the hollow haunting fears of his own desires.\nHe walked through the wavering haze of smoke and liquored dizziness and\n stood until his eyes learned the dark. He spotted her red shirt and\n yellow legs over in the corner above a murky lighted table.\n\n\n He walked toward her, watching her little subhuman pixie face lift.\n The eyes widened with exciting terror, turned even paler behind a red\n slash of sensuous mouth. Briefed and waiting, primed and eager for\n running, she recognized her pursuer at once. He sat at a table near\n her, watching and grinning and seeing her squirm.\n\n\n She sat in that slightly baffled, fearful and uncomprehending attitude\n of being motionless, as though they were all actors performing in a\n weirdo drama being staged in that smoky thick-aired dive.", "He turned and ran blindly, half-fell down the cracking stairs.\nDoctor Burns, head of the readjustment staff at the Youth Center,\n studied Wayne with abstract interest.\n\n\n \"You enjoyed the hunt, Seton? You got your kicks?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"But you couldn't execute them?\"\n\n\n \"No, sir.\"\n\n\n \"They're undesirables. Incurables. You know that, Seton?\"\n\n\n \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\n \"The psycho you only wounded. He's a five-times murderer. And that girl\n killed her father when she was twelve. You realize there's nothing can\n be done for them? That they have to be executed?\"\n\n\n \"I know.\"", "He turned with a scratchy cry and retreated before the sudden blast\n of headlights from a Cad bulleting into the alley. The Cad rushed\n past Wayne and he felt the engine-hot fumes against his legs. Tires\n squealed. The Cad stopped and a teener in black jacket jumped out and\n crouched as he began stalking the old rummy.\n\n\n \"This is him! This is him all right,\" the teener yelled, and one hand\n came up swinging a baseball bat.\n\n\n A head bobbed out of the Cad window and giggled.\n\n\n The fumble-footed rummy tried to run and plopped on wet pavement. The\n teener moved in, while a faint odor of burnt rubber hovered in the air\n as the Cad cruised in a slow follow-up.", "He drank again and forced out a shaky breath. The jazz beat thumped\n fast and muted brass moaned. Drumpulse, stabbing trumpet raped the\n air. Tension mounted as Wayne watched her pale throat convulsing, the\n white eyelids fluttering. Red fingered at her legs and salivated at her\n throat, glancing now and then at Wayne, baiting him good.\n\n\n \"Okay, you creep,\" Wayne said.\n\n\n He stood up and started through the haze. The psycho leaped and a table\n crashed. Wayne's .38 dropped from its spring-clip holster and the blast\n filled the room. The psycho screamed and stumbled toward the door\n holding something in. The mouse darted by, eluded Wayne's grasp and was\n out the door.\n\n\n Wayne went out after her in a laughing frenzy of release. He felt the\n cold strange breath of moist air on his sweating skin as he sprinted\n down the alley into a wind full of blowing wet.", "Wayne smiled with wry superiority at the redheaded psycho in a dirty\n T-shirt, a big bruiser with a gorilla face. He was tussling his mouse\n heavy.\n\n\n \"What's yours, teener?\" the slug-faced waiter asked.\n\n\n \"Bring me a Crusher, buddyroo,\" Wayne said, and flashed his pass card.\n\n\n \"Sure, teener.\"\n\n\n Red nuzzled the mouse's neck and made drooly noises. Wayne watched and\n fed on the promising terror and helplessness of her hunted face. She\n sat rigid, eyes fixed on Wayne like balls of frozen glass.\n\n\n Red looked up and stared straight at Wayne with eyes like black buttons\n imbedded in the waxlike skin of his face. Then he grinned all on one\n side. One huge hand scratched across the wet table top like a furious\n cat's.", "She backed into darkness, up there against the sagging tenement wall,\n her arms out and poised like crippled wings. Wayne crept up. She gave\n a squeaking sob, turned, ran. Wayne leaped into gloom. Wood cracked.\n He clambered over rotten lumber. The doorway sagged and he hesitated\n in the musty dark. A few feet away was the sound of loose trickling\n plaster, a whimpering whine.\n\n\n \"No use running,\" Wayne said. \"Go loose. Give, baby. Give now.\"\n\n\n She scurried up sagging stairs. Wayne laughed and dug up after her,\n feeling his way through debris. Dim moonlight filtered through a\n sagging stairway from a shattered skylight three floors up. The mouse's\n shadow floated ahead.", "Wayne's mouth twitched. He leaned across the counter toward the\n shelves and racks of weapons. \"I'll remember that crack when I get\n my commission.\" He blew smoke in the corporal's face. \"Bring me a\n Smith and Wesson .38, shoulder holster with spring-clip. And throw in\n a Skelly switchblade for kicks—the six-inch disguised job with the\n double springs.\"\n\n\n The corporal waddled back with the revolver and the switchblade\n disguised in a leather comb case. He checked them on a receipt ledger,\n while Wayne examined the weapons, broke open the revolver, twirled the\n cylinder and pushed cartridges into the waiting chamber. He slipped\n the knife from the comb case, flicked open the blade and stared at its\n gleam in the buttery light as his mouth went dry and the refracted\n incandescence of it trickled on his brain like melted ice, exciting and\n scary.", "He breathed deep, started over, ducked back. A stewbum weaved out of\n a bank of garbage cans, humming to himself, pulling at a rainsoaked\n shirt clinging to a pale stick body. He reminded Wayne of a slim grub\n balanced on one end.\n\n\n The stewbum stumbled. His bearded face in dim breaking moonlight had\n a dirty, greenish tinge as he sensed Wayne there. He turned in a\n grotesque uncoordinated jiggling and his eyes were wide with terror and\n doom.\n\n\n \"I gotta hide, kid. They're on me.\"\n\n\n Wayne's chest rose and his hands curled.\n\n\n The bum's fingers drew at the air like white talons.\n\n\n \"Help me, kid.\"", "The corporal's little eyes studied Wayne with malicious amusement.\n \"Take it from a vet, bud. Sooner you go the better. It's a big city and\n you're starting late. You can get a cat, not a mouse, and some babes\n are clever hellcats in a dark alley.\"\n\n\n \"You must be a genius,\" Wayne said. \"A corporal with no hair and still\n a counterboy. I'm impressed. I'm all ears, Dad.\"\n\n\n The corporal sighed wearily. \"You can get that balloon head\n ventilated, bud, and good.\"", "He started up. The entire stair structure canted sickeningly. A railing\n ripped and he nearly went with it back down to the first floor. He\n heard a scream as rotten boards crumbled and dust exploded from\n cracks. A rat ran past Wayne and fell into space. He burst into the\n third-floor hallway and saw her half-falling through a door under the\n jagged skylight.\n\n\n Wayne took his time. He knew how she felt waiting in there, listening\n to his creeping, implacable footfalls.\n\n\n Then he yelled and slammed open the door.\n\n\n Dust and stench, filth so awful it made nothing of the dust. In\n the corner he saw something hardly to be called a bed. More like\n a nest. A dirty, lumpy pile of torn mattress, felt, excelsior,\n shredded newspapers and rags. It seemed to crawl a little under the\n moon-streaming skylight." ] ]

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